https://www.fastcompany.com/91477114/steve-wozniak-woz-apple-the-tech-interactive-humanitarian-award Try our mini crossword with a business twist: Play Fast Company Mini Crosswordclose banner Hamburger menu icon LOGIN Fast company logo SUBSCRIBE * Premium * Tech * Design * News * Leadership * Work Life * Games * Podcasts * Video * INNOVATION FESTIVAL | Custom Studio * IBM * Texas A&M University [p] advertisement 01-23-2026PLUGGED IN There's only one Woz, but we can all learn from him The world has benefited from the Apple cofounder's generosity of spirit for 50 years now--and it's not just about the PC revolution his genius helped catalyze. SHARE FacebookLinkedInBlueskyXLink ADD ON GOOGLE There's only one Woz, but we can all learn from him Steve Wozniak and his most famous brainchild in 1983 [Photo: (c) Roger Ressmeyer/CORBIS/VCG via Getty Images] Author's image BY Harry McCracken Listen to this ArticleMore info 0:00 / 0:00 Hello again, and welcome back to Fast Company's Plugged In. On January 16, Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak--known to all as Woz--received the James C. Morgan Global Humanitarian Award, an honor bestowed each year by the Tech Interactive, a science museum in San Jose, California. The ceremony and a conversation between Wozniak and comedian Drew Carey capped a gala event in which several organizations were named laureates for using technology to improve the world. Their creations include a brain-computer interface (BCI) that helps people with disabilities communicate, a forum that lets patients who have received BCI implants shape the technology's best practices and ethics, a headset that uses ultrasound therapy to treat mental conditions, and a device that provides people with Parkinson's disease the ability to walk more confidently. Until he took the stage himself, Wozniak sat in the audience with his wife, Janet, watching presentations about each honoree with rapt attention. In a conversation after the event, Wozniak marveled at what he'd seen. "They were creating something to solve a problem they had with the world, and that's where you get the best products," he said. He likened the honorees' ingenuity to his own implementation of color graphics on 1977's Apple II, a killer feature at a time when other microcomputers could barely draw pictures in black and white. Rather than adding to the machine's cost and complexity, he explained, his approach "took no chips at all. I mean, it was just so far out of the box. It violated all the rules of mathematics on color TV." [i-2-91477114-theres-only-one-woz-but-we-can-all-learn-from-him]From left: Tech for Global Good Celebration honorees Jay Sanguinetti of Sanmai Technologies, Sidney Collin of NexStride, Steve Wozniak, Andreas Forsland of Cognixion, and Ian Burkhart of BCI Pioneers Coalition in San Jose, California, on January 16, 2026. [Photo: Don Feria] Wozniak has spent close to half a century being celebrated for his technical brilliance and irreplaceable role in bringing computing to the masses. Just three years after starting Apple with Steve Jobs (and, briefly, Ron Wayne), he received the Association for Computing Machinery's Grace Murray Hopper Award. Six years after that, he and Jobs won the National Medal of Technology, resulting in a memorable photo opp with President Ronald Reagan. He said last week's award was particularly meaningful to him because it reflected his efforts as a humanitarian rather than solely as a technologist. Those efforts have often focused on culture and education in Silicon Valley. A native of San Jose, Wozniak provided funding that was instrumental to bootstrapping the 27-year-old Tech Interactive as well as the city's Children's Discovery Museum. (The latter is located on a street named Woz Way--yet another of Wozniak's many tributes.) In his memoir, iWoz, he writes about paying for computer labs in local schools and fulfilling a cherished dream by teaching computing skills to fifth graders. Even earlier, he donated the very first Apple computer to a teacher named Liza Loop. After Apple employees dating to its days as a garage startup weren't cut in on its 1980 initial public offering, Wozniak gave them a meaningful percentage of his personal stock, purely because it felt like the right thing to do. He was also a principal founding donor to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an essential advocate for civil rights in the digital age. The list of his good deeds goes on, and is not thoroughly documented: In conversations with people who have known him for decades, I've heard multiple stories about his unpublicized support for other worthy causes. 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