Steve Wozniak: The Engineer Who Gave Computing Away
In 1976 a Hewlett-Packard engineer walked into his employer's offices with the design for a complete personal computer and offered it to them free of charge. HP turned him down five times. That engineer was Steve Wozniak, and the machine he had built alone — hardware, circuit board, operating software — became the Apple I. He priced it at $666.66, a number he later insisted he chose only because he liked repeating digits. Within eighteen months its successor would define what a home computer was.
A Lockheed Engineer's Son
Wozniak was born on August 11, 1950 in San Jose, California, into the valley that had not yet been renamed for silicon. His father, Francis Jacob "Jerry" Wozniak, was an engineer at Lockheed; his mother, Margaret Louise Kern, came from Washington state. The family's ancestry was Polish and German. The engineering came from the house, not the school: by the time he graduated from Homestead High School in Cupertino in 1968, electronics was less a subject than a native language.
His formal education was famously erratic. He spent a year at the University of Colorado Boulder and was expelled in 1969 for hacking into the university's computer system. He re-enrolled at De Anza College, then transferred to UC Berkeley in 1971. He would not finish. The degree in electrical engineering and computer sciences came only in 1986 — awarded officially in 1987 — after he returned to Berkeley under the alias "Rocky Raccoon Clark."
Cream Soda and Blue Boxes
In 1971 Wozniak built his first machine with his friend Bill Fernandez, a twenty-chip TTL design they called the Cream Soda computer. That same year Fernandez introduced him to a high-school student who liked electronics and practical jokes in equal measure. "A friend said, 'you should meet Steve Jobs because he likes electronics, and he also plays pranks,'" Wozniak recalled.
Their first commercial venture was not a computer but a crime. After reading an Esquire article about phone phreaking, Wozniak designed a "blue box" that generated the tones needed to seize control of the long-distance network. Jobs sold roughly 200 of them at $150 apiece. The pattern of the partnership was set in that transaction: Wozniak made the thing work, Jobs made the thing sell.
Twenty questions, eight minutes on the clock, and a percentile measured against everyone who has taken it. No sign-up.
Take the IQ test →The pattern's darker edge showed in 1973, when Jobs contracted Wozniak to design the circuitry for Atari's Breakout. Jobs told him the fee was $700 and split it; the actual bonus had been $5,000. Wozniak learned the truth a decade later. He said that if Jobs had simply told him he needed the money, he would have given it to him.
The Apple I and the Apple II
Wozniak had joined HP in 1971 designing calculators, and it was there that he worked out the Apple I. He completed the basic design by March 1, 1976. On April 1 of that year, Apple Computer Company was founded by Wozniak, Jobs and Ronald Wayne. Fifty machines went to the Byte Shop. What made the Apple I remarkable was not commercial scale but architecture: built around the cheap MOS 6502 processor at $25, it was a complete computer with a video display, designed end to end by one person.
The Apple II, introduced at the West Coast Computer Faire in April 1977, was the machine that mattered. It was the first mass-produced personal computer with built-in color graphics and BASIC in ROM. Wozniak achieved NTSC color with a roughly one-dollar chip using a technique borrowed from Atari; PAL color, he admitted, worked essentially by accident. He also fought Jobs over the expansion slots — Jobs wanted two, Wozniak insisted on eight — and won. Those eight slots turned the Apple II into a platform rather than an appliance. In 1978 he followed it with the Disk II floppy controller, an exercise in minimal-component elegance that replaced cassette tape with real storage and made business software on a home machine possible.
His patents record the range: a microcomputer for use with video display, a controller for magnetic disc, and two on digitally controlled color signal generation.
Crash, Exit, Aftermath
Apple went public in 1980 and made both founders rich. Wozniak offered roughly $10 million of his own stock to early employees who had been left out; Jobs declined to do the same. On February 7, 1981, Wozniak crashed a Beechcraft Bonanza he was piloting near Scotts Valley, California, suffering severe head injuries and anterograde amnesia. He recovered, in part, by playing Apple II games. He left Apple briefly, went back to Berkeley, and in 1982 founded Unuson with promoter Bill Graham to stage the US Festivals — celebrations of music and technology on which he lost several million dollars.
By early 1985 he was gone for good. The Apple II division was supplying something like 85 percent of the company's sales and had been excluded from the Macintosh launch entirely; at the January 1985 annual meeting the machine and its people went unmentioned. Wozniak was seen kicking the dirt in the parking lot. He sold most of his stock, founded CL 9, and in 1987 shipped the CORE, the first programmable universal remote control.
Why Steve Is Called a Genius
The word attaches to Wozniak for a specific and unusually verifiable reason: he repeatedly solved hardware problems with a fraction of the parts everyone else needed. The Disk II controller and the roughly one-dollar NTSC color trick are the standard exhibits — not conceptual leaps so much as feats of compression, finding the minimum arrangement of components that would produce the required behavior. It is a craft intelligence, closer to a chess player's board vision than to theoretical invention, and the Apple I's status as a whole computer designed by one person — logic, board and software — is the strongest evidence that the craft operated at an unusual level.
The institutions have said so plainly. He received the ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award in 1979, the National Medal of Technology from President Reagan in 1985, induction into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2000, the Heinz Award in 2001, and the IEEE Masaru Ibuka award in 2021 "for pioneering the design of consumer-friendly personal computers." The Computer History Museum made him a Fellow in 1998 for inventing the Apple I.
The honest counter-case is that Wozniak's genius was narrow and time-bound. Apple employee Daniel Kottke's assessment is the standard one: "Between Woz and Jobs, Woz was the innovator, the inventor. Steve Jobs was the marketing person." Nothing Wozniak built after leaving Apple in 1985 — CL 9, Wheels of Zeus, Acquicor, Woz U — approached the significance of what he built before. His own explanation is disarming and probably accurate. "Everything I did at Apple that was an A+ job and that took us places," he told CNBC in 2010, "I had two things in my favor ... I had no money [and] I had had no training." Scarcity was the discipline. When it lifted, so did the edge.
Afterward
Wozniak's second stated life goal was teaching elementary school, and he pursued it, running computer classes for grades five through nine and for their teachers. In 1990 he helped found and fund the Electronic Frontier Foundation. He has been a founding sponsor of the Tech Museum and the Children's Discovery Museum of San Jose, and a vocal supporter of the right-to-repair movement, which he has called something that affects him emotionally — his own success, he notes, was built on the open technology of the 1970s. He told Fortune in 2017: "I didn't want to be near money, because it could corrupt your values." He remains a ceremonial Apple employee. San Jose named a street Woz Way.