Steve Wozniak, half of the famed duo that founded Apple Computer, is taking a new job. On Thursday, solid-state storage company Fusion-io announced Wozniak will be chief scientist.
The company said Woz, as he is known to his fans, will act as a key technical adviser to the research and development group and work with the executive team “in formulating a company strategy that will accelerate the expansion of major global accounts.”
‘Extremely Useful’
One of the major pioneers behind the home computer revolution, Wozniak said the marketplace “has not seen such capacity for innovation and radical transformation since the mainframe computer was replaced by the home computer.” He added that Fusion-io’s technology is “extremely useful” for a variety of applications and virtually all servers.
Wozniak, who developed the Apple I and Apple II computers in the mid-1970s, is also known as the Wonderful Wizard of Woz and The Other Steve, with Apple cofounder and CEO Steve Jobs. When Apple was founded in 1976, Wozniak quit his job at Hewlett-Packard and became the company’s head of research and development.
Over the next few years, Wozniak added a floppy-disk drive controller, a disk operating system, and much of the software for Apple’s early models. When Apple went public in 1980, Jobs and Wozniak became multimillionaires. Since then, Wozniak has returned to the University of California at Berkeley to earn his undergraduate degree, sponsored technology-related events, founded a company that created one of the first universal remotes for TVs, taught grade school, and even returned for a while to Apple to work in product development.
ioDrive, ioSAN, ioXtrme
Fusion-io’s products include the ioDrive, which it described as the first direct-attached, solid-state technology on a PCI Express bus. The company said the drive’s I/O performance is hundreds of times that of mechanical disks.
Two other products from Fusion-io have also been…