THE WIZARDY WOZ

While Jobs stands in his own right as one of the great technological and commercial figures of our age, there are few who would disagree that he might never have got going were it not for the different strain of genius that belonged to Steve Wozniak. Fortune surely had a hand in bringing them together, marrying the slightly older Woz’s technical brilliance to Jobs’ remarkable energy, ambition and instinct for what the public wanted. They stand out as one of the great double acts of industrial history, so it is worth devoting a page or two to look at the career of Woz in isolation.

Stephen Wozniak was born on 11 August 1950 in San Jose, California, growing up, like Jobs, in Santa Clara Valley. His father worked for the Lockheed Corporation – perhaps the greatest name in the US aeronautics industry at the time and deeply involved in some of the most cutting-edge and top-secret technological projects of the Cold War age – so it was hardly a surprise that the young Woz developed a fascination with all things electronic.

Like Jobs, he was intelligent and displayed potential but was easily bored by school and devoted long hours to making devices such as calculators and radios. In 1968 he enrolled at the University of Colorado but left after only a year owing to a chronic shortage of funds. He spent a further year at DeAnza Community College in Cupertino, before taking a year out to earn the money to fund a further year of study at the University of California, Berkeley. He again dropped out, however, and moved back to Silicon Valley to take up a position with Hewlett-Packard.

By then his path had started to cross with Jobs. Initially introduced by their mutual friend, Bill Fernandez, the two cemented their friendship when Jobs took Bill Hewlett’s offer of a vacation job, as well as at sessions of the Homebrew Computer Club, a group of computer enthusiasts who started to meet formally in 1975, usually in the garage of one agreeable member or another.

For Woz, 1975 was something of an annus mirabilis. This was in no small part a result of the arrival of the MITS Altair 8800, a microcomputer to be built from kit. Its release is now widely regarded as one of the sparks that lit the personal computer revolution. Alas for Woz at the time, a basic kit cost $439, with that figure rising by several hundred dollars once you had purchased all the other bits of essential equipment. But its effect was to galvanize him to focus his attentions on creating a computer of his own. The result was Apple I, the machine that birthed Apple Computer, Inc.

By his own admission, Woz dreamed of being a great computer engineer rather than a business leader. He lacked the boundary-less ambition that drove Jobs and enjoyed using some of his newfound wealth to explore other personal interests. Fatefully for the Lockheed engineer’s son, one of these interests was flying. In February 1981 Woz crashed a small aircraft he was piloting shortly after taking off from Sky Park Airport in California’s Scotts Valley. He and his three passengers suffered injuries which, though not life-threatening, proved, for Woz at least, quite life-changing. These included significant temporary memory problems.

It was 1983 before Woz came back to work at Apple full-time, though he had tried his hand as a technology festival organizer in the meantime. In 1985 he and Jobs had their spectacular contribution to the IT revolution recognized when the National Technology Award was bestowed upon them by President Ronald Reagan. A year later Woz belatedly earned his bachelor’s degree in computer science and electrical engineering from the University of California, Berkeley – by which point, it would be safe to assume, he could have taught his professors more than they were able to teach him. As evidence of his unwillingness to wallow in the spotlight, he chose to go under the name of Rocky Clark during his studies, Rocky being his dog’s name and Clark his then wife’s maiden name.

By 1987 Woz was ready for a change and ended full-time employment with the company that had earned him unimaginable wealth and significant fame (even if it was Jobs who had firmly established himself as the ‘face’ of the company). Nonetheless, Wozniak remains to this day a listed company employee, picking up a relatively modest – in multi-millionaire terms, at least – annual stipend.

He threw himself into a raft of new projects in the years that followed. He worked, for instance, on a programmable remote control that he hoped would revolutionize the market, developed applications that took advantage of the fast-developing field of GPS technology, and has also been involved in telecommunications and data storage enterprises. He was, in addition, a co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, whose activities are centred on promoting technologies it believes uphold personal freedom and defending the users of such technologies if they are subject to what the organization considers unfair or baseless criminal prosecution.

Woz, who has been married four times and is the father of three children, never wanted to be in the limelight, as Jobs desired, and certainly disliked much of the baggage that went with being one of the great innovators of his time. Nonetheless, he was at the eye of a veritable technological revolution and few get such a chance to leave their imprint on history. The title of his 2006 biography perhaps says it best of all: iWoz: From Computer Geek to Cult Icon: How I Invented the Personal Computer, Co-Founded Apple, and Had Fun Doing It.