Geekery

Geek God – Steve Wozniak

Posted on 17. Nov, 2009 by Jake in Geek God

The original inventor at Apple HQ

A major oversite (geddit?) took place on this blog when I declared Steve Jobs a Geek God. Sure, the guy deserves some credit for turning Apple into the global mega-brand it is today. But the real geek genius, the inventor, is his partner Steve Wozniack.

Known affectionately as ‘The Woz’, ‘iWoz’ and the ‘Wonderful Wizard of Woz’, Wozniack is a geek’s geek – he was the one whose bedroom as a young man was filled with bizarre electronic devices of his own invention, who would invent cool gadgets just to impress his friends at parties and who had to be convinced by the more business-savvy Jobs that there may actually be a market for this ‘personal computer’ idea he’d been tinkering with. If The Woz would never have become a multimillionaire (back in 1980 when that was still a lot of money) without Jobs and his business sense, then the same goes the other way around – none of Apple’s true technological innovations could have taken place without the Wonderful Wizard of Woz.

The invention that made him famous was the first PC, the Apple 1. The machine sounds like a joke now – 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. The user was expected to supply the case, power supply, keyboard and display themselves. The Apple 1 was fairly expensive $666.66 (Wozniack says he has no idea of the supposedly satanic connotations of the number and just chose the price because he ‘likes repeating digits’). Apple 2 introduced innovations such as high res and the floppy disk drive. Wozniack designed all the software as well as the hardware for these early machines.

Since his early innovations iWoz has been quite low key. An aircraft accident gave him amnesia in 1981, and when he eventually returned to Apple in 1983 he was just employed as an engineer. He has been involved with pioneering useful things such as early GPS technology as well as the universal remote control. He still receives a paycheck from Apple (even though he stopped being a full-time employee in 1987) and is a shareholder in the company.

The Woz is a true geek icon, proving that with enough tech savvy you can be a success in life without an iota of business or dress sense. Respect.

Tags: Apple, Geek God, genius, iWoz, PC, Steve Wozniak