PERSONAL BACKGROUND
- NAME: Stephen Gary Wozniak
- BORN: August 11,1950
- WHERE: San Jose, California
- OCCUPATION: Entrepreneur, Computer Programmer, Engineer, Inventor, Hacker
Steve Wozniak was the main designer on the Apple I and Apple II computers together with Steve Jobs (business brains) and others. The Apple II is noted as the first commercially successful line of personal computers, featuring a central processing unit, a keyboard, color graphics, and a floppy disk drive. In 1984, Steve Wozniak greatly influenced the design of the Apple Macintosh computer, the first successful home computer with a mouse-driven graphical user.
What did Woz do as a hacker?
Woz got his start in hacking making blue boxes, devices that bypass telephone-switching mechanisms to make free long-distance calls. After reading an article about phone phreaking in Esquire, Wozniak called up his buddy Jobs. The pair did research on frequencies, then built and sold blue boxes to their classmates in college. Wozniak even used a blue box to call the Pope while pretending to be Henry Kissinger.
Woz: A White Hat Hacker
Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs built blue boxes, which essentially hack the phone system so users can make free long-distance calls. Therefore, Woz is considered as a white hat hacker.
Where is Woz now?
Woz no longer works full time for Apple, focusing primarily on philanthropy instead. Most notable is his function as fairy godfather to the Los Gatos, Calif. School District. “Wozniak ‘adopted’ the Los Gatos School District, providing students and teachers with hands-on teaching and donations of state-of-the-art technology equipment.”
He is currently the Chief Scientist of Fusion-io and is a published author with the release of his New York Times Best Selling autobiography, ”iWoz: From Computer Geek to Cult Icon”.
