THE 100 MOST INFLUENTIAL INVENTORS OF ALL TIME

7 The 100 Most Influential Inventors of All Time 7

Colorado at Boulder for one year (1968– 69) before drop-
ping out. Following his return to California, he attended
a local community college and then the University of
California, Berkeley. In 1971 Wozniak designed the “Blue
Box,” a device for phreaking (hacking into the telephone
network without paying for long-distance calls) that he
and Jobs, a student at his old high school whom he met
about this time, began selling to other students. Also
during the early 1970s Wozniak worked at several small
electronics firms in the San Francisco Bay area before
obtaining a position with the Hewlett-Packard Company
in 1975, by which time he had formally dropped out of
Berkeley.
Wozniak also became involved with the Homebrew
Computer Club, a San Francisco Bay area group centred
around the Altair 8800 microcomputer do-it-yourself
kit, which was based on one of the world’s first micro-
processors, the Intel Corporation 8080, released in 1975.
While working as an engineering intern at Hewlett-
Packard, Wozniak designed his own microcomputer in
1976 using the new microprocessor, but the company
was not interested in developing his design. Jobs, who was
also a Homebrew member, showed so much enthusiasm
for Wozniak’s design that they decided to work together,
forming their own company, Apple Computer. Their ini-
tial capital came from selling Jobs’s automobile and
Wozniak’s programmable calculator, and they set up pro-
duction in the Jobs family garage to build microcomputer
circuit boards. Sales of the kit were promising, so they
decided to produce a finished product, the Apple II;
completed in 1977, it included a built-in keyboard and
support for a colour monitor. The Apple II, which com-
bined Wozniak’s brilliant engineering with Jobs’s aesthetic
sense, was the first personal computer to appeal beyond
hobbyist circles. When the company went public in 1980,