There’s only one Woz, but we can all learn from him

Hello again, and welcome back to Fast Company’s Plugged In.

On January 16, Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak—known to all as Woz—received the James C. Morgan Global Humanitarian Award, an honor bestowed each year by the Tech Interactive, a science museum in San Jose, California. The ceremony and a conversation between Wozniak and comedian Drew Carey capped a gala event in which several organizations were named laureates for using technology to improve the world.

Their creations include a brain-computer interface (BCI) that helps people with disabilities communicate, a forum that lets patients who have received BCI implants shape the technology’s best practices and ethics, a headset that uses ultrasound therapy to treat mental conditions, and a device that provides people with Parkinson’s disease the ability to walk more confidently. Until he took the stage himself, Wozniak sat in the audience with his wife, Janet, watching presentations about each honoree with rapt attention.

In a conversation after the event, Wozniak marveled at what he’d seen. “They were creating something to solve a problem they had with the world, and that’s where you get the best products,” he said. He likened the honorees’ ingenuity to his own implementation of color graphics on 1977’s Apple II, a killer feature at a time when other microcomputers could barely draw pictures in black and white. Rather than adding to the machine’s cost and complexity, he explained, his approach “took no chips at all. I mean, it was just so far out of the box. It violated all the rules of mathematics on color TV.”

Wozniak has spent close to half a century being celebrated for his technical brilliance and irreplaceable role in bringing computing to the masses. Just three years after starting Apple with Steve Jobs (and, briefly, Ron Wayne), he received the Association for Computing Machinery’s Grace Murray Hopper Award. Six years after that, he and Jobs won the National Medal of Technology, resulting in a memorable photo opp with President Ronald Reagan. He said last week’s award was particularly meaningful to him because it reflected his efforts as a humanitarian rather than solely as a technologist.

Those efforts have often focused on culture and education in Silicon Valley. A native of San Jose, Wozniak provided funding that was instrumental to bootstrapping the 27-year-old Tech Interactive as well as the city’s Children’s Discovery Museum. (The latter is located on a street named Woz Way—yet another of Wozniak’s many tributes.) In his memoir, iWoz, he writes about paying for computer labs in local schools and fulfilling a cherished dream by teaching computing skills to fifth graders. Even earlier, he donated the very first Apple computer to a teacher named Liza Loop.

After Apple employees dating to its days as a garage startup weren’t cut in on its 1980 initial public offering, Wozniak gave them a meaningful percentage of his personal stock, purely because it felt like the right thing to do. He was also a principal founding donor to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an essential advocate for civil rights in the digital age. The list of his good deeds goes on, and is not thoroughly documented: In conversations with people who have known him for decades, I’ve heard multiple stories about his unpublicized support for other worthy causes.

All along, Wozniak has remained on Apple’s payroll. (One of the best things about attending product launches at Apple Park is observing him mingling with the preshow crowd, otherwise made up of journalists, creators, influencers, and Apple PR people.) But it’s been more than 40 years since he wound down active work at the company. Though he’s since been involved in several startups—in areas ranging from remote controls to space junk—his post-Apple life has mattered in ways that have nothing to do with money or power. His desire to leave society better than he found it is one big reason why.

It’s not tough to connect the dots between the Woz who engineered the Apple-1 and Apple II when he was in his mid-twenties and Woz the 75-year-old humanitarian. He does so himself, arguing “your personality settles down between 18 and 23 years old. From then on, you’re the same person.” (Having reassessed his priorities after surviving a small plane crash in 1981, he does allow that something like “a horrible shock or near-death [experience]” might have an impact.) His interest in inventing stuff, he told me, began as a form of self-expression that helped him overcome being painfully shy: “The only way I could do anything to communicate was to design something cool. And people, other geeks, would talk to me about it.”

Apple’s first machines grew out of Wozniak’s desire to own a computer himself, at a time when no computer was built or priced for consumers. That led to him wanting to help other people own them, an early sign of his fundamental generosity of spirit. At first, that meant sharing the Apple-1 schematics so that other hobbyists could assemble their own—in part because he couldn’t convince his pre-Apple employer, HP, that PCs might become a pretty decent business.

“I proposed it five times,” he remembers. “I got turned down. No computer company really felt it was going to go anywhere.”

Fortunately for Wozniak, and us, others showed more foresight. Essential support came from Paul Terrell, whose Byte Shop computer store became Apple’s first dealer, and Mike Markkula, the company’s first angel investor and, later, its CEO. “It took a couple of people like that to really give us a chance,” Wozniak says.

(What about Steve Jobs? Discussing their time together at Apple—Jobs resigned after a board fight in 1985, the same year Wozniak moved on—Wozniak calls him “a good talker, a good promoter, a good marketer of the Apple II” but also points out the failure of the company’s third and fourth computers, the Apple III and Lisa. As Jobs’s Mac got off to a sluggish start, he notes, the Apple II’s continuing popularity provided the company with a lifeline. Wozniak waxes more enthusiastic about the iPod, a crucial element of Apple’s comeback after Jobs returned: “It wasn’t a computer, but he knew what people wanted—he knew people.”)

In this century, the Apple II has remained admired and loved in equal measure—when I helped assemble a list of the greatest PCs of all time, we ranked it No. 1. Even so, the world may underappreciate the degree to which it reflected Wozniak’s outlook on life. It certainly delivered on his life philosophy, which he calls the secret of being a good person: “Happiness equals smiles minus frowns.” I’m not sure if a single offering from today’s Silicon Valley outperforms the 49-year-old Apple II on that score, and AI is only making matters more fraught. Maybe that’s a lesson for today’s product designers: Be more like Woz.

One other trait sets Wozniak apart. In an industry brimming with self-serious workaholics, he is a lifelong prankster, a pastime he discussed onstage with Carey last week. (My takeaway: Never, ever let Woz talk to Siri on your iPhone.) I asked him if there’s a link between his mischievous streak and his philanthropic one. He wasn’t sure. But he stressed that humor and creativity are deeply intertwined.

“If you can make jokes, you can look at the world in different ways,” he told me. “They just come together naturally.” His own life proves his point, and we’re all richer for it.

You’ve been reading Plugged In, Fast Company’s weekly tech newsletter from me, global technology editor Harry McCracken. If a friend or colleague forwarded this edition to you—or if you’re reading it on fastcompany.com—you can check out previous issues and sign up to get it yourself every Friday morning. I love hearing from you: Ping me at hmccracken@fastcompany.com with your feedback and ideas for future newsletters. I’m also on Bluesky, Mastodon, and Threads, and you can follow Plugged In on Flipboard.

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