Steve Wozniak Inventions Information

Stephen Gary "Woz" Wozniak (/ˈwɒzniæk/; born August 11, 1950)(p18)(p27) is an American inventor, electronics engineer, programmer, philanthropist, and technology entrepreneur. In 1976 he co-founded Apple Inc., which later became the world's largest information technology company by revenue and largest company in the world by market capitalization. He and Apple co-founder Steve Jobs are widely recognized as two prominent pioneers of the personal computer revolution of the 1970s and 1980s.

In 1975, Wozniak started developing the Apple I(p150) into the computer that launched Apple when he and Jobs first began marketing it the following year. He primarily designed the Apple II in 1977, known as one of the first highly successful mass-produced microcomputers, while Jobs oversaw among other things the development of its foam-molded plastic case and early Apple employee Rod Holt developed the switching power supply. With computer scientist Jef Raskin, Wozniak had major influence over the initial development of the original Apple 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.

As of January 2018[update], Wozniak has remained an employee of Apple in a ceremonial capacity since stepping down in 1985.

Steve Wozniak was born and raised in San Jose, California, the son of Margaret Louise Wozniak (née Kern) (1923–2014) from Washington state(p18) and Francis Jacob "Jerry" Wozniak (1925–1994) from Michigan.(p18) and He graduated from Homestead High School in 1968, in Cupertino, California.

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.(p18) Wozniak has mentioned his surname being Polish and Ukrainian and has spoken of his Polish descent.(pp129–130)

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 Inc.

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 and sending prank messages on it. In 1971, as a self-taught project, Wozniak designed and built his first computer with his friend Bill Fernandez. Predating useful microprocessors, screens, and keyboards, and using a punch card 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". He later re-enrolled at De Anza College and transferred to the University of California, Berkeley in 1971. Before focusing his attention on Apple, he was employed at Hewlett-Packard (HP) where he designed calculators. It was during this time that he befriended Steve Jobs.

Wozniak was introduced to Jobs by Fernandez, who attended Homestead High School with Jobs in 1971. Jobs and Wozniak became friends when Jobs worked for the summer at HP, where Wozniak too was employed, working on a mainframe computer.

In 1973, Jobs was working for arcade game company Atari, Inc. in Los Gatos, California. He was assigned to create a circuit board for the arcade video game Breakout. According to Atari co-founder Nolan Bushnell, Atari offered $100 (equivalent to $564 in 2018) for each chip that was eliminated in the machine. Jobs had little knowledge of circuit board design and made a deal with Wozniak to split the fee evenly between them if Wozniak could minimize the number of chips. Wozniak reduced the number of chips by 50, by using RAM for the brick representation. Too complex to be fully comprehended at the time, the fact that this prototype also had no scoring or coin mechanisms meant Woz's prototype could not be used. Jobs was paid the full bonus regardless. Jobs told Wozniak that Atari gave them only $700 and that Wozniak's share was thus $350 (equivalent to $1,975 in 2018).(pp147–148, 180) Wozniak did not learn about the actual $5,000 bonus (equivalent to $28,220 in 2018) until ten years later, but said that if Jobs had told him about it and had said he needed the money, Wozniak would have given it to him.(pp104–107)

In 1975, Wozniak began designing and developing the computer that would eventually make him famous, the Apple I. On June 29 of that year, he tested his first working prototype, displaying a few letters and running sample programs. It was the first time in history that a character displayed on a TV screen was generated by a home computer. With the Apple I, he and Jobs were largely working to impress other members of the Palo Alto-based Homebrew Computer Club, a local group of electronics hobbyists interested in computing. The Club was one of several key centers which established the home hobbyist era, essentially creating the microcomputer industry over the next few decades. Unlike other Homebrew designs, the Apple had an easy-to-achieve video capability that drew a crowd when it was unveiled.

In 1976, Wozniak completed the Apple I design. He alone designed the hardware, circuit board designs, and operating system for the computer. Wozniak originally offered the design to HP while working there, but was denied by the company on five different occasions. Jobs instead had the idea to sell the Apple I with Wozniak as a fully assembled printed circuit board. Wozniak, at first skeptical, was later convinced by Jobs that even if they were not successful they could at least say to their grandchildren that they had had their own company. Together they sold some of their possessions (such as Wozniak's HP scientific calculator and Jobs's Volkswagen van), raised $1,300, and assembled the first boards in Jobs's bedroom and later (when there was no space left) in Jobs's garage. Wozniak's apartment in San Jose was filled with monitors, electronic devices, and some computer games Wozniak had developed. The Apple I sold for $666.66. Wozniak later said he had no idea about the relation between the number and the mark of the beast, and "I came up with [it] because I like repeating digits." Jobs and Wozniak sold their first 50 system boards to Paul Terrell, who was starting a new computer shop, called the Byte Shop, in Mountain View, California.

