Stephen Wozniak

Stephen Gary Wozniak, named Woz, is an electronics engineer and computer programmer. He is considered one of the father of the personal computer (PC), indeed Woz single-handedly designed both the Apple I and Apple II computers in the late 1970s.

Before Apple computer

Wozniak was born in San Jose, California, August 11, 1950. He is Swiss-German ancestry on his father's side and Irish ancestry on his mother's; since when he was young he developed a passion for electronic.

In 1969 Wozniak started to build a little computer board with Bill Fernandez ( the future user interface architect of the apple II) that they named "The Cream Soda Computer", Wozniak has stated that they called it the Cream Soda Computer because he and Fernandez drank cream soda all the time whilst they worked on it.
Also in 69, Wozniak built his version of the Blue box, becoming one of the first hacker. A Blue box is a electronic device who is able to hack a public phone; the Wozniak's Blue box was the first with an automatic frequency system, it means that everybody was able to use it.

Fernandez introduced Steve Jobs to Woz in 1971. When Jobs was working at Atari in 1973, Wozniak helped him building a circuit board for the arcade video game Breakout and they became friend. Doing this work Wozniak learn the importance of building small circuite, the key of the PC.
In 1976 Wozniak alone designed the hardware, circuit board designs, and operating system for the first home computer which was able to display characters on a TV screen, and so running programs on the screen. The Apple I was born.

Apple Computer

When Steve jobs knew the Wozniak's computer they assembled the first boards apple I in job's garage. It was sold without keyboard, monitor and power supply, the users need to connect it to the television following complex instructions and they have to bought the right power supply for the computer's power.

They found the Apple Computer on April 1, 1976 and the Wozniak's machine had to be change to become marketable, in fact the Apple I was a hobbyist machine. Wozniak used a 8-bit microprocessor MOS 6502 settled on a single circuit board with 256 bytes of ROM (Read Only Memory) and 4K or 8K bytes of RAM. The Apple II was born.
Apple 's second computer was sold with the prize of 666,66$; even though the prize it was a success because it was the first home computer which had not to be assembled by the buyer (it was sold with monitor power plag and keyboard), it had the ROM to simplify the Turning on, the commands was input by a keyboard and they was displayed on the screen.

While Apple computer was earned its first million of dollars, Wozniak still worked on the apple II, a computer which maintained the concept of the Apple I, the ease of use. He resolved some problems of the first generations of Apple II, then he developed an economic floppy disk drive, a better interfece introducing the colours for the screen. In addition to Wozniak developed a BASIC (a programming language) interpretor, he wrote some programs in the ROM and he created the apple DOS to improve, for example, the 5.25 inch floppy drive. For all this characteristics the apple II was bought by the software developer and it was a big success.

In those years Wozniak divorced for the first time, instead his work on Apple computer was incredible, for example the others Apple engineer had develop a floppy drive with 60-70 circuites, while Woz made it with only 6.

After Apple Computer

Stephen had an accident with his private jet in 1981 and he suffered of injury to the memory for 3 months. Cose of that he could not work on the project Macintosh and he came back to the Berkeley university.

Between the 1981 and the 1985 he promoved many music festivals with 500 thousand of peoples each losing between 5 and 7 million of dollars, but he earned much more money then he left with the sales of the apple II. In this festival Woz organised technology fairs where he showing the possibility offered by personal computers.

Seted aside in the company Woz finally left Apple in 1885. He divorced from his second wife and then he married agan. With 8 children and millions of dollars Woz become to organize music events, technological fairs and he started to teaching.

Today he is a teacher and the biggest financier of his town, Los Gatos. The inventor of the PC has a quiet life far away from the big companies, but he remains one of the greatest geniuses in the field of electronics engineer and computer programming, indeed he has been included in the USA National Inventors Hall of Fame.

This is a short interview of Wozniak made in 1984. He will leave Apple one year later.