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Company Founder Biographies: Founder bios of some of the most successful people in business today. |  |
Steve Wozniak Bio, Founder of Apple
Jobs convinced Wozniak that computers could be marketed to the home consumer who had no interest in the nitty gritty details, had no desire to assemble it themselves -- someone who just wanted to open a box, flip a switch, and have the power of computing at their fingertips. After some limited business ventures together -- they sold illegal "blue boxes" which exploited telephone switching system vulnerabilities in order to allow a user to make free phone calls, and Wozniak helped Jobs with his technician job at Atari -- they founded Apple Computers together in 1976. The first product, the Apple I, was still an assembly-required computer -- the consumer needed to provide all the peripherals, the keyboard, the case, and so on -- but unlike other products, the circuit board itself was complete: no technical or design work was necessary, and assembling the computer at home was no more complicated than putting together a baby's crib. It sold well enough that Wozniak finally had the funding to pursue the ideas he'd been developing in his notebooks, and the Apple II introduced in 1977 was a major step forward, a personal computer with sound and high-resolution graphics, something designed to look more like a home appliance than like an experiment. Apple's 1980 public offering made Wozniak a multimillionaire. He was never comfortable with his fame, though, and after a plane crash in a Beech Bonanza he wasn't qualified to pilot, he left Apple, married his girlfriend Candi Clark, and re-enrolled at the University of California in Berkeley, where had he previously dropped out. He briefly worked at Apple in product development for a few years, but left the company for good in 1987 -- though, presumably in honor of his status as co-founder, he remains listed as an employee, and continues to draw a paycheck. In the twenty years since leaving Apple, Wozniak has worked as a teacher and philanthropist; on the technological side of things, he developed the first universal remote as well as applications for GPS technology. |
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