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Wozniak Thankful For 'An Unbelievably Fortunate Partnership' With Jobs

<p>April 24, 1984, from left to right: Steve Jobs, John Sculley and Steve Wozniak unveil the new Apple IIc computer in San Francisco.</p>
Sal Veder
/
AP

April 24, 1984, from left to right: Steve Jobs, John Sculley and Steve Wozniak unveil the new Apple IIc computer in San Francisco.

"My role was [to be] the key technologist, the scientist, the engineer that was building all these devices. ... Steve was spotting them and seeing ways to sell them and talking about where they could go. And talking about enhancements and improvements that would take it to the next level. He was always trying to move to the next level."

It was "an unbelievably fortunate partnership."

Those are some of the words this morning from the other Apple Computer co-founder, Steve Wozniak, about his friend and former partner Steve Jobs, who died Wednesday at the age of 56 after a long battle with cancer. The two started Apple in 1976, building computers of Wozniak's design in the garage at the home of Jobs' parents.

On CBS News' The Early Show, Wozniak (now chief scientist at "data centralization" hardware and software producer Fusion-io) hailed Jobs as "the most incredible business person in the world" who came up with "home run after home run after home run."

The two both left Apple in 1985. In Wozniak's case it was to pursue other interests. In Jobs' case it was because of a power struggle he lost with then-Apple CEO John Sculley. Jobs would return to Apple in the '90s, and Sculley now concedesthat "nobody but Steve Jobs could have brought the company back to life" and that Jobs was "the greatest CEO ever."

In an email today to The Wall Street Journal's Digits blog, Sculley says:

"Steve Jobs captured our imagination with his creativity. His legacy is far more than being the greatest CEO ever. A world leader is dead, but the lessons his leadership taught us lives on."

Sculley, who parted ways with Apple in 1993, is a venture capitalist.

Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Mark Memmott is NPR's supervising senior editor for Standards & Practices. In that role, he's a resource for NPR's journalists – helping them raise the right questions as they do their work and uphold the organization's standards.