Steve Wozniak, byname of Stephen Gary Wozniak, (born August 11, 1950, San Jose, California, U.S.), American electronics engineer, cofounder, with Steve Jobs, of Apple Computer, and designer of the primary commercially profitable private pc.
Wozniak—or “Woz,” as he was generally identified—was the son of {an electrical} engineer for the Lockheed Missiles and Space Company in Sunnyvale, California, in what would grow to be referred to as Silicon Valley. A precocious however undisciplined pupil with a present for arithmetic and an curiosity in electronics, he attended the University of Colorado at Boulder for one yr (1968–69) earlier than dropping out. Following his return to California, he attended a neighborhood group school after which the University of California, Berkeley. In 1971 Wozniak designed the “Blue Box,” a tool for phreaking (hacking into the phone community with out paying for long-distance calls) that he and Jobs, a pupil at his previous highschool whom he met about this time, started promoting to different college students. Also in the course of the early Seventies Wozniak labored at a number of small electronics companies within the San Francisco Bay space earlier than acquiring a place with the Hewlett-Packard Company in 1975, by which era he had formally dropped out of Berkeley.
Wozniak additionally grew to become concerned with the Homebrew Computer Club, a San Francisco Bay space group centred across the Altair 8800 microcomputer do-it-yourself package, which was primarily based on one of many world’s first microprocessors, the Intel Corporation 8080, launched in 1975. While working as an engineering intern at Hewlett-Packard, Wozniak designed his personal microcomputer in 1976 utilizing the brand new microprocessor, however the firm was not curious about growing his design. Jobs, who was additionally a Homebrew member, confirmed a lot enthusiasm for Wozniak’s design that they determined to work collectively, forming their very own firm, Apple Computer. Their preliminary capital got here from promoting Jobs’s vehicle and Wozniak’s programmable calculator, and so they arrange manufacturing within the Jobs household storage to construct microcomputer circuit boards. Sales of the package have been promising, so that they determined to supply a completed product, the Apple II; accomplished in 1977, it included a built-in keyboard and assist for a color monitor. The Apple II, which mixed Wozniak’s good engineering with Jobs’s aesthetic sense, was the primary private pc to enchantment past hobbyist circles. When the corporate went public in 1980, its market worth exceeded $1 billion, on the time the quickest rise to that milestone in company historical past, and Wozniak’s inventory within the firm made him an instantaneous multimillionaire.
During these years, Wozniak designed new {hardware} elements, equivalent to the three.5-inch floppy disk drive for the Apple II, and numerous elements of the Apple working system and its software program functions. This work resulted in 1981 when he crashed his small airplane, leaving him quickly with traumatic amnesia (unable to type new long-term recollections), and he was pressured to go on a sabbatical. He quickly determined to return to Berkeley, underneath the pseudonym of Rocky Clark, as a way to end the pc science and electrical engineering programs wanted to earn these levels. Although he dropped out once more, he finally was given credit score for his work at Apple, and the varsity awarded him a bachelor of science diploma in electrical engineering in 1987.
Wozniak returned to Apple in 1982, although he resisted efforts to contain him in administration. He lastly retired as an energetic worker in 1985, instantly after being awarded, together with Jobs, a National Medal of Technology by U.S. Pres. Ronald W. Reagan. Wozniak spent the following a long time engaged in philanthropic causes, particularly involving the training of youngsters, and in volunteer work instructing pc enrichment lessons to preteens.
Although Wozniak was semiretired after leaving Apple, he stored up with the computing world by funding numerous enterprise ventures and sometimes serving as an adviser or board member for various corporations. In 2009 he grew to become the chief scientist at Fusion-Io, an American firm that produces high-capacity, solid-state storage units. Wozniak was serving on the corporate’s board of administrators when he determined to grow to be a full-time worker. After Fusion-Io was offered to SanDisk in 2014, Wozniak left the corporate to grow to be chief scientist at Primary Data, which was concerned in knowledge virtualization; that enterprise shut down in 2018.
In 2006 Wozniak revealed his autobiography, iWoz: Computer Geek to Cult Icon: How I Invented the Personal Computer, Co-Founded Apple, and Had Fun Doing It.