Steve Wozniak, Los Gatos inventor and Apple co-founder, still lives by his happiness formula:  smiles minus frowns

Steve Wozniak designed the Apple I and the Apple II by himself, the machines that helped bring the personal computer into ordinary homes and gave birth to Apple, which turned 50 on April 1. The Apple II was the first personal computer to catch on far beyond hobbyists, and he is the sole inventor on four Apple patents.

Ask the Los Gatos engineer what he wants to remember at the end of his life, though, and he will not talk about computers. He will talk about jokes. Years ago, he read about a media mogul jetting from city to city to sell billion-dollar companies and asked himself whether he would want that kind of wealth and power when he died. “No,” he told University of Colorado Boulder graduates in May 2024. “I want to die remembering my pranks and the fun I had and funny jokes.”

He even has a formula for it. “H equals S minus F,” he explained. “Happiness equals smiles—comedy, music, whatever—minus frowns.”

Two vows in sixth grade

Wozniak was born in San Jose on Aug. 11, 1950, the son of an electrical engineer at Lockheed Missiles and Space Company in Sunnyvale. He earned his ham radio license at 11. When young Steve asked how a transistor worked, his father would pull out a blackboard and show how electrons moved through crystals.

“So I really respected him,” Wozniak said in an oral history for The Henry Ford museum. In sixth grade, he made two promises. “I told him, ‘I’m gonna be an engineer like you. And second, I’m gonna be a fifth grade teacher.’” He kept both.

After Homestead High School in Cupertino, he took his first trip out of California, flying from San Jose, “when the airport had two gates,” to visit the Boulder campus with two high school friends. It snowed that night. He had never seen snow. “Out there in our underwear, throwing snowballs and making snowmen,” he recalled. He applied to no other college. He still loves the cold and heads outside in shorts and short sleeves when it is freezing.

In Boulder, the freshman aced a graduate-level computer course and wrote so many programs that he ran his class five times over its computer budget. He told his father he would own a computer someday. His father said a computer cost as much as a house. “I paused, and I said, ‘I’ll live in an apartment.’”

He also loved typing. He typed strangers’ term papers from midnight to 6 in the morning and charged 5 cents. Later he designed electronics for clients around California and tutored statistics students. His price never changed:  5 cents.

Dial-A-Joke and a lifetime of pranks

While designing calculators at Hewlett-Packard, Wozniak started the Bay Area’s first Dial-A-Joke line. Back then, people could not legally buy their own answering machine, so he leased one. “The one I had to lease cost as much as my apartment rental,” he said. “Can you imagine a young engineer pay an apartment rental twice just to run Dial-A-Joke?” He kept it going for a couple of years, and he even met his fiancée at the time through it.

Pranks have been part of his life since middle school, and by high school he had learned the most important rule:  don’t tell anybody what you did. “I do pranks every day, every day, to this day,” he said. One morning he tucked an empty plastic water bottle under his arm, climbed back into bed and told his wife, “Oh, my neck hurts.” Then he squeezed the bottle. “Big crack. And she jumped. And I laughed. And we both laugh,” he said. “You gotta be with somebody that enjoys your humor.”

His favorite pranks are two that never worked. Before Apple, he and a younger friend tried to rig the sprinklers at their old high school to soak the parents’ seats at graduation. Wozniak climbed onto the roof and got inside, but into the wrong part of the building. The friend was Steve Jobs. They had been introduced by a buddy who said Jobs “knows digital electronics like you do and he plays pranks like you do.”

A Superman machine

Wozniak saw a Pong game at a bowling alley and built his own. When a friend showed him a terminal linked to college computers across the country, he built that too, using his home TV as a screen. “I love it when electronics makes you a Superman,” he said.

Then came the Apple I. He and Jobs raised their first money by selling Jobs’ car and Wozniak’s programmable calculator, and they started building circuit boards in the Jobs family garage. Their first big order, worth $50,000, terrified him. “My salary was only $24,000,” he said. “I was just gonna be an engineer, my whole life.” With no bank accounts and no cars, the pair bought chips on 30 days’ credit, built the computers in about 10 days and drove them to the store for cash. The Apple II followed in 1977 with a keyboard, color graphics and a floppy disk drive.

