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 mid-
1970s. 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 Hewlett-
Packard 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