Steve Wozniak

Cofounder of Apple Computer

• Born: August 11, 1950
• Place of Birth: San Jose, California

Primary Company/Organization: Apple

Introduction

From childhood, Steve Wozniak loved electronics and practical jokes. He was adept at building computers and using them to entertain and to solve problems. His friend Steve Jobs was a natural seller of ideas, and they formed an ideal partnership for creating the revolutionary Apple computer. Their company Apple would go on to become a dominant force in the high tech industry. Wozniak largely devoted his post-Apple years to philanthropic causes, especially supporting technology in schools initiatives, but he also remained active in various electronics and business projects.

Early Life

Stephan Gary Wozniak, also known as "Woz," was born on August 11, 1950, in San Jose, California. As an electrical engineer, his father, Jerry, encouraged his son's love of electronics from an early age. His mother, Margaret, was a homemaker, devoting her time to raising her children, who also included Leslie and Mark. Wozniak was shy and loved to read. In the fourth grade, he discovered that he loved mathematics. The following year, he discovered ham radios and learned Morse code. By the time he was eleven, Wozniak was writing computer games. At the age of thirteen, he won an award at the Bay Area Science Fair for his 10-bit parallel digital computer.

Wozniak began taking electronics classes in high school and was hired by an electronics company to program its computers using Fortran. With a grant from the National Science Foundation, he also took mathematics classes at local colleges. Despite a love of practical jokes that caused him to be suspended for a short time, Wozniak graduated from Homestead High with honors in 1968. During a year attending the University of Colorado, he spent much of his time on computers. Returning to California, he attended a local college in Sunnyvale and got a job programming and running diagnostics on computers at Tenet, Inc. He and his friend Bill Fernandez spent their spare time designing a computer that they dubbed Cream Soda. His junior year found Wozniak attending the University of California, Berkeley.

Life's Work

By 1973, Wozniak was working at Hewlett-Packard in Palo Alto, California, which placed him in an ideal position for the upcoming computer revolution. He renewed his friendship with Steve Jobs, a high school computer geek serving an internship at Hewlett-Packard. In March 1975, the two friends attended the first meeting of the Homebrew Computer Club in Menlo Park, California. Although Jobs was five years younger, he and Wozniak found that their interest in computers outweighed the age difference. Homebrew was one of many such clubs that had sprung up in response to the release of the Altair computer kit, which allowed computer hobbyists to build their own computers. The club gave members a venue for sharing their developing knowledge. An electronics whiz, Wozniak was convinced that he could build his own computer now that the price of parts had begun to drop. After saving his money, he managed to complete his computer by January 1976.

Wozniak's computer, which became the Apple I, would be considered primitive by today's standards, but it was revolutionary for its time. Jobs encouraged him to sell his creation. It was sold without a case, a power supply, a monitor, or a keyboard. By that time, Bill Gates and Paul Allen were already selling their operating system, MS-DOS. At the National Computer Conference, an enterprising but less than honest member of Homebrew stole discarded Microsoft tapes from the garbage and carried them back to Homebrew, where they were freely distributed and used. On February 3, 1976, an open letter from Gates decrying the piracy appeared in the club's newsletter and in other publications regularly perused by hobbyists.

Meanwhile, Wozniak and Jobs continued to collaborate. They designed the Blue Box, a device that allowed them to bypass telephone charges. It made them a small profit but could have resulted in jail time. While Wozniak worked at Hewlett-Packard, Jobs continued to live at home, earning money by writing computer games for Atari. In their spare time, the friends played with game development. Atari subsequently asked them to design Breakout, a spin-off of Atari's popular Pong game. Wozniak was responsible for circuitry, problem-solving, and diagram writing. They designed the game to use only 43 chips, at a time when most games were using more than 120 chips.

Despite the drawbacks of the Apple I, Jobs was astute enough to understand its potential to make money. He convinced Wozniak that they should start their own company in order to sell it, but Wozniak was initially hesitant to leave the financial safety of his job at Hewlett-Packard. He agreed to go into business with Jobs, however, and Apple was founded on April 1, 1976. Wozniak steadily improved his computer design, working mostly in the garage at the home of Jobs's parents. Within a year, the Apple II was introduced. Wozniak said later that both Apple I and Apple II were created for fun rather than profit.

In October 1976, Wozniak finally yielded to persuasion and left Hewlett-Packard to devote his efforts to Apple. In January 1977, after Mike Markkula, the marketing guru whom Jobs and Wozniak had hired to guide them through the early days, invested $250,000 in the company, it was incorporated as Apple Computer, Inc., and was relocated to Cupertino. As Apple continued to expand, it eventually needed an entire campus in Silicon Valley to house its operations.

