February 6, 1985: Co-founder Steve Wozniak, frustrated with Apple’s shifting priorities, leaves the company to pursue outside interests.
His departure — which comes in the same year that Steve Jobs left Apple to create NeXT — marks another big change for the company. The move mostly stems from Woz’s dissatisfaction with the way management treated the Apple II division. However, his desire to start a new company also plays a role.
Steve Wozniak is leaving Apple because the Apple II has no respect
Unlike Steve Jobs—whose skills made him a master negotiator, marketer, and editor of ideas—Wozniak always seemed happier before Apple’s expansion. Woz worked best in small teams of engineers creating one- or two-person creations such as the Apple II disk drive or Disk II.
Seeing how Apple was changing, especially with committee-driven boondoggles like the Apple III, made Woz feel less at home in Cupertino. After making his fortune when Apple went public, he increasingly turned his attention to non-Apple pursuits. For example, he invented an ambitious music event called the US Festival.
The lack of respect the Apple II division received made Wozniak particularly resentful and played a major role in his decision to leave Apple. Apple’s first mass-market computer, the Apple II, served as a sales force even after the introduction of the Macintosh. In fact, on the day Jobs publicly revealed that the first generation Macintosh 128K had sold 50,000 units in its first three months, Apple sold 52,000 units of the Apple IIc in 24 hours.
Despite this, Apple’s management viewed the Apple II as an outdated technology that should be phased out over time. (And yet Cupertino continued to produce some versions of the Apple II well into 1990!)
Woz leaves Apple for CL 9 and (and courses at UC Berkeley)
However, Steve Wozniak did not leave Apple idle. His new project? A universal programmable remote control capable of controlling everything from a VCR to a hi-fi system. Working alongside an engineer friend named Joe Ennis, Woz named his new company CL 9 (meaning “Cloud Nine”).
The company started in 1985 and within two years produced the 6502-based CL 9 Core remote control. And in some ways, the concept foreshadowed futuristic platforms like Apple HomeKit. However, CL 9 ended in 1988.
Woz also went back to school at UC Berkeley to finish his degree in computer science. As his name was well known in technical circles, he went under the pseudonym “Rocky Raccoon Clark”.
Despite his decision to leave Apple, Wozniak remained a shareholder and continued to receive a salary. He eventually returned as an advisor after Gil Amelio became Apple’s CEO in the mid-1990s. But Woz’s departure on this day in 1985 marked the end of his official tenure as an ordinary Apple employee (if you can even use that phrase in reference to the co-founder).
