The Wonderful Wizard of Woz

Known variously as the Woz, iWoz, and the other Steve, Steve Wozniak is perhaps one of the most gifted and important technical minds of the past century. A friend of mine, after reading Wozniak's interview in Founders at Work, said to me in an email, "I finished with the impression that he was a truly unique individual destined to bring the personal computer to the world." I couldn't agree more whole-heartedly.

Wozniak attended the University of California, Berkeley in the late 1960s. Berkeley was one of a handful of hotbeds for computer science at the time. This was incredibly early in the evolution of the personal computer, and only the most hard core nerds had any hope of making progress. The computer that set the computer hobbyist community on fire, the Altair 8800, was still half a decade away, and even that computer only had a few blinking lights to offer the user.

Bill Gates was 13 years old and 11 years away from creating MS-DOS.

After withdrawing from Berkeley, Wozniak went to work for Hewlett-Packard. He worked on the company's scientific calculator, one of the most advanced computing devices of the day. Then Steve met Steve. A partnership was born that spawned not only one of the most iconic computers of all time but one of the most iconic companies as well.

The pair began attending meetings of the Homebrew Computer Club. At the time, the name of the club was almost redundant seeing as the first mass produced personal computers were still years in the future. An engineer in the purest sense of the word, Woz cared much more about creating bleeding-edge technology than starting a business. In Founders at Work, Woz is quoted, "We hadn't decided to start a company. Because companies weren't my thing, technology was. I'd make Xeroxes of all my schematics and pass them out and I thought 'I'll get known by doing this stuff.'" Motivated not by profit but rather by intrinsic curiosity and a desire to make a name for himself, Woz created computers years ahead of anything available at the time. All this in his spare time while working full time at HP.

Eventually, the consummate entrepreneur, Jobs, convinced Wozniak that they should create a company to design and sell his computers. Their first product was to be printed circuit boards, but this quickly gave way to the Apple II, an improved version of the computer Wozniak showed off at the Homebrew Computer Club.

The Apple II was designed entirely by Wozniak. Not only did he solder the chips together himself, he wrote the software that ran on the computer. In his interview in Founders at Work he describes how he wrote a progamming language for a system that didn't have one: "Normally you type a computer program into a computer. What I did was I handwrote it on the left side of the pages in what's called machine language. And then I looked at a little card and I translated my program into ones and zeros on the other side." You heard that correctly. He wrote an entire programming language in ones and zeros. Today, complex computer programs called compilers take care of this mind numbing task. In that day, he had to do it himself.

That is the type of technical virtuosity that makes someone "destined to bring the personal computer to the world." The Apple II was an incredible success. It is the computer that made computing palatable for the masses. Today, computers are inescapable, so take a second to appreciate the man who started it all--the Wonderful Wizard of Woz.

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