Atari was the creator of Pong, an early two-player video game
based on ping pong. The company wanted to develop a similar
one-player game. Jobs volunteered to do so for a few thousand
dollars.
In reality, he did not have the technical skill to create such a
game from scratch, but Woz did. Jobs promised to pay his friend
half if he would design the game. Working as a team, the two
produced Breakout in only four nights. The game was exactly
what Atari wanted. Wozniak designed it, while Jobs put all the
wires and components of the game together. The two young men
worked so feverishly that they both came down with mononu-
cleosis shortly thereafter.
Steve Wozniak
E
ven as a child, Steve Wozniak was an electronic genius.
After high school he attended the University of California
at Berkeley where he majored in engineering. But he pre-
ferred actually doing engineering projects to studying about
them, so he dropped out in the mid 1970s to work for Hewlett
Packard. He stayed at Hewlett Packard until he cofounded
Apple Computers with Steve Jobs.
In 1981, Wozniak was piloting a small airplane, which
crashed. He sustained serious injuries. When he recovered,
he decided to leave Apple and go back to Berkeley to get his
degree. He used the name Rocky Clark so no one would rec-
ognize him. At this time, he also formed a corporation called
Unite Us in Song (UNUSON) dedicated to getting computers
into the hands of children, and he sponsored two huge rock
concerts, which were nonprofit musical and technological
extravaganzas.
Wozniak went back to Apple in 1982. In 1985, he and Jobs
won the National Technology Medal. He then left Apple for
the final time. Since then he has funded many charitable proj-
ects, including personally teaching computer skills to school
children.
34 Steve Jobs