He spoke as part of Augsburg College's Scholarship Weekend. By Liz Sawyer. Steve Jobs may have been the face of Apple Inc. Wozniak, then a young Silicon Valley engineer, had spent years tinkering with electronics β building his own circuit boards as a child β before hooking up with Jobs.
It was Wozniak's personal interest in the way machines worked, rather than academia, that would launch his early innovations β and later, Apple as we know it. Wozniak, wearing a black suit paired with bright blue and green Nike sneakers, encouraged students to go beyond the classroom and launch their own passion projects. His presentation, entitled "Learn Different," anchored a public discussion about innovation, creativity and education in an increasingly connected world.
While studying at the University of California at Berkeley, Wozniak designed a video arcade game and collaborated with his younger pal Jobs to market it. Jobs, ever the salesman, brought it to Atari, which then offered him a job.
Using a family garage as their workshop, the duo spent their days producing a user-friendly alternative to the clunky IBMs. Wozniak designed the operating system for Apple I, originally offering the project to his employers at Hewlett-Packard, who turned him down.
The rejection would seal his business relationship with Jobs in , when they unveiled the Apple enterprise. He also personally developed Apple II, which transformed the personal computing industry and established Apple as a technology powerhouse. Looking back, Wozniak said part of his success came from simply forcing himself to put pencil to paper, over and over again.
