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Steve Wozniak co-founded Apple with Steve Jobs in 1976.
Here are 15 facts about him:
1: Wozniak was introduced to Steve Jobs by their mutual friend Bill Fernanndez. He founded Apple Inc. in 1976 with Steve Jobs and Ronald Wayne.
2: Woziak had a ham radio license even when he was in the 6th grade.
3: Woziak and Jobs built a first digital `blue box’ which allowed toll-free calls. Woz played a prank on the Vatican by calling them and telling them that he was Henry Kissinger.
4: When he was a student, Wozniak built a pocket device that emitted TV signals. With the intention of playing pranks with this new device, he would go to people watching TV and secretly press the button on the device in his pocket to disrupt TV transmission. Nobody would have any clues as someone would shake the antenna and someone else hit the TV set. Amid this commotion, Woz would quietly press the button on the device in his pocket and TV pictures would become clear again.
5: As Walter Isaacson says in his biography of Steve Jobs,“In twelfth grade, he built an electronic metronome – one of those tick-tick-tick devices that keep time in music class – and realized it sounded like a bomb. So he took the labels off some big batteries, taped them together, and put it in a school locker; he rigged it to start ticking faster when the locker opened. Later that day he got called to the principal’s office. He thought it was because he had won, yet again, the school’s top math prize. Instead he was confronted by the police. The principal had been summoned when the device was found, [and he] bravely ran onto the football field clutching it to his chest, and pulled the wires off.”
6: Once Woz and Jobs persuaded some kids to give them the combination numbers of their bike locks. The two Steves went out and switched all the locks. When the kids came out, nobody could get their bikes. “It took them until late that night to straighten things out,’’ says Walter Isaacson in his book on Steve Jobs.
7: Once the two Steves “set off an explosive under the chair of our teacher, Mrs. Thurman. We gave her a nervous twitch,’’ says Walter Isaacson in his book.
8: Woz is married four times and is a sworn member of the Freemasons.
9: Woz once dated comedian Kathy Griffin who went on to describe their relationship on her reality TV show, My Life on the D-List.
10: There is a street in San Jose, California, named Woz Way because of Woz’s work for the local Children’s Discovery Museum.
11: Woz has 11 honorary doctor of engineering degrees.
12: Woz once lost his memory in a plane crash in 1981.
13: Woz’s first start-up was called CL 9. In 1987, the company developed the first universal remote control called the CORE.
14: Woz dropped out of UC Berkeley but went back there under the name of the assumed name Rocky Clark in the 1980s.
15: Woz’s best tribute to Jobs was, “He will be a historic figure forever and that will inspire other young people to become great thinkers and leaders and to turn out like Steve. I truly believe that his inspiration is the road to a great future.”
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