Wozniak never cared much about the money. When Apple went public in 1980, he offered $10 million of his own stock to early Apple employees. After a 1981 plane crash left him with temporary amnesia, he went back to the University of California, Berkeley, to finish his degree, enrolling under a fake name, Rocky Clark, because he was already famous. He took psychology classes to move closer to teaching and earned his bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering and computer science in 1987.

He also stayed on Apple’s payroll at a small salary, for a sweet reason. “I always wanted to be on Apple’s computer forever that keeps track of how long you’ve worked for the company,” he said. “And I am to this day.”

Mr. Wozniak’s class

In 1985, he and Jobs received the National Medal of Technology from President Ronald Reagan. Then Wozniak turned to his second sixth-grade vow. He taught computer classes to students in fifth through eighth grades for eight years. “No press allowed. I wouldn’t allow press near students,” he said. “Boy, did I teach them well. And part of that was making sure it was fun.”

He adopted the Los Gatos school district, providing 11 modern computer labs, wiring school networks, training teachers and teaching fifth graders about 200 hours a year. The Heinz Awards honored him for “lighting the fires of excitement for education in grade school students and their teachers.”

San Jose owes him plenty, too. He was a founding sponsor of The Tech Museum, now The Tech Interactive, the Children’s Discovery Museum of San Jose and Silicon Valley Ballet, and he helped found the Electronic Frontier Foundation in 1990. The city named Woz Way, home of the Children’s Discovery Museum, for him in 1999. The museum gave him its Legacy for Children Award in 2015.

On Jan. 16, The Tech Interactive gave him its 2025 James C. Morgan Global Humanitarian Award, joining past honorees Bill Gates, Al Gore and Fei-Fei Li, at a downtown San Jose celebration that featured a fireside chat with comedian Drew Carey. “I’ve always believed technology should help people live better, more creative lives,” Wozniak said.

Segway polo, Tetris and four Bichons

Wozniak plays Segway polo, which he and his friends worked out for themselves once they all had Segways. “We just went on and said, ‘Well, what could we try doin’ with paddles and goals?’” he said. “And balls.” He also plays Tetris on a Game Boy, even at rock shows. “Every concert, I play all concert long,” he told The Henry Ford’s interviewer.

He danced with Karina Smirnoff on Season 8 of Dancing with the Stars in 2009. He and his wife, Janet, played themselves on The Big Bang Theory in 2010. Joey Slotnick, Josh Gad and Seth Rogen have all played him in movies.

He and Janet live in Los Gatos with four Bichon Frise dogs named Ziggy, Zelda, Jewel and Wozzie. He has three grown children and at least five grandchildren. He and Janet love each other so much, he says, that they celebrate an anniversary every single day. At the Boulder graduation, he announced it was day 5,753. He had been asked to be brief and entertaining, he told the crowd, “so I put this robe over my briefs.”

He is proud of his town, too:  “Los Gatos, home of the pet rock. Los Gatos, where Netflix is. Los Gatos, where Atari founded the arcade industry.” When he set up an internet server in his Los Gatos office in the early days of the web, he grabbed Woz.com, then chose to use Woz.org instead. “I saw myself as a nonprofit person, not after money,” he said.

Still curious at 76

At 76, Wozniak still travels the world to speak, and he still pokes holes in hype. On artificial intelligence, he told an interviewer for Pictet Asset Services this year, “I believe the A part is correct, but it isn’t intelligent.” His advice for using it:  “AI is a good reporter, but you should be the editor.” Your own thinking, he said, “is Actual Intelligence.”

The same interviewer asked for a publicity photo. It was the one question that stumped him. “I’ll have to ask my wife,” he said. “She’ll know.”

On Nov. 10, the Fiber Broadband Association announced he will lead a fireside chat on entrepreneurship and creativity at its Fiber Connect 2027 conference next June. He believes entrepreneurship is “the most important thing in the world.”

His advice to the Boulder graduates fits the way he has lived:  “Stay honest, keep smiling, and pay your own successes forward by helping others, mentoring and teaching.”

Source:  Woz.org about page and Pictet Asset Services interview, 2026; University of Colorado Boulder, 2024 commencement remarks; The Henry Ford, oral history with Steve Wozniak (2009; full transcript on a mirror); The Tech Interactive, Jan. 7, 2026; Fiber Broadband Association release, Nov. 10, 2026; Britannica; Wikipedia.