1. Steve Wozniak was the primary designer of the Apple II, introduced in 1977, known as one of the first highly successful mass-produced microcomputers, while Jobs oversaw the development of its foam-molded plastic case and early Apple employee Rod Holt developed its switching power supply.
Stephen Gary Steve Wozniak was born on August 11,1950, in San Jose, California.
Steve Wozniak's mother, Margaret Louise Wozniak, was from Washington state, and his father, Francis Jacob "Jerry" Wozniak of Michigan, was an engineer for the Lockheed Corporation.
Steve Wozniak graduated from Homestead High School in 1968, in Cupertino, California.
Steve Wozniak is a grant adviser at Five Bridges Foundation, which helps at-risk youths in San Francisco.
Steve Wozniak once said it was her mother who introduced activism to her and her siblings.
Steve Wozniak has credited watching Star Trek and attending Star Trek conventions while in his youth as a source of inspiration for his starting Apple Computer.
In 1969, Steve Wozniak returned to the San Francisco Bay Area after being expelled from the University of Colorado Boulder in his first year for hacking the university's computer system.
Steve Wozniak re-enrolled at De Anza College in Cupertino before transferring to the University of California, Berkeley, in 1971.
Steve Wozniak was introduced to Jobs by Fernandez, who attended Homestead High School with Jobs in 1971.
Jobs and Steve Wozniak became friends when Jobs worked for the summer at HP, where Steve Wozniak, too, was employed, working on a mainframe computer.
Steve Wozniak was assigned to create a circuit board for the arcade video game Breakout.
Steve Wozniak reduced the number of chips by 50, by using RAM for the brick representation.
Steve Wozniak did not learn about the actual $5,000 bonus until ten years later.
Steve Wozniak alone designed the hardware, circuit board designs, and operating system for the computer.
Steve Wozniak originally offered the design to HP while working there, but was denied by the company on five occasions.
Jobs then advised Wozniak to start a business of their own to build and sell bare printed circuit boards of the Apple I Wozniak, at first skeptical, was later convinced by Jobs that even if they were not successful they could at least say to their grandchildren that they had had their own company.
Steve Wozniak later said he had no idea about the relation between the number and the mark of the beast, and that he came up with the price because he liked "repeating digits".
In November 1976, Jobs and Steve Wozniak received substantial funding from a then-semi-retired Intel product marketing manager and engineer named Mike Markkula.
At the request of Markkula, Steve Wozniak resigned from his job at HP and became the vice president in charge of research and development at Apple.
Steve Wozniak's design included a $25 CPU on a single circuit board with 256 bytes of ROM, 4K or 8K bytes of RAM, and a 40-character by 24-row display controller.
Jobs and Steve Wozniak introduced the Apple II at the April 1977 West Coast Computer Faire.
Steve Wozniak designed the Disk II floppy disk drive, released in 1978 specifically for use with the Apple II to replace the slower cassette tape storage.
On February 7,1981, the Beechcraft Bonanza A36TC which Steve Wozniak was piloting crashed soon after takeoff from the Sky Park Airport in Scotts Valley, California.
Steve Wozniak had no memory of the crash, and did not remember his name while in the hospital or the things he did for a time after he was released.
Steve Wozniak did not immediately return to Apple after recovering from the airplane crash, seeing it as a good reason to leave.
Later in 1981, after recovering from the plane crash, Steve Wozniak re-enrolled at UC Berkeley to complete his Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences degree that he started there in 1971.
In May 1982 and 1983, Steve Wozniak, with help from professional concert promoter Bill Graham, founded the company Unuson, an abbreviation of "unite us in song", which sponsored two US Festivals, with "US" pronounced like the pronoun, not as initials.
Later that year, Steve Wozniak returned to Apple product development, desiring no more of a role than that of an engineer and a motivational factor for the Apple workforce.
Steve Wozniak enjoyed engineering, not management, and said that he missed "the fun of the early days".
Media coverage attributed his departure to disagreements with Apple management, quoting his statement that Apple had "been going in the wrong direction for the last five years", but Steve Wozniak later objected to this portrayal and stated that he left primarily because he was excited to start CL 9 and recapture the fun of developing a new technology.
