50 Fun Facts About Steve Wozniak

Which TV series did Wozniak credit with inspiring him to found Apple?

Star Trek. Wozniak said he might never have had the inspiration to start Apple if he had not driven to its fan conventions in Southern California as a young man.

In which California city was Wozniak born in 1950?

San Jose. His father was a Lockheed engineer in the valley, and the city later named a street Woz Way in his son's honour.

Wozniak once prank-called the Vatican pretending to be which American statesman?

Henry Kissinger. Putting on a heavy accent, Wozniak asked for the Pope and was told he was asleep; the Vatican caught on after checking with the real Kissinger.

What nickname did Wozniak earn in the phone-phreaking community?

Berkeley Blue. He took the handle as a UC Berkeley student building blue boxes, and the famous phreaker Captain Crunch came to his dorm room to meet him.

What got Wozniak into trouble as a freshman at the University of Colorado Boulder?

Hacking its computer system with prank messages got him disciplined in 1969, yet the same university awarded him an honorary doctorate twenty years later.

What did Wozniak and a friend name the computer they built in 1971?

Cream Soda, the drink the two friends kept fetching while they built it. A newspaper reporter then stepped on the power cable and blew the machine up.

Which company employed Wozniak as an engineer when he built the Apple I?

Hewlett-Packard. He offered his employer the Apple I design five times and was turned down each time, so he and Jobs started a company instead.

Who introduced Wozniak to Steve Jobs?

Bill Fernandez. Out walking with Jobs, he spotted Wozniak washing his car and introduced the two; he later became Apple's first full-time employee.

Which magazine's 1971 article 'Secrets of the Little Blue Box' set Wozniak building phone-phreaking devices?

Esquire. Wozniak picked up the issue from his mother's kitchen table the day before his university classes began and called it the most amazing article he had ever read.

Wozniak's blue boxes let users do what?

Call for free. The illegal boxes fooled the long-distance network, and Wozniak sold them door to door in college dorms with Jobs: one played emcee, the other handled the sales and the money.

Which Atari arcade game's circuit board did Wozniak help Jobs slim down?

Breakout. By Wozniak's account, Jobs handed him half of what he said Atari had paid and kept a far larger bonus for the chips saved, as Wozniak learned only years later.

Which digital-rights group did Wozniak help launch with early funding?

Electronic Frontier Foundation. Wozniak backed its founders in 1990, when they organised to defend computer users' civil liberties after a series of Secret Service raids.

Which hobbyist group did Wozniak design the Apple I to impress?

Homebrew Computer Club. The group first met in a Menlo Park garage in 1975, and Wozniak showed his schematics at its meetings before Apple existed.

What was the Zaltair, which Wozniak advertised in thousands of brochures at a 1977 trade show?

A hoax computer. Wozniak's phony ad promised made-up features such as a language called BaZic, and even Jobs did not know who was behind it.

Which phone service, the Bay Area's first of its kind, did Wozniak run in the early 1970s?

Dial-a-Joke. His line took about 2,000 calls a day, and Wozniak often picked up a handset in his kitchen to tell the jokes live.

Which job did Wozniak take up after Apple, working for years with no salary?

Schoolteacher. He taught computer classes to fifth-graders and their teachers in Los Gatos, and paid for much of the district's equipment himself.

Jobs sold his Volkswagen van to fund the first Apple I boards, while Wozniak sold what?

His programmable calculator. The money paid for the first circuit boards, which the two friends then put together at the Jobs family home.

Who was the short-lived third co-founder of Apple Computer in April 1976?

Ronald Wayne drew up the partnership agreement, then withdrew within two weeks and gave up his 10% stake for $800.

When Jobs proposed the name Apple, Wozniak's first worry was a clash with which band's record label?

The Beatles. Jobs had just returned from an apple orchard commune in Oregon, and neither man could come up with a name they liked better.

Who ordered 50 Apple I computers for his Byte Shop?

Paul Terrell. He would pay $500 apiece only for fully assembled machines, which pushed Jobs and Wozniak from selling bare boards into building computers.

Why did Wozniak price the Apple I at $666.66?

Repeating digits. Wozniak says he liked them and had no thought of the devil's number when he set the price.

Which bargain-priced CPU did Wozniak build the Apple I around?

MOS 6502. Wozniak had designed a computer on paper around a Motorola chip he could not afford, and built it once the far cheaper 6502 went on sale.

As a sixth-grader, Wozniak earned a licence for which hobby?

Ham radio. He built his own transmitter and receiver, yet said he had nobody at school to share the hobby with.

The Apple II stood out among 1977's personal computers for being able to display what?

Colour graphics. Apple dropped its old Isaac Newton logo for a six-colour striped apple as the machine went on show.

Jobs wanted two and Wozniak eight of which Apple II feature?

Expansion slots. After a heated argument in which Wozniak told Jobs to go get himself another computer, the machine shipped with eight.

At which event was the Apple II introduced in April 1977?

