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Steve Wozniak was born on August 11, 1950 in San Jose, California. -
He attended the University of Colorado at Boulder from 1968–69 and took a year off. Following his return to California, he attended a local community college and then the University of California, Berkeley until 1971.
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Alongside Steve Jobs, they designed and built The Blue Box, a device for phreaking (hacking into the telephone network without paying for long-distance calls). -
He obtained a position with the Hewlett-Packard Company in 1975. -
He became involved with the Homebrew Computer Club, a San Francisco Bay area group centered around the Altair 8800 microcomputer do-it-yourself kit, which was based on one of the world’s first microprocessors, the Intel Corporation 8080. -
While working as an engineering intern at Hewlett-Packard, Wozniak designed his own microcomputer in 1976 using the new microprocessor, but the company was not interested in developing his design.
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Steve Jobs liked his design and decided to form a company together with Wozniak in 1976. -
Wozniak designed new hardware components, such as the 3.5-inch floppy disk drive for the Apple II, and various components of the Apple operating system and its software applications.
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They decided to produce a finished product, the Apple II; completed in 1977, it included a built-in keyboard and support for a color monitor. The Apple II, which combined Wozniak’s brilliant engineering with Jobs' aesthetic sense, was the first personal computer to appeal beyond hobbyist circles. -
The company went public in 1980. Its market value exceeded $1 billion, at the time the fastest rise to that milestone in corporate history, and Wozniak’s stock in the company made him an instant multimillionaire. -
He crashed his small airplane, leaving him temporarily with traumatic amnesia (unable to form new long-term memories), and he was forced to go on a sabbatical. -
He finally retired as an active employee in 1985
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He and Steve Jobs were awarded a National Medal of Technology by U.S. Pres. Ronald W. Reagan. -
Wozniak continued his studies at UC Berkeley and completed his degree. He had to enroll under a pseudonym "Rocky Clark" because he was well known. -
He became the chief scientist at Fusion-Io, an American company that produces high-capacity, solid-state storage devices. After Fusion-Io was sold to SanDisk in 2014, Wozniak left the company to become chief scientist at Primary Data, which was involved in data virtualization; that business shut down in 2018. In 2020, he founded EFFORCE, which allows companies to fund energy efficiency projects through investing in a cryptocurrency token using blockchain technology.