Basic Info

Stephan Gary "Woz" Wozniak (born August 11, 1950 in San Jose, California) is a U.S. computer engineer and the co-founder of Apple Computer (now Apple Inc.), with Steve Jobs. His inventions and machines are credited with contributing greatly to the personal computer revolution of the 1970s. Wozniak created the Apple I and Apple II computers in the mid-1970s. The Apple II gained a sizable amount of popularity, eventually becoming one of the best selling personal computers of the 1970s and early 1980s.

Wozniak has several nicknames, including "The Woz", "Wizard of Woz" and "iWoz" (a pun on iPod). "WoZ" (short for "Wheels of Zeus") is also the name of a company Wozniak founded. He is known for his introverted character, and he finds his level of celebrity somewhat annoying. He is also known as the "Other Steve" of Apple Computer, the more prominent Steve being co-founder and current CEO Steve Jobs.

In The Beginning

In 1975, Woz withdrew from the University of California, Berkeley (he would later return to finish his B.S. degree in E.E.C.S., which he received in 1986) and came up with the computer that eventually made him famous. However, he was largely working to impress other members of the Palo Alto-based Homebrew Computer Club, a local group of electronics hobbyists. His project had no wider ambition.

In 1970 Woz had become friends with Steve Jobs, five years his junior, when Jobs had a summer job at the same business where Woz was working on a mainframe computer. Jobs had the idea to sell the computer as a fully assembled P.C. board. Wozniak, at first skeptical, was later convinced by Jobs that even if they were not a success they could at least say to their grandkids they had their own company. Together they sold some of their prized possessions (e.g. Woz's H.P. scientific calculator and Jobs' Volkswagen van), raised $1,300, and assembled the first prototypes in Jobs' bedroom and later in Jobs' garage. Their first computer was quite an engineering marvel within the context of 1975 computing. All that was needed was some RAM, a keyboard, and a monitor to make a fully functional microcomputer. (The Apple is not necessarily the first microcomputer to use monitors and cassette storage. There were several projects and experiments around the same time which could claim the first.)

Apple Is Born

On April 1, 1976, Jobs and Wozniak formed Apple Computer. Wozniak quit his job at H.P. and became the vice president in charge of research and development at Apple. The Apple I was priced at $666.66. Jobs and Wozniak sold their first 100 computers to a local dealer.

Wozniak could now focus full-time on fixing the shortcomings of the Apple I and adding new functionality. His new design was to retain the most important characteristics: simplicity and usability. Woz introduced high-resolution graphics in the Apple II. His computer could now display pictures instead of just letters. By 1978, he also designed an inexpensive floppy-disk drive controller. He and Randy Wigginton wrote a simple disk operating system and file system. Shepardson Microsystems was contracted to build a simple command line interface for the disk operating system.

In addition to designing the hardware, Wozniak wrote most of the software initially provided with the Apple. He wrote a programming language interpreter, a set of virtual 16-bit processor instructions known as SWEET 16, a Breakout game (which was also a reason to add sound to the computer), the code needed to control the disk drive, and more.

In 1980, Apple went public and made Jobs and Wozniak multimillionaires.