Today is the day to wish Woz a very happy 70th birthday!
Stephen Gary “Woz” Wozniak was born 70 years ago today, on August 11, 1950 in San Jose, California.
Woz co-founded Apple Computer, Inc., which is now named Apple Inc., with Steve Jobs and Ronald Wayne.
Wozniak created the Apple I and Apple II computers in the mid-1970s and received the National Medal of Technology in 1985, along with Steve Jobs, from U.S. President Ronald Reagan.
While he’s best remembered for the Apple II, the Disk II was actually one of Wozniak’s crowning achievements at Apple, being the company’s first 5 ½-inch floppy disk,” Luke Dormehl reports for Cult of Mac. “Created with then-17 year old Randy Wigginton over Christmas 1977 (Wigginton took December 25 off; Wozniak didn’t) the peripheral not only added a whole lot of functionality to Apple’s desktop, it was an early example of the company’s present high margin business model: costing just $140 in components, and selling for upwards of $495.”
With software engineer Jef Raskin, Wozniak had a major influence over the initial development of the original Apple Macintosh concepts from 1979 to 1981, when Steve Jobs took over leadership of the project following Wozniak’s brief departure from the company due to a traumatic airplane accident.
MacDailyNews Take: Happy Birthday, Woz! 🎂
Happy Birthday 🎈🎁🎉🎊🎂 Woz. If it wasn’t for you, I would never be a happy Apple Fan boy
Congrats to Woz!!
He always seems like a happy person and pretty sure they’ll be celebrating tonight.
I wonder if it’s true that an hour after his blue pill he tells his wife “Woz up!!”….
Happy Birthday to one of the greatest engineers!
Happy birthday to the great and powerful Woz!
I met Woz at a “CL 9” -Cloud 9 – universal remote early preproduction product demo back in ‘84 or ‘85. The CL 9 was a sharp looking T shaped programmable universal remote for audio visual equipment. It was awesome. It was, unfortunately, a gigantic “almost” in that it had everything you wanted and worked and looked good. It even had Apple- like packaging. What it lacked was labels for “tv”, “tape”, and “amp”- it had letters- Woz said this was for flexibility but the average joe would just become confused. Such a shame, it was a great product.
Woz is a great guy, very personable, enthusiastic about people and was able to answer questions from the simple to the most complex. Afterwards I shook his hand and spoke to him about what I was doing with my Apple II. A company called Applied Engineering had my Apple IIe at that moment because they had timing issues with their new z80/cpm expansion board. Woz has been to Applied Engineering earlier in the day and had discussed the timing problem with them. He was surprised it was my IIe. I was like “they make good products and I’m just trying to help them out.“ He said he felt the same. It was a great moment . 😊
This might have been an Applied Engineering product demo event with Woz as a “special guest”. I can’t remember the details- it was 35 years ago. I do remember one of the products was called a “Timemaster H.O.” We couldn’t figure out what the H.O. stood for- High Output- a term that people from Detroit use to refer to high performance motors. The Timemaster card had a clock and extra features for timing both software events and devices you could connect to the Apple II. Applied Engineering was a very small, very impressive company.
…Woz had been to Applied…
All hail the great Wizard of Woz