On April 1st I already wrote about Apple’s 30th birthday. Most of that article was about Steve Jobs. But another important person who we should not overlook, is Steve Wozniak or – as his friends call him: ‘The Woz’ aka ‘The Wizard of Woz’. Unlike the other Steve (Jobs) the Woz does not like to go public that much. In fact he usually declines to give interviews. However, pending the publication of his biography this fall, called ‘I Woz’, he did grant The Seattle Times an interview. What I found interesting is the fact that Wozniak never anticipated how much impact the PC (Mac) would have on the world as we know it. In fact he thought they would just be used as a glorified calculator and for storing recipes. Boy, did he underestimate that! Although Wozniak’s employment with Apple ended in 1985, nine years after setting up the company, he has remained a major stockholder as well as a friend to Steve Jobs.
In the Seattle Times he says about his relationship with Jobs:
We are friends and polite and talk to each other once in a while. … We’ve never had an argument. There have been a couple of artificial ones over misinterpretations of things in the press. I’m an analytical person. When I talk with reporters, I will talk about the pluses and minuses of an issue and, boy, sometimes they like to grab a little minus, twist the words a little, exaggerate it and make a headline.
One of the more interesting sides of Wozniak is, that he loves to pull pranks on people. Apparantly he likes to use $2 notes from a “pad” of money. You (apparantly) can buy uncut sheets of bills from the US Treasury and Wozniak has them bound into booklets. They are fully legal tender despite their perforated edges (I am sure this would not work in Europe though). On his own website he tells a hilarious story about how using this money got him in trouble once. I highly recommend reading it: it really shows that Wozniak is at least as interesting as ‘the other Steve’.