Steve Wozniak
Walter Day Lifetime Achievement Award
Class of 2016 Inductee
Wozniak is an American technology entrepreneur, electrical engineer, computer programmer, philanthropist, and inventor.
In 1976, he co-founded Apple Computer with his early business partner Steve Jobs.
Through his work at Apple in the 1970s and 1980s, he is widely recognized as one of the most prominent pioneers of the personal computer revolution.
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 $708 in 2024) 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.
Aside from his tech eminence having helped found Apple, Steve Wozniak is apparently also a pretty sick Tetris player. He only plays the original Game Boy port, and admits he submitted his scores to Nintendo Power back in the day.
“I was always #1 in the Nintendo Power listings in 1988, and after they said my name had been in there too many times and wouldn’t print it again, I spelled my name backwards (Evets Kainzow) and sent in a photo of my score,” Wozniak said in a comment on a Gizmodo piece about him. “When I got the magazine, I’d forgotten doing this and was worried that a foreigner from the next city over (I used Saratoga instead of Los Gatos so they wouldn’t catch on) had a score up in my range. I got worried but then remembered my joke. Whew! It’s in some old issue of Nintendo Power magazine.”
Walter Day Trading Card:
https://thewalterdaycollection.com/collection/gallery/item/2800-steve-wozniak
A select few of his awards and achievements:
In 1979, Wozniak was awarded the ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award.
In 1985, both he and Steve Jobs received the National Medal of Technology from US President Ronald Reagan, the country’s highest honor for achievements related to technological progress.
In 1998, he was named a Fellow of the Computer History Museum “for co-founding Apple Computer and inventing the Apple I personal computer”.
In September 2000, Wozniak was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.
The American Humanist Association awarded him the Isaac Asimov Science Award in 2011.
In November 2014, Industry Week added Wozniak to the Manufacturing Hall of Fame.
Wozniak is listed as the sole inventor on the following Apple patents:
US Patent No. 4,136,359: “Microcomputer for use with video display” —for which he was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.
US Patent No. 4,210,959: “Controller for magnetic disc, recorder, or the like.
US Patent No. 4,217,604: “Apparatus for digitally controlling PAL color display”.
US Patent No. 4,278,972: “Digitally-controlled color signal generation means for use with display”.
For his contributions to technology, Wozniak has been awarded a number of Honorary Doctoral degrees, which include the following:
University of Colorado Boulder: 1989
North Carolina State University: 2004
Kettering University: 2005
Nova Southeastern University, Fort Lauderdale: 2005
ESPOL University in Ecuador: 2008
Michigan State University, in East Lansing 2011
Concordia University in Montreal, Canada: June 22, 2011
State Engineering University of Armenia: November 11, 2011
Santa Clara University: June 16, 2012
University Camilo José Cela in Madrid, Spain: November 8, 2013
Lincoln Law School in San Jose, California: May 19, 2023
2016 IVGHOF Ceremony Acceptance Speech:
Additional photos