In 2001, Steve Wozniak founded Wheels of Zeus to create wireless GPS technology to "help everyday people find everyday things much more easily".
In 2006, Wheels of Zeus was closed, and Steve Wozniak founded Acquicor Technology, a holding company for acquiring technology companies and developing them, with Apple alumni Hancock and Amelio.
Steve Wozniak announced the annual event in 2015 along with Marvel legend Stan Lee.
In October 2017, Steve Wozniak founded Woz U, an online educational technology service for independent students and employees.
Steve Wozniak maintained a friendly acquaintance with Steve Jobs until Jobs's death in October 2011.
However, in 2006, Steve Wozniak stated that he and Jobs were not as close as they used to be.
Steve Wozniak called the Apple Lisa group the team that had kicked Jobs out, and that Jobs liked to call the Lisa group "idiots for making [the Lisa computer] too expensive".
Steve Wozniak attributed the eventual success of the Macintosh to people like John Sculley "who worked to build a Macintosh market when the Apple II went away".
In September 2021, it was reported that Steve Wozniak was starting a company alongside co-founder Alex Fielding named Privateer Space to address the problem of space debris.
In 2024, Steve Wozniak sued YouTube in respect to a scam that was being circulated on the platform using his likeness.
Steve Wozniak is listed as the sole inventor on the following Apple patents:.
In 1990, Steve Wozniak helped found the Electronic Frontier Foundation, providing some of the organization's initial funding and serving on its founding Board of Directors.
Steve Wozniak is the founding sponsor of the Tech Museum, Silicon Valley Ballet and Children's Discovery Museum of San Jose.
Also since leaving Apple, Steve Wozniak has provided all the money, and much onsite technical support, for the technology program in his local school district in Los Gatos.
In 1986, Wozniak lent his name to the Stephen G Wozniak Achievement Awards, which he presented to six Bay Area high school and college students for their innovative use of computers in the fields of business, art, and music.
Steve Wozniak is the subject of a student-made film production of his friend's nonprofit Dream Camp Foundation for high-level-need youth entitled Camp Woz: The Admirable Lunacy of Philanthropy.
In March 2015, Steve Wozniak stated that while he had originally dismissed Ray Kurzweil's opinion that machine intelligence would outpace human intelligence within several decades, Steve Wozniak had changed his mind:.
Steve Wozniak stated that he had started to identify a contradictory sense of foreboding about artificial intelligence, while still supporting the advance of technology.
In 2016, Steve Wozniak changed his mind again, stating that he no longer worried about the possibility of superintelligence emerging because he is skeptical that computers will be able to compete with human "intuition": "A computer could figure out a logical endpoint decision, but that's not the way intelligence works in humans".
Steve Wozniak added that if computers do become superintelligent, "they're going to be partners of humans over all other species just forever".
Steve Wozniak signed a 2023 open letter from the Future of Life Institute calling for "all AI labs to immediately pause for at least 6 months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4".
Steve Wozniak applied for Australian citizenship in 2012, and has stated that he would like to live in Melbourne, Australia in the future.
Steve Wozniak describes his impetus for joining the Freemasons in 1979 as being able to spend more time with his then-wife, Alice Robertson, who belonged to the Order of the Eastern Star, associated with the Masons.
Steve Wozniak was initiated in 1979 at Charity Lodge No 362 in Campbell, California, now part of Mt.
Steve Wozniak was married to slalom canoe gold-medalist Candice Clark from June 1981 to 1987.
On his religious views, Steve Wozniak has called himself an "atheist or agnostic".
Steve Wozniak is a member of a Segway Polo team, the Silicon Valley Aftershocks, and is considered a "super fan" of the NHL ice hockey team San Jose Sharks.
Steve Wozniak has discussed his personal disdain for money and accumulating large amounts of wealth.
In 2017, Steve Wozniak received a Polish citizenship and visited Poland to meet with government and technology industry representatives and to visit his father's hometown.
Steve Wozniak has expressed support for the right to repair movement.
In November 2023, Steve Wozniak suffered a minor stroke while preparing to speak at a conference in Mexico City.
Steve Wozniak said that he and his wife Janet, who is getting a passport, will from now on "promote" Serbia while living in the US.
Steve Wozniak has been mentioned, represented, or interviewed countless times in media from the founding of Apple to the present.