Stephen Wozniak

Stephen Wozniak Stephen Gary "Woz" Wozniak (born August 11, 1950 in San Jose, California) is an American computer engineer who founded Apple Computer (now Apple Inc.) with Steve Jobs. His inventions and machines are credited with contributing significantly to the personal computer revolution of the 1970s. Wozniak created the Apple I and Apple II computers in the mid1970s. The Apple II gained much popularity, eventually becoming one of the best selling personal computers of the 1970s and early 1980s. Wozniak has several nicknames, including "The Woz", "Wonderful Wizard of Woz" and "iWoz" (a reference to the ubiquitous naming scheme for Apple products). "WoZ" (short for "Wheels of Zeus") is also the name of a company Wozniak founded. He is sometimes known as the "Other Steve" of Apple Computer, the better known Steve being co-founder Steve Jobs. He and his family are of Polis Origins of Apple In 1970, Wozniak had become friends with Steve Jobs, when Jobs had a summer job at the same business where Wozniak was working on a mainframe computer.[1] According to Wozniak's autobiography, iWoz, Jobs had the idea to sell the computer as a fully assembled PC board. Wozniak, at first skeptical, was later convinced by Jobs that even if they were not successful they could at least say to their grandkids they had their own company. Together they sold some of their possessions (such as Wozniak's HP scientific calculator and Jobs' Volkswagen van), raised USD$1,300, and assembled the first prototypes in Jobs' bedroom and later (when there was no space left) in Jobs' garage. Wozniak's apartment in San Jose was filled with monitors, electronic devices, and Wozniak had developed some computer games, similar to SuperPong but that had voice overs to the blips on the screen. Wozniak carried electronic devices with him often, and would entertain partygoers with novel devices.[citation needed] The Apple I Computer was similar to the Altair 8800, the first commercially available personal computer, except it had no provision for internal expansion cards. With the addition of these cards, the Altair could be attached to a computer terminal and it could be programmed in BASIC. The Apple I was purely a hobbyist machine, a $25 microprocessor (MOS 6502) on a single-circuit board with 256 bytes of ROM, 4K or 8K bytes of RAM and a 40 character by 24 row display controller. It lacked a case, power supply, keyboard, or display, which had to be provided by the user. By 1975, Wozniak withdrew from the University of California, Berkeley (he would later return to finish his B.S. in EECS, which he received in 1986 enrolled under the alias Rocky Clark) and came up

with the computer that eventually made him famous. However, he was largely working to impress other members of the Palo Alto-based Homebrew Computer Club, a local group of electronics hobbyists. His project had no wider ambition. On April 1, 1976, Jobs and Wozniak formed Apple Computer. Wozniak quit his job at HewlettPackard and became the vice president in charge of research and development at Apple. The Apple I was priced at $666.66. (Wozniak later said he had no idea about the correlation between the number and the mark of the beast, and "I came up with [it] because I like repeating digits." It was $500 plus a 33% markup.) Jobs and Wozniak sold their first 100 computers to Paul Terrell, who was starting a new computer shop, called the Byte Shop, in Mountain View, California. Terrell bought just the circuit board for the Apple I; he had to supply the keyboard, monitor, transformer, and even the case in which to put the computer. Excerpt from the Apple I design manual, including Wozniak's hand-drawn diagrams Wozniak could now focus full-time on fixing the shortcomings of the Apple I and adding new functionality. His new design was to retain the most important characteristics: simplicity and usability. Wozniak introduced high-resolution graphics in the Apple II.[2] 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 controller. He and Randy Wigginton wrote a simple disk operating system and file system. Shepardson Microsystems was contracted to build a simple command line interface for the disk operating system. In addition to designing the hardware, Wozniak wrote most of the software initially provided with the Apple. He wrote a programming language interpreter, a set of virtual 16-bit processor instructions known as SWEET 16, a Breakout game (which was also a reason to add sound to the computer), the code needed to control the disk drive, and more.In 1980, Apple went public and made Jobs and Wozniak multimillionaires. However, Jobs refused to allow some members of Apple to receive stock options, so Wozniak decided to share some of his options with the rest of the team by either giving it away for free or at a heavily discounted price. This was dubbed "The Woz Plan". Maia Etchart Eckhartd 8th Milton 24/3/09 Fuente wikipedia