“Steve Wozniak, more fondly known as Woz, co-founded Apple with his friends Steve Jobs and Ronald Wayne,” Ashleigh Allsopp writes for Macworld UK. “He invented the Apple I and Apple II in the 70s before leaving Apple in 1987, but that certainly wasn’t the end of Woz in the media. He’s quite the chatterbox, and, here at Macworld, we rather enjoy trying to guess what on Earth he’s going to say next.”
Allsopp writes, “Below are 10 facts about Steve Wozniak that you may not have known.”
Here’s one to whet your appetite:
In the 90s, Woz submitted so many high scores of the classic Gameboy game Tetris to Nintendo Power magazine that they eventually refused to print them. So, Woz began sending them under the name “Evets Kainzow”.
Read more in the full article here.
Oh yeah well beat this Woz… Ah who am I kidding, I got nothing on a Tetris god.
Pfttt!!! That’s ancient history. What are his scores on Candy Crush Saga?
It is actually a pretty sad list if these were truly his only unknown “accomplishments”. I’m sure that Woz has done something more noteworthy than “Dancing with the Stars”…
Inventing the first universal Control would be pretty high on anyones resume
Without Woz, there would be no Apple as we know it, and I am typing this from my iPad 3 Retina
Yuck, dated Kathy Griffin. I hope he was able to put that foul mouth of hers to good use.
They forgot that he was in a Datsun commercial for the 280 or 300z
He did do Nissan commercials indeed
Fact #11-he has not been relevant to Apple and any product released since the late 80’s
bet there are a few engineers in the field and at Apple because he inspired them to become engineers.
Relax, “Ne” is just struggling for some kind of relevancy himself
in reality only myopic people feel like this
we see the depth of our experience as deep as we are trained to look, or are inspired to look.
this poster, “kinugumee”, is obviously neither
Actually that’s false.
Woz’s SWIM chip (a derivative by Woz and a couple others of the original WIM chip personally designed by Woz) was in many Macs up through 1998.
Don’t know what the SWIM chip was? It stood for “Super Wozniak Integrated Machine”. It was the chip that allowed Macs to read all variants of 3 1/2 inch floppy disks, natively. Not a big deal today, but in the late 80s through late 90s it was one component of Macs with which the designers did not mess. As with Woz’s early designs, it was an elegant piece of work that was very efficient at what it did. Thus the engineers didn’t screw with it. It also did several other small, core pieces of functions for Macs (thus the “integrated machine” name).
Yes, after about 2000, Woz was pretty much irrelevant to Apple except as the “Royal Kibitzer”. But no one should think that Woz’s relevance to Apple stopped back in the 80s.
Thing very telling about Woz:
He went back to college to finish his degree long after he would ever need it and went under an assumed name- the Profs knew, but not his fellow students until after graduation. Instead of being Mr Big shot, he chose to be just some older guy finishing his degree.
As to his importance to Apple:
Jobs was the guy with a vision for a computer company and where he wanted to take it, but Woz was the guy with the chops to make a computer. He was the model of engineers of a now bygone era that went for simplicity instead of complexity. There would have been nothing for Jobs to sell without Woz at the beginning.
Why does Ronald Wayne always get mentioned as a co-founder?? i guess he “technically” was the tie-breaker guy, but it’s not like he was there 9-5 adding tons of value and ideas to the company..
I discovered just yesterday that it is easy to follow Woz’s day-to-day on Foursquare.
Denny’s. Burger King. Seriously. Check it out.