In 1970, Wozniak became friends with Steve Jobs, when Jobs worked for the summer at a company where Wozniak was working on a mainframe computer.[2] According to Wozniak's autobiography,iWoz, Jobs had the idea to sell the computer as a fully assembled printed circuit board. Wozniak, at first skeptical, was later convinced by Jobs that even if they were not successful they could at least say to their grandkids they had had their own company. Together they sold some of their possessions (such as Wozniak's HP scientific calculator and Jobs's Volkswagen van), raised USD $1,300, and assembled the first prototypes in Jobs's bedroom and later (when there was no space left) in Jobs's garage. Wozniak's apartment in San Jose was filled with monitors, electronic devices, and some computer games Wozniak had developed, similar to SuperPong but with voice overs to the blips on the screen.
By 1975, Wozniak withdrew from the University of California, Berkeley and came up with the computer that eventually made him famous and some have compared to a work of art since the hardware, circuit board designs, and operating system were the work solely of Wozniak.[3] With the Apple I design, he and Jobs were largely working to impress other members of the Palo Alto-based Homebrew Computer Club, a local group of electronics hobbyists very interested in computing, one of several key centers which established the home hobbyist era, essentially creating the microcomputer industry over several years. Unlike other Home Brew competitors, the Apple had an easy-to-achieve video capability that immediately created buzz and drew a crowd when it was unveiled.[3]
On April 1, 1976, Jobs and Wozniak formed Apple Computer. Wozniak quit his job at Hewlett-Packard and became the vice president in charge of research and development at Apple. Their first product, the Apple I computer, was similar to the Altair 8800, the first commercially available microcomputer, except it had no provision for internal expansion cards. With the addition of these cards, the Altair could be attached to a computer terminal and could be programmed in BASIC. The Apple I was purely a hobbyist machine, a $25 microprocessor (MOS 6502) on a single-circuit board with 256 bytes of ROM, 4K or 8K bytes of RAM and a 40-character by 24-row display controller. It lacked a case, power supply, keyboard, or display, which had to be provided by the user. The Apple I was priced at $666.66. (Wozniak later said he had no idea about the correlation between the number and the mark of the beast, and "I came up with [it] because I like repeating digits." It was $500 plus a 1/3 markup, which is actually $666.67, rounding up to the nearest penny.) Jobs and Wozniak sold their first fifty computers to Paul Terrell, who was starting a new computer shop, called the Byte Shop, in Mountain View, California. Terrell bought just the circuit board for the Apple I; he had to supply the keyboard, monitor, transformer, and even the case in which to put the computer.[4]
Airplane crash
In February 1981, Steve was involved in a private plane accident while taking off from a Scott Valley Airport.[5] The cause of the crash was determined to be a premature liftoff. He was unable to recall any of the events of the crash and for many weeks after being released from the hospital, didn't realize he had been in a crash at all. He says he wandered around in a haze and didn't report to work, thinking every day was a weekend day. He didn't remember one day to the next and needed to be told how to get to places familiar to him. He finally began to figure out what happened, after which his memory began operating correctly again.