West Coast Computer Faire. Jobs and Wozniak grabbed the prime booth at San Francisco's Civic Auditorium and rented a video projector, then a rarity, for the demo.

What did Wozniak's 1978 Disk II replace as Apple II storage?

Cassette tape. Wozniak and a young colleague worked through their Christmas holiday to get the far faster floppy drive ready for a trade show.

Which 1980 machine did Wozniak say had 100 percent hardware failures?

Apple III. Wozniak said it shipped very late and that cramming the design onto a single circuit board caused the failures; Apple retired it in 1984.

In 2023 Wozniak joined Elon Musk in signing an open letter urging a six-month pause on what?

Training more powerful AI. Weeks later Wozniak told the BBC his fear was that bad actors would use the technology to make scams harder to spot.

What accident in February 1981 led Wozniak to step away from Apple?

A plane crash. Wozniak's Beechcraft stalled just after takeoff and hit an embankment; investigators blamed a premature lift-off by a pilot unfamiliar with the aircraft.

What condition did Wozniak suffer for about five weeks after a 1981 accident?

Anterograde amnesia, the inability to form new memories. He was later shown photos of himself playing computer games in hospital and could recall none of it.

Under what name did Wozniak re-enrol at UC Berkeley in 1981?

Rocky Raccoon Clark. He borrowed his dog's name and his wife's surname so that he could study without being recognised, and kept the alias on his diploma.

Which pair of giant rock concerts did Wozniak bankroll in 1982 and 1983 through his company Unuson?

US Festival. Wozniak hoped to blend music with new technology, but the two events lost him millions and he went back to designing computers.

Wozniak proposed judging a robot's intelligence by sending it into a stranger's home to do what?

Make a cup of coffee. The robot would have to find the kitchen, the machine, the coffee and a mug in a house it had never seen, then work out which buttons to press.

What did Wozniak's company CL 9 bring to market in 1987?

A programmable universal remote. Wozniak quit Apple in 1985 to build it, saying he wanted the fun of a small start-up again.

What was Wozniak's company Wheels of Zeus meant to create?

Wireless GPS technology. Its smart tags were meant to report the whereabouts of a pet or a briefcase, but the company shut down in 2006.

What title did Wozniak take at the flash-storage start-up Fusion-io in 2009?

Chief scientist. When some of the firm's executives left to found Primary Data, Wozniak followed them in 2014 and took the same title there.

Which comics legend joined Wozniak to announce Silicon Valley Comic Con in 2015?

Stan Lee. Wozniak wanted the convention to put real science beside science fiction, with NASA researchers sharing the bill with television casts.

Privateer, a company Wozniak co-founded in 2021, was set up to work on what?

Space debris. Rather than hauling junk out of orbit, the company set out to map it, pitching itself as the Google Maps of space.

Which sport has Wozniak played with the Silicon Valley Aftershocks?

Segway polo. Wozniak took up the game so keenly that its world championship trophy, the Woz Challenge Cup, was named after him.

Which comedian did Wozniak date in 2007, joining her at the Emmy Awards?

Kathy Griffin. Wozniak went on to appear in several episodes of her reality show My Life on the D-List, and the two stayed friends after splitting up in 2008.

On which TV contest did Wozniak compete in 2009?

Dancing with the Stars. Paired with Karina Smirnoff, Wozniak drew the judges' lowest score of the night yet survived the vote, and kept dancing through a pulled hamstring and a fractured foot.

In which sitcom did Wozniak appear as himself in 2010, dining with his real wife?

The Big Bang Theory. Sheldon, too fearful to leave home, rolls up to Wozniak's restaurant table as a telepresence robot to meet his hero.

Who played Wozniak in Danny Boyle's 2015 film Steve Jobs?

Seth Rogen. Wozniak, a consultant on the film, said he was shocked and amazed by how good it was, even though it put words in his mouth that he never said.

Which country's president gave Wozniak a passport after meeting him in its capital in 2023?

Serbia. President Aleksandar Vucic announced the passport after talks with Wozniak in Belgrade, shortly before a parliamentary election.

Wozniak sued YouTube in 2020 over doctored videos that used his image to promise viewers free what?

Bitcoin. Viewers were told to send cryptocurrency and get double back; in 2024 an appeals court ruled that YouTube could not simply rely on its legal immunity.

What stands at 180 Woz Way, on the street named in Wozniak's honour?

A children's museum. Wozniak was the largest private donor to the campaign that built the Children's Discovery Museum, so his home city named its street after him.

Which award did Wozniak and Jobs receive from President Reagan in 1985?

National Medal of Technology. The two were in the first group ever to receive it, in the same year that both men walked away from the company they had founded.

Why did Wozniak join the Freemasons?

To attend events with his wife, who belonged to the Order of the Eastern Star. He says the group never suited him and he stopped going once their divorce was filed, though he paid for a lifetime membership.

Before Apple went public, what did Wozniak do for early employees?

Offered them his shares. He put up about $10 million of his own stock in 1980, later calling it the right thing to do, while Jobs refused to follow suit.