Steve Wozniak's fake computer brochure fooled even his friend Steve Jobs
At a West Coast computer show, Steve Wozniak and two friends handed out glossy brochures for the Zaltair, a miracle machine running a language called BAZIC. The product did not exist. Steve Jobs fell for it, even boasting that the Apple II compared well, and only learned the truth years later.
The joke was carefully engineered. The Zaltair parodied the popular Altair 8800, and its Z name mocked companies branding themselves after Zilog's Z-80 chip. Wozniak added fake trademarks and a shipping label from MITS, the Altair's maker, having checked that nobody from MITS would attend; one did, and scooped up piles of brochures. A fake quote from the MITS president secretly spelled out a rival firm's name in its first letters. In 1985 Wozniak gave Jobs a framed copy for his birthday.
Pranks were only part of the story. Born in San Jose on 11 August 1950, the son of a Lockheed engineer, he was expelled from the University of Colorado in his first year for hacking its computers. In 1971 he and his friend Bill Fernandez built a machine nicknamed Cream Soda from 20 donated chips, which died when a reporter stepped on its power cable. That same year Fernandez introduced him to Jobs, and the pair sold about two hundred illegal blue boxes for free long-distance calls at $150 each.
Wozniak alone designed the hardware, circuit boards and operating system of the Apple I, completing it by 1 March 1976, mainly to impress the Homebrew Computer Club. His employer, Hewlett-Packard, turned the design down five times. Apple was founded on 1 April 1976, a shop in Mountain View ordered 50 boards, and the first ones were assembled in the Jobs family home. The Apple I cost $666.66 because Wozniak liked repeating digits.
He was the main designer of the Apple II, launched in 1977 and one of the first hugely successful mass-produced microcomputers. After leaving Apple in 1985 he created the first programmable universal remote, and he entered the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2000.
Source: Steve Wozniak