On April 1, 1976, Jobs and Wozniak formed Apple Computer (now called Apple Inc.) along with administrative supervisor Ronald Wayne, whose participation in the new venture was short lived. Wozniak resigned from his job at Hewlett-Packard and became the vice president in charge of research and development at Apple. He and Jobs decided on the name "Apple" shortly after Jobs returned from an apple orchard in Oregon. Wozniak's Apple I is similar to the Altair 8800, the first commercially available microcomputer, except the Apple I has no provision for internal expansion cards. With expansion cards the Altair can attach to a computer terminal and be programmed in BASIC. In contrast, the Apple I is a hobbyist machine. Wozniak's design includes a $25 CPU (MOS 6502) on a single circuit board with 256 bytes of ROM, 4K or 8K bytes of RAM, and a 40-character by 24-row display controller. Apple's first computer lacks a case, power supply, keyboard, and display—all components provided by the user.

After the success of the Apple I, Wozniak designed the Apple II, the first personal computer with the ability to display color graphics, and BASIC programming language built in. Inspired by "the technique Atari used to simulate colors on its first arcade games", Wozniak found a way of putting colors into the NTSC system by using a US$1 chip, while colors in the PAL system are achieved by "accident" when a dot occurs on a line, and he says that to this day he has no idea how it works. During the design stage, Steve Jobs argued that the Apple II should have two expansion slots, while Wozniak wanted eight. After a heated argument, during which Wozniak had threatened for Jobs to "go get himself another computer", they decided to go with eight slots. Jobs and Wozniak introduced the Apple II at the 1977 West Coast Computer Faire. Wozniak's first article about the Apple II is in Byte magazine in May 1977. It became one of the first highly successful mass-produced personal computers in the world.

In 1980, Apple went public to instant and significant financial profitability, making Jobs and Wozniak both millionaires. The Apple II's intended successor, the Apple III, released the same year, is a commercial failure and was discontinued in 1984. According to Wozniak, the Apple III "had 100 percent hardware failures", and that the primary reason for these failures was that the system was designed by Apple's marketing department, unlike Apple's previous engineering-driven projects.

During the early design and development phase of what would become the Macintosh, Wozniak had heavy influence over the project until 1981. In a 2013 interview, Wozniak said that "Steve [Jobs] really took over the project when I had a plane crash and wasn't there." In the mid-1980s he designed the Apple Desktop Bus, a proprietary bit-serial peripheral bus that became the basis of all Macintosh and NeXT computer models.[verification needed]

In favor of the Macintosh's slow but steady uprising through the late 1980s, Apple's corporate leadership—including Steve Jobs—increasingly alienated and disrespected its flagship cash cow Apple II series—and Wozniak along with it. The Apple II division—other than Wozniak—was not invited to the Macintosh introduction event, and Wozniak was seen instead kicking the dirt in the parking lot. Although Apple II products provided about 85% of Apple's sales in early 1985, the company's January 1985 annual meeting did not mention the Apple II division or its employees, a typical situation that frustrated Wozniak.

On February 7, 1981, the Beechcraft Bonanza A36TC which Wozniak was piloting crashed soon after takeoff from the Sky Park Airport in Scotts Valley, California. The plane stalled while climbing, then bounced down the runway, broke through two fences, and crashed into an embankment. Wozniak and his three passengers—then-fiancée Candice Clark, her brother Jack Clark, and Jack's girlfriend, Janet Valleau—were injured. Wozniak sustained severe face and head injuries, including losing a tooth, and also suffered for the following five weeks from anterograde amnesia, the inability to create new memories. He had no memory of the crash, and did not remember his name while in the hospital or the things he did for a time after he was released. He would later state that Apple II computer games are what helped him regain his memory. The National Transportation Safety Board investigation report cited premature liftoff and pilot inexperience as probable causes of the crash.(pp28–30)

Wozniak did not immediately return to Apple after recovering from the airplane crash, seeing it as a good reason to leave.Infinite Loop characterized this time: "Coming out of the semi-coma had been like flipping a reset switch in Woz's brain. It was as if in his thirty-year old body he had regained the mind he'd had at eighteen before all the computer madness had begun. And when that happened, Woz found he had little interest in engineering or design. Rather, in an odd sort of way, he wanted to start over fresh.":322

Complete article available at this page.