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Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple Computers with Steve Jobs, is now primarily involved in charitable work, including contributions to the San Jose Children’s Discovery Museum. He was responsible for much of the hardware and software development of the Apple II, and received many accolades for his work. Despite being a multi-millionaire, he prefers to take a back seat to Jobs and is modest about his achievements.
If you’re reading this from your Apple computer, or just love Macs in general, it’s hard not to get excited about Steve Jobs and the other Steve, as he’s affectionately called, Steve Wozniak. Wozniak, along with Jobs, is best known for founding Apple Computers. Although Steve Wozniak is no longer an active Apple employee, he still enjoys showing up at events like the annual MacWorld and most of his projects lately are charitable in nature, including his massive contributions to the San Jose Children’s Discovery Museum .
A native of San Jose, California, which would later become a key “computing area” called Silicon Valley, Steve Wozniak is modest enough for a multi-millionaire. He resists public attention and prefers to take a back seat to Jobs. He was much more interested in product development than running a business. Wozniak left Apple in 1987 to first develop a series of remote control switches, which did not perform well in the marketplace, and then worked briefly as a fifth grade teacher. Today, he primarily supports educational efforts through his Unuson charitable foundation, which was initially created to sponsor US festivals in 1982 and 1982.
Steve Wozniak’s role in helping create Apple was not marked by an ambition to produce a world-class computer. Instead, initially, Steve Wozniak was more interested in making a computer to impress his friends than he was in the Homebrew Computer Club to which he belonged. The two Steves had met in 1970 and Steve Jobs was five years younger than Wozniak. Steve Wozniak was 20 and Steve Jobs was 15 when they met.
Jobs was inspired by the idea that he could make a personal computer, and Steve Wozniak was inspired by Jobs. Together, they worked on developing prototypes for Apple in some very modest places, first in Jobs’ bedroom and then in Wozniak’s garage. Eventually they felt they had to form a company. Although Wozniak worked for Hewlett Packard at the time, he left to become vice president when Apple was founded in 1976.
Steve Wozniak was especially responsible for research and development, as the early computer projects he and Jobs worked on together needed a lot of improvement. Ultimately, Wozniak was responsible for developing much of the hardware and some of the software needed to create the Apple II. Barely ten years after Jobs and Steve Wozniak first met, Apple became a publicly traded company, and the two Steves at the ages of 30 and 25 were millionaires.
A plane crash in 1981 gave Steve Wozniak amnesia and he decided to leave Apple for a short time to graduate from the University of California, Berkeley. He graduated in 1986, but only returned to Apple as head of product development in 1983. 1982 and 1983 also marked Wozniak’s founding of Unuson and his sponsorship of the two US festivals. He officially retired from Apple in 1987 and pursued different career directions.
Steve Wozniak, sometimes referred to as the “Woz”, has received many accolades. He received the National Medal of Technology from President Reagan in 1985, was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2000, and has two honorary degrees from Kettering University and Nova Southeastern University. You can read more about Steve Wozniak in his 2006 autobiography iWoz: from Computer Geek to Cult Icon. Also, the 1999 made-for-television movie Pirates of Silicon Valley received good reviews and is available on DVD.
