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Wozniak's early inspirations came from his father Jerry who was a Lockheed engineer, and from a fictional wonder-boy: Tom Swift. His father infected him with fascination for electronics and would often check over young Woz's creations. Tom Swift, on the other hand, was for Woz an epitome of creative freedom, scientific knowledge, and the ability to find solutions to problems. Tom Swift would also attractively illustrate the big awards that await the inventor. To this day, Wozniak returns to Tom Swift books and reads them to his own kids as a form of inspiration.
Woz's values were shaped and strengthened over years by his family, Christian philosophy, radio amateur ethics (helping people in emergency), books (Swift's utilitarian and humanitarian attitude) and others.
As a lasting Swift legacy, throughout his life, Wozniak loved all projects that required heavy thinking. He learned the basics of mathematics and electronics from his father. When Woz was 11, he built his own amateur radio station, and got a ham-radio license. At age 13, he was elected president of his high school electronics club, and won first prize at a science fair for a transistor-based calculator. Also at 13, Woz built his first computer that laid the engineering foundation of his later success.
Together with John DraperDraper also known as Captain Crunch (after Cap'n Crunch, the mascot of a breakfast cereal), was a phone phreaker. A blind friend of John Draper informed him that a toy whistle that was, at the time, packaged in boxes of Cap'n Crunch cereal could be easily he made Blue BoxesSteve Wozniak on display at the Computer History Museum. A blue box is an electronic device created to defeat long distance call charges on the United States telephone network. It operates by playing a tone and the multifrequency tones that were used by a, devices with which one could (mis)use the telephone system by emulating pulses (i.e. phone phreakingPhreaking is a slang term for the action of making a telephone system do something that it normally should not allow. Sometimes, phreaking will be considered illegal, like in the act of toll fraud. Other reasons why many people attempted (or succeeded in)). With Steve JobsSteven Paul Jobs (born February 24, 1955) is best known as the co-founder (with Steve Wozniak) and CEO of Apple Computer, and somewhat less so for his founding and leadership of Pixar. He is also regarded as a pioneer in computing for seeing the commercia, whom he met working as a summer employee at HP, he sold these boxes.
By 1975Events January January 1 Watergate scandal: John N. Mitchell, H. Haldeman, John D. Ehrlichman are found guilty of the Watergate cover-up and are sentenced to 30 months to 8 years in jail on February 21 January 5 The Tasman Bridge in Tasmania, Australia, i, Woz dropped out of the University of California, BerkeleyThe University of California, Berkeley (also known as Cal Berkeley UCB or UC Berkeley is a public, coeducational university situated in the foothills of Berkeley, California to the east of San Francisco Bay, overlooking the Golden Gate and its bridge. (he would later finish his degree in the 1982Events January January 6 William Bonin is convicted of being the "freeway killer". January 8 AT&T agrees to divest itself of twenty-two subdivisions January 11 Mark Thatcher, son of the British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, disappears in the Sahara du) and came up with a computer that eventually became successful nationwide. However, he was largely working within the scope of the Palo Alto-based Homebrew Computer Club, a local group of electronics hobbyists. His project had no wider ambition.
At the club he met Steve Jobs. Jobs, 5-years Woz's junior, had himself dropped out of Reed College in 1972. Jobs and Wozniak came to the conclusion that a completely assembled and inexpensive computer would be in demand. They sold some of their prized possessions (e.g. Woz's HP scientific calculator and Steve Jobs' Volkswagen mini-van), raised $1300, and assembled the first prototype in Jobs' garage. Their first computer was quite unimpressive by today's standards, but in 1975 it was an engineering marvel. In simplicity of use it went years ahead of the Altair, which was introduced earlier in 1975. Altair had no display and no true storage. It received commands via a series of switches and a single program would require thousands of toggles without an error. Altair output was presented in the form of flashing lights. Altair was great for true geeks, but it was not usable for a wider public. It would not even come assembled. Woz's computer, on the other hand, named Apple I, was a fully assembled and functional unit that contained a $25 microprocessor on a single-circuit board with ROM. On April 1, 1976, Jobs and Wozniak formed Apple Computer Company. Wozniak quit his job at Hewlett-Packard and became the vice president in charge of research and development at Apple. Apple I was priced at $666.66. Jobs and Wozniak sold their first 25 computers to a local dealer.
Wozniak could now focus full-time on fixing the shortcomings of Apple I and adding new functionality. Apple I earned the company close to a million dollars. His new design was to retain the most important characteristics: simplicity and usability. Woz introduced high-resolution graphics in the Apple II. His computer could now display pictures instead of just letters: "I threw in high-res. It was only two chips. I didn't know if people would use it." By 1978, he also designed an inexpensive floppy-disk drive. He and Randy Wigginton wrote a simple disk operating system.
In addition to his hardware skills, Wozniak wrote most of software that ran Apple. He wrote a Basic interpreter, a Breakout game (which was also a reason to add sound to the computer), the code needed to control the disk drive, and more. On the software side, the Apple II was also made more attractive to a business user by the famous pioneering spreadsheet: Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston's VisiCalc. In 1980, the Apple company went public and made Jobs and Wozniak millionaires. At the age of 27, Jobs was the youngest Fortune 500 man in 1982—a rare case before the dot-com era.
Incidentally, in 1978, when the company cut the price of Apple II, it helped to launch yet another meteoric software career, that of Mitch Kapor. Kapor scraped enough money to buy his own Apple. Inspired by VisiCalc and a meeting with its inventors, he went on to develop Lotus 1-2-3 and swept the spreadsheet market place for years to follow.
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