Steve Wozniak
Pre-Apple

In 1969, Wozniak returned to the San Francisco Bay Area after being expelled from the University of Colorado Boulder in his first year for hacking the university's computer system. He re-enrolled at De Anza College in Cupertino before transferring to the University of California, Berkeley, in 1971. In June of that year, for a self-taught engineering project, Wozniak designed and built his first computer with his friend Bill Fernandez.

Predating useful microprocessors, screens, and keyboards, and using punch cards and only 20 TTL chips donated by an acquaintance, they named it "Cream Soda" after their favorite beverage. A newspaper reporter stepped on the power supply cable and blew up the computer, but it served Wozniak as "a good prelude to my thinking 5 years later with the Apple I and Apple II computers". Before focusing his attention on Apple, he was employed at Hewlett-Packard (HP), where he designed calculators. It was during this time that he dropped out of Berkeley and befriended Steve Jobs.

Wozniak was introduced to Jobs by Fernandez, who attended Homestead High School with Jobs in 1971. Jobs and Wozniak became friends when Jobs worked for the summer at HP, where Wozniak, too, was employed, working on a mainframe computer.

We first met in 1971 during my college years, while he was in high school. A friend said, 'you should meet Steve Jobs because he likes electronics, and he also plays pranks.' So he introduced us.

Their first business partnership began later that year when Wozniak read an article titled "Secrets of the Little Blue Box" from the October 1971 issue of Esquire, and started to build his own " blue boxes " that enabled one to make long-distance phone calls at no cost. Jobs, who handled the sales of the blue boxes, managed to sell some two hundred of them for $150 each, and split the profit with Wozniak. Jobs later told his biographer that if it had not been for Wozniak's blue boxes, "there wouldn't have been an Apple."

In 1973, Jobs was working for arcade game company Atari, Inc. in Los Gatos, California. He was assigned to create a circuit board for the arcade video game Breakout. According to Atari co-founder Nolan Bushnell, Atari offered $100 (equivalent to $686 in 2023) for each chip that was eliminated in the machine. Jobs had little knowledge of circuit board design and made a deal with Wozniak to split the fee evenly between them if Wozniak could minimize the number of chips. Wozniak reduced the number of chips by 50, by using RAM for the brick representation. The fact that this prototype had no scoring or coin mechanisms meant Woz's prototype could not be used. Jobs was paid the full bonus regardless. Jobs told Wozniak that Atari gave them only $700 and that Wozniak's share was thus $350 (equivalent to $2,400 in 2023). Wozniak did not learn about the actual $5,000 bonus (equivalent to $34,300 in 2023) until ten years later. While dismayed, he said that if Jobs had told him about it and had said he needed the money, Wozniak would have given it to him.

In 1975, Wozniak began designing and developing the computer that would eventually make him famous, the Apple I. With the Apple I, Wozniak was largely working to impress other members of the Palo Alto –based Homebrew Computer Club, a local group of electronics hobbyists interested in computing. The club was one of several key centers which established the home hobbyist era, essentially creating the microcomputer industry over the next few decades. Unlike other custom Homebrew designs, the Apple had an easy-to-achieve video capability that drew a crowd when it was unveiled.
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