Stephen Gary Wozniak (; born August 11, 1950), also known by his nickname Woz, is an American technology entrepreneur, electrical engineer, computer programmer, and inventor. In 1976, he co-founded Apple Inc. (originally called Apple Computer) with his early business partner Steve Jobs. Through his work at Apple in the 1970s and 1980s, he is widely recognized as one of the most prominent pioneers of the personal computer revolution.
In 1975, Wozniak started developing the Apple I into the computer that launched Apple when he and Jobs first began marketing it the following year. He was the primary designer of the Apple II, introduced in 1977, known as one of the first highly successful mass-produced microcomputers, while Jobs oversaw the development of its foam-molded plastic case and early Apple employee Rod Holt developed its switching power supply.
With human–computer interface expert Jef Raskin, Wozniak had a major influence over the initial development of the original 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, which involved a 1990 initiative to place computers in schools in the former Soviet Union.
He has received numerous awards and honors for his work in philanthropy and the tech industry, including an induction into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2000. As of June 2024, Wozniak has remained an employee of Apple in a ceremonial capacity since stepping down in 1985. In recent years, he has helped fund multiple entrepreneurial efforts dealing in areas such as GPS and telecommunications, flash memory, technology and pop culture conventions, technical education, ecology, satellites and more. In addition to his American citizenship, Wozniak is also a Polish and Serbian citizen.
Stephen Gary Wozniak was born on August 11, 1950, in San Jose, California. His mother, Margaret Louise Wozniak (née Kern) (1923–2014), was from Washington state, and his father, Francis Jacob "Jerry" Wozniak (1925–1994) of Michigan, was an engineer for the Lockheed Corporation. Wozniak graduated from Homestead High School in 1968, in Cupertino, California. Steve has one brother, Mark, a former tech executive who lives in Menlo Park. He also has one sister, Leslie, who attended Homestead High School in Cupertino. She is a grant adviser at Five Bridges Foundation, which helps at-risk youths in San Francisco. Leslie said it was her mother who introduced activism to her and her siblings.
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. Wozniak is of Polish and German ancestry. 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 Computer. In his autobiography, iWoz, he also credits the Tom Swift Jr. books as an inspiration for becoming an engineer.
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. He re-enrolled at De Anza College in Cupertino before transferring to the University of California, Berkeley, in 1971. In June of that year, for a self-taught engineering project, Wozniak designed and built his first computer with his friend Bill Fernandez.
Predating useful microprocessors, screens, and keyboards, and using punch cards 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". Before focusing his attention on Apple, he was employed at Hewlett-Packard (HP), where he designed calculators. It was during this time that he dropped out of Berkeley and befriended Steve Jobs.
Wozniak was introduced to Jobs by Fernandez, who attended Homestead High School with Jobs in 1971 and would eventually become Apple's first full-time employee. Jobs and Wozniak became friends when Jobs worked for the summer at HP, where Wozniak, too, was employed, working on a mainframe computer.
We first met in 1971 during my college years, while he was in high school. A friend said, 'you should meet Steve Jobs because he likes electronics, and he also plays pranks.' So he introduced us.
Their first business partnership began later that year when Wozniak read an article titled "Secrets of the Little Blue Box" from the October 1971 issue of Esquire, and started to build his own "blue boxes" that enabled one to make long-distance phone calls at no cost. Jobs, who handled the sales of the blue boxes, managed to sell some two hundred of them for $150 each, and split the profit with Wozniak. Jobs later told his biographer that if it had not been for Wozniak's blue boxes, "there wouldn't have been an Apple."
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 $725 in 2025) 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. Whilst a lack of scoring or coin mechanisms made Wozniak's prototype unusable, 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 $2,500 in 2025). Wozniak did not learn about the actual $5,000 bonus (equivalent to $36,300 in 2025) until ten years later. While dismayed, he said that if Jobs had told him about it and had said he needed the money, Wozniak would have given it to him.
In 1975, Wozniak began designing and developing the computer that would eventually make him famous, the Apple I. With the Apple I, Wozniak was 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 custom Homebrew designs, the Apple had an easy-to-achieve video capability that drew a crowd when it was unveiled.
Wozniak also created the fictional computer Zaltair. Adam Schoolsky and Randy Wigginton helped him to pull it off at the West Coast Computer Conference. It was a parody of the Altair 8800 computer, which was very popular at the time. Steve Wozniak thought of the name because:The company Zilog had come out with a compatible processor, which they called the Z-80. A few companies using this chip were establishing brands based on Z words. Like ComputerZ or Z-Node or the like.As a joke, Wozniak decided to print "20,000 brochures" (according to YouTube video "Rare video of Steve Wozniak from 1984 talking about computing, joining Apple and the Mac" filmed at a Cleveland computer club meeting) of a fake product called the 'Zaltair' with a lot of "superlative descriptions of a computer that solved every problem in the world". It advertised, among other things, a new version of the BASIC programming language called "BAZIC", with the ability to "define your own language... a feature we call perZonality".