Stephen Gary Wozniak

Wozniak offered the Apple I design to his employer, Hewlett-Packard, on five separate occasions, and was refused every time.¹ His plan after that was to hand the schematics out free at Homebrew Computer Club meetings, until Steve Jobs pushed him to sell the machine instead.² He is the co-founder of Apple Inc., the American company whose Apple I and Apple II computers helped create the mass-market personal computer category in the late 1970s. Wozniak designed and hand-built both machines, and their sales funded Apple's first decade.² He has held a ceremonial Apple employee status for decades and today works mainly as a public speaker, educator, and technical advisor rather than as an operating executive.

Background

Stephen Gary Wozniak, known as "Woz," was born on August 11, 1950, in San Jose, California, and raised in Sunnyvale, in the heart of Silicon Valley. His father, Francis "Jerry" Wozniak, was a Lockheed engineer who worked on classified missile programs and shared circuit diagrams with his son at the kitchen table on weekends, teaching a value Wozniak has described as "extreme honesty."¹ His mother was Margaret Louise Wozniak, and he had a brother, Mark, and a sister, Leslie.

Wozniak was drawn to electronics young: a crystal radio kit at seven, an electronics kit at eight, and the Tom Swift Jr. engineer-adventure books as a child. He scored a perfect 800 on the math SAT and, in high school, designed computers on paper using only equipment manuals and no textbooks, privately competing with himself to redraw the same circuit with fewer chips each time. He won first prize at the Bay Area Science Fair in junior high with a binary adding and subtracting machine, and again at thirteen with a 10-bit parallel digital computer.¹

He graduated from Homestead High School in Cupertino in 1968, attended the University of Colorado Boulder for a year, then De Anza College, and later enrolled at UC Berkeley before leaving to take a job at Hewlett-Packard. He completed his BS in electrical engineering and computer sciences in 1986. Wozniak has been married four times and has three children.

Getting started

In 1971, Wozniak built the "Cream Soda Computer" with Bill Fernandez using about twenty TTL chips, before microprocessors were common. Fernandez introduced him to Steve Jobs the same year. After reading an Esquire article on phone phreaking, Wozniak built a digital "blue box" in three weeks; Jobs sold roughly two hundred of them at $150 each, the pair's first commercial collaboration.¹

Hired at Hewlett-Packard as a calculator designer, Wozniak tried to give the Apple I design to HP on five separate occasions and was refused each time.¹ He credits the first Homebrew Computer Club meeting, held March 5, 1975, in Gordon French's garage, as the direct spark for the Apple I. He chose the MOS 6502 chip, which cost $25, over the Intel 8080 at $179, the economic decision that made a hobbyist-affordable computer possible. He completed the Apple I design on March 1, 1976, planning at first to hand out the schematics free at Homebrew meetings, until Jobs pushed him to sell it instead.²

What he built

Apple Computer Company was founded on April 1, 1976, by Wozniak, Steve Jobs, and Ronald Wayne, funded partly by selling Wozniak's HP-65 calculator and Jobs's VW van. The Apple I was priced at $666.66, and about fifty units sold to Paul Terrell's Byte Shop.² The Apple II, released in 1977, was the first personal computer with color graphics, which Wozniak has said was inspired by watching a colored dot on an Atari factory-floor television. He has described the Apple II as effectively all of Apple's income for its first ten years.² Wozniak was also the principal designer of the Disk II floppy drive in 1978 and contributed to early Macintosh engineering.

At Apple's IPO on December 12, 1980, roughly 4.6 million shares were offered at $22 and closed at $29, creating about three hundred instant millionaires. Wozniak personally distributed as much as 2,000 shares each, roughly $10 million from his own holdings, to forty to eighty early employees whom Jobs had excluded from the offering.¹ Wozniak left his day-to-day role in 1985, disenchanted with the company's direction, and received the National Medal of Technology jointly with Jobs that year.

How he operates

He had been redrawing the same computers on paper since high school, competing with himself to use fewer chips each time and working out tricks he says "could never be in a book."² That private habit turned out to be the exact shape of what the personal computer industry needed in 1976, and building it never presented itself to him as effort or as a business: his plan for the finished Apple I was to hand the schematics out free at Homebrew, and it took Jobs to argue him into selling instead, which is the fit the Obsessive Natural Builder archetype describes.² He deliberately avoided the business and press side of the partnership, saying he "sat in engineering" while Jobs handled commercial vision. He is known for being non-vindictive: on learning a decade later that Jobs had shorted him roughly $4,300 on the Atari Breakout project, Wozniak said that if Jobs had told him he needed the money, he would have given it to him.¹ He co-founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation in 1990, reflecting a civil-liberties and open-technology ethic.

Where things stand

Wozniak still holds ceremonial Apple employee status but is not involved in product decisions. After leaving Apple he founded or advised a series of ventures, including CL 9, Wheels of Zeus, Fusion-io, Primary Data, Silicon Valley Comic Con, Woz U, Efforce, and Privateer Space. He is active as a public speaker, a philanthropist focused on K-12 STEM education, and a technical advisor to small ventures. He is widely known for having given away most of his Apple-era wealth, and has said he gave it away because wealth and power are not what he lives for.³

Key facts

• Tried to give the Apple I design to his employer HP for free on five separate occasions before Apple existed.
• Scored a perfect 800 on the math SAT and won multiple regional science-fair prizes for original binary computers built as a teenager.
• Redistributed roughly $10 million of his own Apple IPO stock to forty to eighty early employees Jobs had left out of the offering.
• Chose the $25 MOS 6502 over the $179 Intel 8080, a component decision that set the personal computer's price point.
• Co-founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation in 1990.
• Received the National Medal of Technology jointly with Steve Jobs in 1985.