It's been over four decades since Steve Wozniak left Apple, and on August 11 2026, Woz's 76th birthday, we talk about how he gave Apple its soul.
You're an AppleInsider reader so you know Apple and inescapably, you know the story. Steve Wozniak was the brilliant engineer, Steve Jobs was the brilliant businessman, and Ronald Wayne was, er, something else.
These are the three who founded Apple in 1976, but the story of both Woz and Jobs goes back further, and really also goes deeper. Woz truly was a remarkable engineer but if he had been able to have his way, he'd have been happy giving away everything he made.
Woz is a true engineer and in "iWoz," his 2007 autobiography co-written with Gina Smith, he wrote about how much that role means to him.
"To this day, I still believe engineers are among the key people in this world," he wrote, "and I believe that I will be one forever, and I have dedicated my whole life to engineering."
Clearly that ethos led to Apple, and maybe less clearly that ethos continues to pervade the company today.
What may be more surprising is that more than 40 years after he left Apple, Woz says he's still on the payroll. Reportedly he's getting $50 a week, meaning over the four decades he's earned $104,000 from the company.
Stephan Gary Wozniak was born on August 11, 1950, and "Stephan" is not a typo. Woz's mother, Margaret Louise Wozniak told him that his birth certificate was wrong, and so he says he calls himself Stephen.
His parents nurture his natural curiosity, helped by how his father had such a secret job in electronics that he never told Woz what it was. But a love of engineering and technology was instilled in Woz, and he earned his amateur radio license at 11 years of age.
In 1968, Woz enrolled at the University of Colorado to study computing. In 1969, he got kicked out for hacking into the faculty's mainframe.
It was typical Woz hacking, an innocent desire to know more about how something worked, and presumably no idea that he could've just asked someone.
That practically childlike attitude about discovery and knowledge defines Woz. That practically meant that he would be susceptible to people like Steve Jobs who could and did talk him into money-making ventures.
Notably, the infamous Blue Box that Woz designed and Jobs sold around campus when they were both at UC Berkley in the early 1970s.
This was the box that would produce a tone of a precise frequency that happened to be what Bell used in it telephone network. Buy the box, play the tone, and you immediately had free national and international calls.
"I remember one very, very late night in the dorm when I decided to call the pope. Why the pope? I don't know. Why not?" said Woz in his autobiography. "So I started by using the Blue Box to call Italy Inward (country code 121), then I asked for Rome Inward, and then I got to the Vatican and in this heavy accent I announced I was Henry Kissinger calling on behalf of President Nixon."
The prank didn't go very far. The Vatican phoned the real Kissinger to verify.
This was a student beating the worldwide phone company. That was a recurring issue with him, of being the individual who could out-think corporations.
It was only a few steps more that took Woz into being the founder of a corporation. And it only took Steve Jobs and later Apple CEO Mike Markkula to overcome Woz's reluctance to sell technology, and later his fear of giving up his job at Hewlett Packard.
Woz's engineering skill really was ahead of his time, and especially in how he was able to create devices using a tenth as many processor chips as existing firms. Prompted by Atari offering a bonus for every chip eliminated in a new version of its Pong game, Steve Jobs challenged Woz to do it.
Jobs also said that there was a deadline four days away, and it's not clear if that was true. But it is clear that Woz did it.
In four days, with no sleep, Woz designed and together with Jobs built legendary arcade title Breakout. It was the paddle-and-bricks game that would become famous, and Woz did it in 45 chips where some Atari games of the time were using 200 chips.
The bonus that Atari had offered was $100 per eliminated chip, so in theory Woz earned $5,000 right then in the early 1970s. Allegedly Jobs told Woz that Atari had paid only $700, and they split that amount 50/50.
Helped by how Woz reportedly didn't find this out for years, the pair continued to be friends, and through Woz, they both went to the then-new Homebrew Computer Club. Woz saw his tribe, while Jobs saw customers.
Purely to impress his new friends at the club, Woz designed what would later become known as the Apple I. For its time, it was an impressive computer, and Woz probably looked forward to seeing it used by his friends.
But Jobs saw opportunity and it was because of him that Woz agreed to sell Apple I computers. This is one of the most well-known parts of the Apple story, as Jobs made a deal to assemble Apple I computers for sale at the Byte Shop.
If it weren't for that sale, Apple would probably never have got anywhere. Even with the sale, though, there was an issue that Woz doesn't seem to have been able to resolve by himself.
On the one hand, at this point he was working for Hewlett Packard so under the terms of his contract, all of his work belonged to them. After Apple was formed as a company on April 1, 1976, Woz needed to leave HP and he needed to bring his Apple I with him, but he resisted.
Steve Jobs knew how to market Woz's technology skills
