Apple I and Apple II computers, along with two other Apple products<\/a>.<\/p>\nGrowing up in San Jose, Calif., in the 1950s and \u201860s, Wozniak said Silicon Valley looked completely different from how it does today.<\/p>\n
Wozniak said he recalls riding his bike through apricot, cherry and plum fields that stretched as far as the eye could see.<\/p>\n
Despite the rural landscape, he said a love for electronics was common among children in his neighborhood.\u00a0<\/p>\n
His father, an electrical engineer, served as an early inspiration. Watching him work through\u00a0 formulas on paper and learning about electron movement, orbitals and resistance, Wozniak said he decided early on he wanted to follow the same career path.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Wozniak said he once told his father he planned to own a 4K Data General computer because that amount of memory was the minimum needed to solve programming problems.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cMy dad said it cost as much as a house,\u201d he said. \u201c(I told him) I\u2019ll live in an apartment.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Wozniak said he spent much of his free time studying manuals and computer parts, designing chips for every computer model he could imagine.<\/p>\n
He taught himself as his knowledge surpassed his father\u2019s and experimented with whatever inexpensive parts he could find.<\/p>\n
\u201cI would talk about electronics with half the kids in the small, two-block area development with electronic parents, who had mayonnaise jars full of little parts,\u201d Wozniak said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Using one of the switches, Wozniak said he once set up a prank on an unsuspecting high school student.<\/p>\n
He placed a running metronome in his locker and connected a switch to the lock so that when the locker opened, the metronome sped up. Wozniak said he had to hide his laughter when he was ultimately called into the principal\u2019s office for the joke.<\/p>\n
He said he played pranks throughout middle and high school, often aiming to pull \u201csmart pranks.\u201d<\/p>\n
Wozniak attended a community college in Colorado because his parents could only afford one year of out-of-state tuition. After his sophomore year, he took one year off to work. During that time, he designed and built his first computer.<\/p>\n
Wozniak said he took a year off from school to work, and during that time, executives he worked with learned that he designed computers. Because he couldn\u2019t afford the expensive chips himself, one executive used industry connections to secure the parts, allowing him to design a new computer from scratch.\u00a0<\/p>\n
He built the computer with help from his friend Bill Fernandez and was later introduced to Steve Jobs in Fernandez\u2019s garage.<\/p>\n
Wozniak said Jobs was younger and a \u201chippie,\u201d but the two quickly admired each other.<\/p>\n
\u201c(Jobs) knew I could design computers, and he knew that was valuable expertise and appreciated me, and that made him my best friend,\u201d Wozniak said. \u201cI was so shy, I didn\u2019t have any friends so anyone who understood me was a good friend.\u201d<\/p>\n
Wozniak said the two drove to concerts together and bonded over their shared love of Bob Dylan.<\/p>\n
In 1975, Wozniak worked on the design that would become the Macintosh, the first color personal computer.<\/p>\n
At the time, California\u2019s arcade game industry was booming, but games were black and white. Wozniak said he began wondering what it would take for arcade games to be displayed in color.<\/p>\n
That question led him to explore how computer numbers could be used to code color on a TV screen.<\/p>\n
He said by sending computer data made up of ones and zeroes through wires in four-bit groups, each combination could be translated into a different color on a TV screen.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Wozniak said that idea inspired Apple\u2019s original six-color logo.<\/p>\n
When Apple was founded, Wozniak said he never imagined the company would grow to its current scale. The goal, he said, was to build better products that improved human life.<\/p>\n
Wozniak said while early computing allowed people to fully own and run their systems, the rise of the internet and cloud-based technology has reduced those benefits.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cThen came the internet, and it turned out so beautiful at first, but such a problem later,\u201d Wozniak said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
He said the ability to choose what to post on social media and which apps to download reflects individual autonomy and creativity.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Wozniak said AI pulls information from existing sources without crediting the original creators and reproduces it without the intuition or understanding of humans.<\/p>\n
Wozniak said he\u2019s glad Apple has been slower to adopt artificial intelligence.<\/p>\n
AI doesn\u2019t have the capacity to understand and analyze information the way humans do, he said, adding that users should question every AI-generated output.<\/p>\n
An attendee asked Wozniak about the role of world leaders in regulating AI.<\/p>\n
\u201cHow important do you think it is to have the right leaders as more capable AI systems emerge, and what does that leadership look like on the national level as it relates to AI?\u201d she asked.<\/p>\n
While technology isn\u2019t necessarily \u201ccontrollable\u201d right now, Wozniak said there should be clear sourcing behind AI inputs and outputs. He said AI systems should allow users to trace information back to its original sources, with built-in tracking to reduce the risk of misuse or illegal activity.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Throughout the discussion, Wozniak emphasized the importance of humanizing technology and prioritizing innovation.<\/p>\n
When reflecting on Wozniak\u2019s life work, President Joseph Helble asked what he was most proud of.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cI did not want to get rich,\u201d Wozniak said. \u201cI did not want to start a company. I wanted other engineers to look at my designs and see that I was a different engineer. I taught myself things differently than in the books.\u201d<\/p>\n
Ed Mullen, a computer engineer at Intel, asked Wozniak for advice on turning vision into reality.<\/p>\n
Wozniak said there\u2019s no formula for success.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere are engineers that know things and can do things very well, but there are also inventors,\u201d Wozniak said. \u201cInventors just have a different kind of spirit. When an idea comes in their head they want to run in a laboratory and try to hook it up and make something out of it.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"On Thursday, Steve Wozniak, an entrepreneur, author and co-founder of Apple, spoke at Lehigh University\u2019s Compelling Perspective Series…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":100791,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[8918,119,121,120,5609,139,503,295],"class_list":["post-100790","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-allentown","tag-7-minute-read","tag-allentown","tag-allentown-headlines","tag-allentown-news","tag-event","tag-news","tag-technology","tag-top-stories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100790","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=100790"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100790\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/100791"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=100790"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=100790"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=100790"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}