Selling for $1,298, the Apple II was the first computer that did not need to be assembled after purchase. Using the BASIC programming language and a printed circuit board, it also contained its own keyboard, power supply, speakers, graphics, and game paddles and had 4K of memory, a user's manual, and a demonstration cassette. However, it was still dependent on a television monitor and on a cassette recorder and tapes. By 1979, however, Apple computers contained floppy disk drives for storing data. As Apple grew, Wozniak had less time to spend on computer design. Since most development work was done by teams of developers, Wozniak took on a public relations role.

The Apple III was introduced in 1980 as a rival to IBM personal computers. It was expensive at $2,995, and sales were disappointing. It was discontinued at the end of the following year. After time off to complete his education, Wozniak returned to work at Apple in 1982, but he chose to work as an engineer rather than as an executive. Although bitter infighting seemed to be tearing the company apart, Wozniak attempted to remain above the fray. Released in 1983, the Lisa (the Mac XL) was the most user-friendly computer released to that time, containing folders, pull-down menus, and an entire megabyte of random access memory (RAM). At $9,995, however, it was beyond the means of the average home user.

Wozniak gave up his active role in Apple in 1987. Along with a fellow Apple engineer, he founded CL-9 (Cloud 9), concentrating on creating a universal infrared remote control, which became the first programmable remote control in history. Wozniak continued to serve as a consultant for Apple, which truly flourished after Jobs—who had been forced out of the company in 1985—returned in 1997. However, the friendship between the two cofounders steadily unraveled. They remained in contact until Jobs's death in 2011 but were never again close friends. Wozniak remained a nominal employee of Apple, however, and continued to receive an annual salary.

He founded the company Wheels of Zeus (WOZ) in 2001 to develop wireless global positioning system (GPS) technology. That venture lasted until 2006, the same year Wozniak published his autobiography, iWoz: From Computer Geek to Cult Icon: How I Invented the Personal Computer, Co-Founded Apple, and Had Fun Doing It.

In 2021, Wozniak founded the company Privateer. It aimed to develop more accurate tracking methods to monitor space junk, dead satellites and other debris left in Earth orbit.

Personal Life

Wozniak married several times. He met Alice Robertson when she called in to his Dial-a-Joke telephone line. They married on January 11, 1976, but divorced four years later. He retained two-thirds of his Apple stock, with the other third going to his ex-wife. Wozniak subsequently became involved with Candi Clark, who worked for Apple as an accountant. He and Clark married on June 14, 1981, in the backyard of his parents' home, with Emmylou Harris as the featured entertainer. He subsequently built a lavish home for his family in Silicon Valley. His child-friendly home, which he named the Castle, was located on twenty-six acres and included a manufactured waterfall and a carousel. Wozniak lost the Castle when the couple divorced in 1987. He bought a nearby home where he spent $1 million creating a cave for his three children, Jesse, Sara, and Gary. Wozniak was married a third time, to Suzanne Mulkern, an old high school friend and the mother of three children, in 1990; they divorced in 2004. He married Janet Hill in 2008.

On February 7, 1981, with Wozniak at the controls, a plane carrying him, his fiancée (Clark), Clark's brother, and his girlfriend crashed, causing Wozniak to suffer a short-term memory loss and leading to a reevaluation of his life. Wozniak decided to return to Berkeley to resume work on a degree. After a year of taking classes, Berkeley officials allowed him to use his continuing work at Apple for course credit. He finally graduated in 1986 and delivered the commencement speech at his graduation.

The 1980s also saw Wozniak realize his dream of combining computers with his love of music. He created Unuson (United Us in Song), using $1 million of his own money, to put together a 1981 music festival that brought together artists such as the Police, Pat Benatar, Fleetwood Mac, and Emmylou Harris. This and a second festival the following year lost money, but the second festival drew a larger audience.

Wozniak was portrayed in the 2013 film Jobs (by Josh Gad), and the 2015 film Steve Jobs (by Seth Rogan). While he consulted on the latter for historical accuracy, he strongly criticized the former for what he felt were inaccurate depictions of many of the people involved in building Apple.

In November 2023, Wozniak suffered a minor stroke while attending the World Business Forum in Mexico, where he was schedule to speak. He was hospitalized briefly before returning to his home in Los Gatos, California.

Bibliography

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Wattles, Jackie. "Steve Wozniak’s New Venture Takes Aim at Space Junk." CNN Business, 2 Mar. 2022, www.cnn.com/2022/03/01/tech/space-junk-steve-wozniak-privateer-scn/index.html. Accessed 27 Sept. 2024.

Wozniak, Steve, with Gina Smith. iWoz: From Computer Geek to Cult Icon; How I Invented the Personal Computer, coFounded Apple, and Had Fun Doing It. New York: Norton, 2006. Print.