Steve Wozniak

If his name comes up in a clip about building things properly, it is usually attached to a single idea: that personal computing was made by hand, by people who cared how it worked underneath. Craftsmanship and humane engineering are the phrases most often used to summarise what he stands for, and they cover both a method and an ethic — think clearly, then execute carefully.

Born in San Jose, California, on 11 August 1950, he worked as an engineer and entrepreneur, and his early projects showed a knack for turning loose, informal opportunities into formal systems. The pattern was incremental rather than dramatic: a run of small improvements that eventually added up to a recognisable way of working. Unusually, he treated distribution and trust as things to be designed in from the start, not as outcomes to be dealt with later.

Mid-career, the work shifted from prototypes to platforms and from audiences to communities, with decisions about architecture, incentives and governance that were later picked apart as case studies. Failed experiments were written down as knowledge. Criticism was absorbed rather than deflected. What distinguished this stretch was less the scale than the fact that the standard could be repeated — engineering, design, operations and policy holding together under pressure, and peers adopting the approach in settings of their own.

Later he leaned towards mentorship and institutional memory, and towards standards portable enough to survive being handed on. The archive of talks, memos and design notes shows the practice behind the results, which is part of why the material still gets read. His site is woz.org. The influence sits in habits and teams rather than in any one object, and is measured largely by the quality of the people who came after.