Steve Wozniak

By Laura Whitfield

Steve Wozniak built the personal computer because he wanted to impress his friends. In 1975, the twenty-five-year-old Hewlett-Packard engineer started attending the Homebrew Computer Club in Menlo Park, California, where hobbyists gathered to gawk at the Altair 8800, a crude kit machine programmed with toggle switches. Wozniak, born in San Jose in 1950, had been designing computers on paper since high school; he decided he could do better, and for the sheer joy of the engineering puzzle he designed a machine around the cheap MOS 6502 microprocessor, with a keyboard interface and video output built in, so it displayed characters on a television instead of blinking lights. His friend Steve Jobs saw a product where Wozniak saw a toy. They sold fifty hand-built Apple I boards in 1976, and then Wozniak did the thing that changed the industry: he designed the Apple II, a complete computer in a plastic case with color graphics, sound, eight expansion slots, and, crucially, a floppy-disk drive and the first spreadsheet, VisiCalc, which gave businesses a reason to buy it. The Apple II, launched in 1977, was the first mass-produced personal computer that an ordinary person could use, and it sold for sixteen years, financing everything Apple became. Wozniak's engineering was famously elegant: he achieved with a handful of chips what competitors needed dozens to do, writing tight code and clever circuits that engineers still study. He survived a 1981 plane crash, left Apple in 1985, and spent the following decades teaching, funding museums and schools, and giving away much of his fortune. He never cared about being a billionaire; he cared about being a brilliant engineer, and the prankster who once built a TV jammer stayed the company's conscience. The Apple II itself is long obsolete, which is why its durability score is low, but as the machine that proved ordinary people wanted computers, it lit the fuse of the personal computing era. The Apple I was a beautiful piece of minimalism: a bare circuit board, sold for $666.66, that buyers had to mount in a case with their own keyboard and television. About two hundred were made, most sold through the Byte Shop in Mountain View, and they financed the real machine. The Apple II, designed through 1976 and launched in 1977 at $1,298, was the first computer that looked like an appliance rather than a project: a beige plastic case, a keyboard, color graphics Wozniak had engineered with fiendish cleverness, squeezing color from a handful of chips. The Disk II floppy drive, designed with Randy Wigginton, gave it storage, and in 1979 Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston's VisiCalc gave it a purpose, the first spreadsheet, the application that made businesses buy computers by the thousand. Wozniak's code was famously dense and elegant; engineers who disassembled his ROMs found tricks they still admire. In 1981 he crashed his private plane, suffered amnesia, and stepped back; he formally left Apple in 1985, uneasy with the company's direction. He funded two US Festivals, enormous music and technology gatherings, co-founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation in 1990, taught schoolchildren, and gave away much of his wealth. The Apple II line sold for sixteen years and kept Apple alive through its wilderness decades; without it there would have been no Macintosh, no iPod, no iPhone.

Impact on civilization

The Apple II was the proof of concept for the entire personal computer industry. Before it, computers belonged to institutions; after it, they belonged to whoever could afford one, and the industry that grew from that premise, hardware, software, and eventually the internet economy, is now the largest wealth-creation engine in history. Wozniak's specific contribution was democratization through engineering elegance: by making the machine cheap, expandable, and genuinely usable, he moved computing from the hobbyist's workbench to the family's desk and the small business's office. VisiCalc on the Apple II was the first 'killer app,' the demonstration that software, not hardware, would be where the value lived. Every laptop, tablet, and smartphone descends from the bet he made at the Homebrew Computer Club: that ordinary people, given a real computer, would find extraordinary things to do with it. Wozniak proved that the personal computer's bottleneck was not technology but imagination about the user. His machines assumed ordinary people were smart enough for real computing, and the market proved him right beyond anyone's expectations. The open architecture of the Apple II, with its expansion slots inviting third-party hardware, also established the ecosystem model: the platform owner prospers when others build on it, a lesson the industry has relearned with every app store since.