The man who invented the home computer

Steve Wozniak, known worldwide as ‘Woz’, is a reluctant celebrity. As the man who designed and built the first Apple computer, and who co-founded the Apple brand, he has become a public figure.

The central figures are Woz, the simple, hard-working engineer, and the slightly Machiavellian figure of Steve Jobs, marketing man extraordinaire. And as Woz puts it, the plot is this: "How did two young kids, early 20s, with absolutely no money, somehow piece together and build up the structure that was gonna define where the world went?"

There's no question that this is what they did. In 1975, when Woz built the Apple I, home computers were messes of chips and wire put together from kits by geeky enthusiasts. Data was usually entered from a paper tape, and the results of whatever program was run would be shown as flashing lights on the front panel.

"It was like an airplane cockpit," recalls Woz. Instead, he designed a computer that could take input from a keyboard and display data on a TV screen, and that was cheap enough to be affordable and powerful enough to run games and small-business software. "I wanted to get rid of the geeky part of computers," he insists.