Steve Wozniak
By:
August 11, 2009
When most people hear “Steve” and “Apple” mentioned in the same sentence, they think of Steve Jobs, ringmaster of technology fetishists, evangelizing about the latest sleek iToy. They forget about the “Other Steve,” STEVE WOZNIAK (born 1950). In the late 1970s, Woz was slaving over circuit boards in his garage to impress his fellow nerds at the local computer club when Jobs, his old college chum, came along and saw dollar signs. In 1977, the two Steves unveiled the Apple II, for which Wozniak had registered the understated patent “Microcomputer for use with video display”; the Apple II represented a colossal paradigm shift and, in the space of a couple of years, it turned Apple Computer into a billion-dollar company. However, after crashing his airplane in 1981 and suffering a spell of amnesia, Woz, one of the founding fathers of microcomputing, experienced a personal paradigm shift. Nowadays, while collecting a tiny honorarium from Apple, he prefers to spend his time tinkering with gadgets at home and passing on his enthusiasm for all things hi-tech to local children.
On his or her birthday, HiLobrow irregularly pays tribute to one of our high-, low-, no-, or hilobrow heroes. Also born this date: | Odile Crick | Hulk Hogan |
READ MORE about members of the Blank Generation (1944-53).
I just got this sinister vibe from the above piece… was there foul play involved in that airplane crash? Are these guys still friends? Genuine friends, or keep your friends close, enemies closer kind of way? Is Steve Jobs an ambitious man? I’ve never ever liked computers… let alone apple computers. Computers provide the means to live life artifically, and all they can do is turn people into twits. Congratulations fellas…!
the picture is misleading. this is not a picture of the Steve’s “introducing” the Apple II. the Apple II came out in 1977, but the computer in the picture is the Apple //c, which came out in 1984.
Thanks, David. This was an editorial mistake; the writer didn’t choose the photo.