Steve Wozniak

Steve Wozniak designed the machines that made Apple, and left the running of it to others. Born in San Jose in 1950 to a Lockheed engineer, he was building calculators and computers from spare parts as a teenager, and his obsession was doing more with fewer chips — an aesthetic that shaped everything he made. He met Steve Jobs through a mutual friend in 1971, and the two began by selling blue boxes, illegal devices that generated the tones needed to make free long-distance calls. He worked at Hewlett-Packard designing calculators and offered them his computer design first; they turned it down five times. The Apple I of 1976 was a single board that could use a television as a display and a keyboard for input, rather than switches and lights. The Apple II of 1977 was the machine that mattered: colour graphics, sound, eight expansion slots, and a case and power supply that made it a consumer product rather than a kit. He designed the hardware, the operating system and the BASIC interpreter essentially alone. His most admired piece of engineering was the Disk II floppy controller, which replaced the usual twenty or more chips with about eight by moving the work into software, cutting the cost enough to make disk storage standard. He was badly injured in a light aircraft crash in 1981, suffering anterograde amnesia for weeks. He returned to Apple briefly, finished the degree he had abandoned under a pseudonym, and then spent years teaching computing to primary school children. He gave shares to early employees who had received none. He formally remains an Apple employee on a nominal salary, and has been openly critical of the company.

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