Steve Wozniak
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50 free Steve Wozniak trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Steve Wozniak is the engineer half of Apple's founding story: the HP calculator designer who built the Apple I alone to impress the Homebrew Computer Club, designed the Apple II with its colour graphics and eight expansion slots, and then spent the rest of his life doing whatever seemed fun, from rock festivals and teaching fifth-graders to Segway polo and Dancing with the Stars. These 50 questions cover the Cream Soda computer and the University of Colorado expulsion, Berkeley Blue and the blue boxes sold for $150 each, the Breakout bonus Jobs kept quiet about, the Zaltair hoax, the five times HP turned down the Apple I, the calculator and the Volkswagen van, Paul Terrell's order of 50 machines, the $666.66 price, the argument over expansion slots, the Disk II, the 1981 Beechcraft crash and the amnesia that Apple II games cured, the diploma issued to Rocky Raccoon Clark, Unuson and the US Festivals, the CORE universal remote, Wheels of Zeus, Fusion-io, Woz U, Privateer Space, the Hoover Medal, Woz Way, and his portrayals by Joey Slotnick, Josh Gad and Seth Rogen. The easy tier asks which company he co-founded; the expert tier wants his Masonic lodge and the name of the fictional BASIC in the Zaltair brochure. Every answer is cited to a page we checked and comes with a short explanation. Play it solo or print it for a tech-history quiz night.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which TV series did Wozniak credit with inspiring him to found Apple?
Star Trek
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.
Q 02In which California city was Wozniak born in 1950?
San Jose
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.
Q 03Wozniak once prank-called the Vatican pretending to be which American statesman?
Henry Kissinger
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.
Q 04What nickname did Wozniak earn in the phone-phreaking community?
Berkeley Blue
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.
Q 05What got Wozniak into trouble as a freshman at the University of Colorado Boulder?
Hacking its computer system
Hacking its computer system with prank messages got him disciplined in 1969, yet the same university awarded him an honorary doctorate twenty years later.
Q 06What did Wozniak and a friend name the computer they built in 1971?
Cream Soda
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.
Q 07Which company employed Wozniak as an engineer when he built the Apple I?
Hewlett-Packard
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.
Q 08Who introduced Wozniak to Steve Jobs?
Bill Fernandez
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.
Q 09Which magazine's 1971 article 'Secrets of the Little Blue Box' set Wozniak building phone-phreaking devices?
Esquire
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.
Q 10Wozniak's blue boxes let users do what?
Call for free
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.
Q 11Which Atari arcade game's circuit board did Wozniak help Jobs slim down?
Breakout
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.
Q 12Which digital-rights group did Wozniak help launch with early funding?
Electronic Frontier Foundation
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.
Q 13Which hobbyist group did Wozniak design the Apple I to impress?
Homebrew Computer Club
Q 21Why did Wozniak price the Apple I at $666.66?
Repeating digits
Repeating digits. Wozniak says he liked them and had no thought of the devil's number when he set the price.
Q 22Which bargain-priced CPU did Wozniak build the Apple I around?
MOS 6502
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.
Q 23As a sixth-grader, Wozniak earned a licence for which hobby?
Ham radio
Ham radio. He built his own transmitter and receiver, yet said he had nobody at school to share the hobby with.
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.
Q 14What was the Zaltair, which Wozniak advertised in thousands of brochures at a 1977 trade show?
A hoax computer
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.
Q 15Which phone service, the Bay Area's first of its kind, did Wozniak run in the early 1970s?
Dial-a-Joke
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.
Q 16Which job did Wozniak take up after Apple, working for years with no salary?
Schoolteacher
Schoolteacher. He taught computer classes to fifth-graders and their teachers in Los Gatos, and paid for much of the district's equipment himself.
Q 17Jobs sold his Volkswagen van to fund the first Apple I boards, while Wozniak sold what?
His programmable calculator
His programmable calculator. The money paid for the first circuit boards, which the two friends then put together at the Jobs family home.
Q 18Who was the short-lived third co-founder of Apple Computer in April 1976?
Ronald Wayne
Ronald Wayne drew up the partnership agreement, then withdrew within two weeks and gave up his 10% stake for $800.
Q 19When Jobs proposed the name Apple, Wozniak's first worry was a clash with which band's record label?
The Beatles
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.
Q 20Who ordered 50 Apple I computers for his Byte Shop?
Paul Terrell
Paul Terrell. He would pay $500 apiece only for fully assembled machines, which pushed Jobs and Wozniak from selling bare boards into building computers.
Q 24The Apple II stood out among 1977's personal computers for being able to display what?
Colour graphics
Colour graphics. Apple dropped its old Isaac Newton logo for a six-colour striped apple as the machine went on show.
Q 25Jobs wanted two and Wozniak eight of which Apple II feature?
Expansion slots
Expansion slots. After a heated argument in which Wozniak told Jobs to go get himself another computer, the machine shipped with eight.
Q 26At which event was the Apple II introduced in April 1977?
West Coast Computer Faire
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.
Q 27What did Wozniak's 1978 Disk II replace as Apple II storage?
Cassette tape
Cassette tape. Wozniak and a young colleague worked through their Christmas holiday to get the far faster floppy drive ready for a trade show.
Q 28Which 1980 machine did Wozniak say had 100 percent hardware failures?
Apple III
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.
Q 29In 2023 Wozniak joined Elon Musk in signing an open letter urging a six-month pause on what?
Training more powerful AI
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.
Q 30What accident in February 1981 led Wozniak to step away from Apple?
A plane crash
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.