Steve Wozniak

Stephen Gary Wozniak (; born August 11, 1950), also known by his nickname Woz, is an American technology entrepreneur, electrical engineer, computer programmer, and inventor. In 1976, he co-founded Apple Inc. (originally called Apple Computer) with his early business partner Steve Jobs. Through his work at Apple in the 1970s and 1980s, he is widely recognized as one of the most prominent pioneers of the personal computer revolution.

In 1975, Wozniak started developing the Apple I into the computer that launched Apple when he and Jobs first began marketing it the following year. He 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.

With human–computer interface expert Jef Raskin, Wozniak had a major influence over the initial development of the original Macintosh concepts from 1979 to 1981, when Jobs took over the project following Wozniak's brief departure from the company due to a traumatic airplane accident. After permanently leaving Apple in 1985, Wozniak founded CL 9 and created the first programmable universal remote, released in 1987. He then pursued several other business and philanthropic ventures throughout his career, focusing largely on technology in K–12 schools, which involved a 1990 initiative to place computers in schools in the former Soviet Union.

He has received numerous awards and honors for his work in philanthropy and the tech industry, including an induction into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2000. As of June 2024, Wozniak has remained an employee of Apple in a ceremonial capacity since stepping down in 1985. In recent years, he has helped fund multiple entrepreneurial efforts dealing in areas such as GPS and telecommunications, flash memory, technology and pop culture conventions, technical education, ecology, satellites and more. In addition to his American citizenship, Wozniak is also a Polish and Serbian citizen.

Stephen Gary Wozniak was born on August 11, 1950, in San Jose, California. His mother, Margaret Louise Wozniak (née Kern) (1923–2014), was from Washington state, and his father, Francis Jacob "Jerry" Wozniak (1925–1994) of Michigan, was an engineer for the Lockheed Corporation. Wozniak graduated from Homestead High School in 1968, in Cupertino, California. Steve has one brother, Mark, a former tech executive who lives in Menlo Park. He also has one sister, Leslie, who attended Homestead High School in Cupertino. She is a grant adviser at Five Bridges Foundation, which helps at-risk youths in San Francisco. Leslie said it was her mother who introduced activism to her and her siblings.

The name on Wozniak's birth certificate is "Stephan Gary Wozniak", but his mother said that she intended it to be spelled "Stephen", which is what he uses. Wozniak is of Polish and German ancestry. In the early 1970s, Wozniak's blue box design earned him the nickname "Berkeley Blue" in the phreaking community. 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 his autobiography, iWoz, he also credits the Tom Swift Jr. books as an inspiration for becoming an engineer.

In 1969, 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. He re-enrolled at De Anza College in Cupertino before transferring to the University of California, Berkeley, in 1971. In June of that year, for a self-taught engineering project, Wozniak designed and built his first computer with his friend Bill Fernandez.

Predating useful microprocessors, screens, and keyboards, and using punch cards and only 20 TTL chips donated by an acquaintance, they named it "Cream Soda" after their favorite beverage. A newspaper reporter stepped on the power supply cable and blew up the computer, but it served Wozniak as "a good prelude to my thinking 5 years later with the Apple I and Apple II computers". Before focusing his attention on Apple, he was employed at Hewlett-Packard (HP), where he designed calculators. It was during this time that he dropped out of Berkeley and befriended Steve Jobs.

Wozniak was introduced to Jobs by Fernandez, who attended Homestead High School with Jobs in 1971 and would eventually become Apple's first full-time employee. Jobs and Wozniak became friends when Jobs worked for the summer at HP, where Wozniak, too, was employed, working on a mainframe computer.

We first met in 1971 during my college years, while he was in high school. A friend said, 'you should meet Steve Jobs because he likes electronics, and he also plays pranks.' So he introduced us.

Their first business partnership began later that year when Wozniak read an article titled "Secrets of the Little Blue Box" from the October 1971 issue of Esquire, and started to build his own "blue boxes" that enabled one to make long-distance phone calls at no cost. Jobs, who handled the sales of the blue boxes, managed to sell some two hundred of them for $150 each, and split the profit with Wozniak. Jobs later told his biographer that if it had not been for Wozniak's blue boxes, "there wouldn't have been an Apple."

Wozniak is listed as the sole inventor on the following Apple patents:

US Patent No. 4,136,359: "Microcomputer for use with video display"—for which he was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.

US Patent No. 4,210,959: "Controller for magnetic disc, recorder, or the like"

US Patent No. 4,217,604: "Apparatus for digitally controlling PAL color display"

US Patent No. 4,278,972: "Digitally-controlled color signal generation means for use with display"

In 1990, Wozniak helped found the Electronic Frontier Foundation, providing some of the organization's initial funding and serving on its founding Board of Directors. He is the founding sponsor of the Tech Museum, Silicon Valley Ballet and Children's Discovery Museum of San Jose.

In March 2015, Wozniak stated that he had originally dismissed Ray Kurzweil's opinion that machine intelligence would outpace human intelligence. But over time, Wozniak had changed his mind: I agree that the future is scary and very bad for people. If we build these devices to take care of everything for us, eventually they'll think faster than us and they'll get rid of the slow humans to run companies more efficiently. Wozniak stated that he had started to identify a contradictory sense of foreboding about artificial intelligence, while still supporting the advance of technology.

By June 2015, Wozniak changed his mind again, stating that a superintelligence takeover would be good for humans: They're going to be smarter than us and if they're smarter than us then they'll realise they need us ... We want to be the family pet and be taken care of all the time ... I got this idea a few years ago and so I started feeding my dog filet steak and chicken every night because 'do unto others'.

In 2016, 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". Wozniak added that if computers do become superintelligent, "they're going to be partners of humans over all other species just forever".

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". In an interview to the BBC in May 2023 Wozniak said that AI may make scams more difficult to detect, noting that "AI is so intelligent it's open to the bad players, the ones that want to trick you about who they are".

Wozniak lives in Los Gatos, California. He applied for Australian citizenship in 2012, and has stated that he would like to live in Melbourne, Australia, in the future. Wozniak has been referred to frequently by the nickname "Woz", or "The Woz"; he has also been called "The Wonderful Wizard of Woz" and "The Second Steve" (in regard to his early business partner and longtime friend, Steve Jobs). "WoZ" (short for "Wheels of Zeus") is the name of a company he founded in 2002; it closed in 2006.

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. He was initiated in 1979 at Charity Lodge No. 362 in Campbell, California, now part of Mt. Moriah Lodge No. 292 in Los Gatos. Today he is no longer involved: "I did become a Freemason and know what it's about but it doesn't really fit my tech/geek personality. Still, I can be polite to others from other walks of life. After our divorce was filed I never attended again but I did contribute enough for a lifetime membership."

Because of his lifetime of achievements, multiple organizations have given Wozniak awards and recognition, including:

In 1979, Wozniak was awarded the ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award.

In 1985, both he and Steve Jobs received the National Medal of Technology from US President Ronald Reagan, the country's highest honor for achievements related to technological progress.

Later he donated funds to create the "Woz Lab" at the University of Colorado at Boulder. In 1998, he was named a Fellow of the Computer History Museum "for co-founding Apple Computer and inventing the Apple I personal computer."

In 2000, Wozniak received the American Computer & Robotics Museum's George R. Stibitz Computing and Communications Innovator Award "for inventing the Apple I & Apple II computers & for co-founding of the Apple Computer Company." In 2022, Wozniak received the museum's Lifetime Achievement award for his role in the invention of the Apple I & II computers and the co-founding Apple. He has also personally signed and donated an Apple I to the museum, and is listed as one of the museum's "founders" level donors for this donation.