Pre-Apple 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. 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. at the
Computer History Museum 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 () 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 (). 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,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". To help make the ad believable, he included fake trademarks and a shipping label for
MITS, the company manufacturing the Altair. Wozniak did not think that this would be an issue, as he had "made sure in advance that MITS would not be at the show." However, it later turned out that a representative from MITS was attending, and had been taking large amounts of their fake brochures.
Apple formation and success computer in a briefcase, from the
Sydney Powerhouse Museum collection By March 1, 1976, Wozniak completed the basic design of the Apple I computer. Wozniak originally offered the design to
HP while working there, but was denied by the company on five occasions. Jobs then advised Wozniak to start a business of their own to build and sell bare
printed circuit boards of the Apple I. Wozniak, at first skeptical, was later convinced by Jobs that even if they were not successful they could at least say to their grandchildren that they had had their own company. To raise the money they needed to build the first batch of the circuit boards, Wozniak sold his
HP scientific calculator while Jobs sold his
Volkswagen van. After the company was formed, Jobs and Wozniak made one last trip to the Homebrew Computer Club to give a presentation of the fully assembled version of the Apple I. saw the presentation and was impressed by the machine. They sold their first 50 system boards to Terrell later that year. In November 1976, Jobs and Wozniak received substantial funding from a then-semi-retired
Intel product marketing manager and engineer named
Mike Markkula. computer with an external
modem After the success of the Apple I, Wozniak designed the Apple II, the first personal computer with the ability to display color graphics, and BASIC programming language built in. while colors in the
PAL system are achieved by "accident" when a dot occurs on a line, and he says that to this day he has no idea how it works. During the design stage, Jobs argued that the Apple II should have two
expansion slots, while Wozniak wanted eight. It became one of the first highly successful mass-produced personal computers in the world. Wozniak also designed the
Disk II floppy disk drive, released in 1978 specifically for use with the
Apple II to replace the slower
cassette tape storage. In 1980, Apple went public to instant and significant financial profitability, making Jobs and Wozniak both millionaires. The Apple II's intended successor, the
Apple III, released the same year, was a commercial failure and was discontinued in 1984. According to Wozniak, the Apple III "had 100 percent hardware failures", and that the primary reason for these failures was that the system was designed by Apple's marketing department, unlike Apple's previous engineering-driven projects. In a 2013 interview, Wozniak said that in 1981, "Steve [Jobs] really took over the project when I had a plane crash and wasn't there.") crashed soon after takeoff from the
Sky Park Airport in
Scotts Valley,
California. The airplane stalled while climbing, then bounced down the runway, broke through two fences, and crashed into an embankment. Wozniak and his three passengers—then-fiancée
Candice Clark, her brother Jack Clark, and Jack's girlfriend, Janet Valleau—were injured. Wozniak sustained severe face and head injuries, including losing a tooth, and also suffered for the following five weeks from
anterograde amnesia, the inability to create new memories. He had no memory of the crash, and did not remember his name while in the hospital or the things he did for a time after he was released. He would later state that Apple II computer games were what helped him regain his memory. Wozniak did not immediately return to Apple after recovering from the airplane crash, seeing it as a good reason to leave.
UC Berkeley and US Festivals Later in 1981, after recovering from the plane crash, Wozniak re-enrolled at UC Berkeley to complete his
Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences degree that he started there in 1971 (and which he would finish in 1986). Because his name was well known at this point, he enrolled under the name Rocky Raccoon Clark, which is the name listed on his diploma, which sponsored two
US Festivals, with "US" pronounced like the pronoun, not as initials. Initially intended to celebrate evolving technologies, the festivals ended up as a technology exposition and a rock festival as a combination of music, computers, television, and people. After losing several million dollars on the 1982 festival, Wozniak stated that unless the 1983 event turned a profit, he would end his involvement with rock festivals and get back to designing computers. Later that year, Wozniak returned to Apple product development, desiring no more of a role than that of an engineer and a motivational factor for the Apple workforce. Although Apple II products provided about 85% of Apple's sales in early 1985, the company's January 1985 annual meeting did not mention the Apple II division or its employees, a typical situation that frustrated Wozniak.
Final departure from Apple workforce Even with the success he had helped to create at Apple, Wozniak believed that the company was hindering him from being who he wanted to be, and that it was "the bane of his existence". Unuson continued to support this, funding additional teachers and equipment. to create wireless
GPS technology to "help everyday people find everyday things much more easily". In 2002, he joined the board of directors of
Ripcord Networks, Inc., joining Apple alumni
Ellen Hancock,
Gil Amelio, Mike Connor, and Wheels of Zeus co-founder
Alex Fielding in a new
telecommunications venture. Later the same year he joined the board of directors of
Danger, Inc., the maker of the
Hip Top. In 2006, Wheels of Zeus was closed, and Wozniak founded
Acquicor Technology, a
holding company for acquiring technology companies and developing them, with Apple alumni Hancock and Amelio. From 2009 through 2014 he was chief scientist at
Fusion-io. In 2014 he became chief scientist at Primary Data, which was founded by some former Fusion-io executives.
Silicon Valley Comic Con (SVCC) is an annual
pop culture and
technology convention at the
San Jose McEnery Convention Center in
San Jose, California. The convention was co-founded by Wozniak and Rick White, with Trip Hunter as CEO. Wozniak announced the annual event in 2015 along with
Marvel legend
Stan Lee. In October 2017, Wozniak founded
Woz U, an online educational technology service for independent students and employees. As of December 2018, Woz U was licensed as a school with the
Arizona state board. Though permanently leaving Apple as an active employee in 1985, Wozniak chose to never remove himself from the official employee list, and continues to represent the company at events or in interviews. He is also an Apple shareholder. He maintained a friendly acquaintance with Steve Jobs until Jobs's death in October 2011. However, in 2006, Wozniak stated that he and Jobs were not as close as they used to be. In a 2013 interview, Wozniak said that the original
Macintosh "failed" under Steve Jobs, and that it was not until Jobs left that it became a success. He called the
Apple Lisa group the team that had kicked Jobs out, and that Jobs liked to call the Lisa group "idiots for making [the Lisa computer] too expensive". To compete with the Lisa, Jobs and his new team produced a cheaper computer, one that, according to Wozniak, was "weak", "lousy" and "still at a fairly high price". "He made it by cutting the RAM down, by forcing you to swap disks here and there", says Wozniak. He attributed the eventual success of the Macintosh to people like
John Sculley "who worked to build a Macintosh market when the Apple II went away". At the end of 2020, Wozniak announced the launch of a new company helmed by him, Efforce. Efforce is described as a marketplace for funding ecologically friendly projects. It used a WOZX
cryptocurrency token for funding and blockchain to redistribute the profit to token holders and businesses engaged on the platform. In September 2021, it was reported that Wozniak was also starting a company alongside co-founder
Alex Fielding named
Privateer Space to address the problem of
space debris. Privateer Space debuted the first version of its space traffic monitoring software on March 1, 2022. In 2024, Wozniak sued
YouTube in respect to a scam that was being circulated on the platform using his likeness. Later, he won after a San Jose appeals court ruled YouTube was liable for failing to combat it. ==Inventions==