Biography of Steve Wozniak

Biography of Steve Wozniak

Steve Wozniak was born in 1950. A baby boomer he grew up in suburban Santa Clara Valley, California with his parents and siblings. His father was an engineer for Lockheed and his mother was the president of a Republican Women's Club. He was into electronics heavily even as a child and young teenager. While looking at a magazine article he spotted a diagram for a simple calculator called the One-Bit-Adder-Subtractor. Woz, as his friends called him, dissected the plans and made improvements. In Cupertino Science Fair he took home first prize with the Ten Bit Parallel Adder Subtractor. It was his first attempt at building a computer.

This would be the beginning of a great learning era it would seem. In junior high he had already taught himself how to design programs in computer languages. At homestead high school he absorbed everything he could about electronics and physics. He fare outreached his counter parts in class. After he graduated he went on to the University of Colorado but flunked out. You see he was bored with school because he was so intelligent. At least that is what he tells everyone. Returning to California the Woz still was interested in computers even after his fall from college life. One of his early interests was the Altair 8800. It was costly when it came out so he and a friend began research on it.

In the garage of a neighbor Steve Wozniak created what would be called the cream soda computer. Named that after all the cream soda he drank while building it. While building it he met a man named Steve Jobs. Although the computer went up in smoke during a test the basic groundwork was laid for a machine that would change the world was set and a friendship that would turn into a new industry. After the introduction of the Altair an organization sprang up of hobbyist and amateurs. It was the Homebrew Computer Club and of course Steve Wozniak went to the meetings and rarely if ever missed one of them. It seemed the Altair used a costly microprocessor, the Intel 8080, to do its thinking. Since Woz couldn't afford the 179 dollars per chip he jumped at the offer Hewlett Packard offered its employees.