Stephen Wozniak - Decade Of Change, 1980-1990

DECADE OF CHANGE (1980-1990)

Apple's success made more than 40 Apple employees and investors millionaires by the start of the new decade, and Jobs, Wozniak, and Markkula became very wealthy as a result. For Wozniak, the 1980s were a time of great changes and new directions. His first marriage ended in divorce in 1980. In 1981 he was seriously injured, along with his new fiancée Candi Clark, when a small plane that he was piloting crashed on the runway. Wozniak suffered head injuries that affected his short-term memory.

As Apple grew into a big company in the 1980s, Wozniak became dissatisfied with his role there. Following the plane crash, he took a leave of absence and, from then on, did only limited engineering work for Apple. While on leave in the early 1980s, Wozniak spent his energy organizing a three-day music festival that was held on Labor Day in 1982 and again in 1983. The US Festival featured top acts such as Fleetwood Mac and the Grateful Dead and was staged by noted rock promoter Bill Graham.

For his work on designing personal computers, Wozniak was awarded the National Medal of Technology in 1985. He resigned from Apple in 1985, the same year Jobs left the company. After selling his Apple stock for an estimated $70 million, Wozniak formed a new company, CL9, to design and market a universal remote-control device that he invented known as Core. CL9 merged with another company, Tech Force, that manufactured toy robots operated by remote-control devices. After failing to turn a profit, Tech Force went out of business in 1990.

By the 1990s Wozniak was out of the business world. His marriage to former Olympic kayaker Candi Clark ended in divorce in 1990. Later that year he married Suzanne Mulkern, an attorney with three children. Together with Wozniak's three children from his marriage with Clark, the family was a big one. When his son Jesse discovered computers at age 9 in 1991, Wozniak was inspired to begin a class for Jesse and some of his classmates in the summer of 1992. He bought them Apple Macintosh PowerBooks and taught them three times a week from his office in Silicon Valley. By 1993 Jesse's computer class had grown to 12 students, and Wozniak began another one with 20 fifth-grade students. The class consisted of hand-picked students and met after school.

During the 1990s Wozniak's connection to the modern computer industry was limited to occasional speeches on technology issues and appearances at Macworld conventions. He established his own Web site where visitors can exchange e-mail with him and read about his views on computer technology. The site also features WozCam video cameras that are installed throughout his seven-bedroom house in Los Gatos. In 2000 Wozniak was named to the Inventors Hall of Fame.