Science & Tech Quote by Steve Wozniak

There is a charmingly raw utopianism in Wozniak's memory: the revolution isn’t dressed up as a manifesto, it’s a club-room feeling. That matters. The line captures a moment when “computer” still meant institutional power - mainframes in universities, corporations, and government offices - and access was gatekept by money, credentials, and bureaucracy. Calling it a revolution wasn’t metaphor; it was a literal redistribution fantasy, with hardware as the ballot box.

The phrasing gives away the politics. “Belong to everyone” isn’t just consumer availability; it’s ownership, agency, the right to tinker. “Give us power” is both nerdy and blunt: computational literacy as leverage in a society that increasingly runs on information. Then comes the key turn: “free us from the people who owned computers.” That’s a class critique smuggled into a garage-innovation origin story. The enemy is not a villain but a structure - centralized control of tools that decide what gets processed, stored, measured, and therefore what counts.

Context sharpens the irony without canceling the idealism. The personal computer did decentralize computing and ignite creative autonomy, but the arc of the industry also rebuilt new centers of power: platforms, ecosystems, app stores, cloud infrastructure. Wozniak’s quote works because it preserves the emotional truth of that early tech culture - the belief that access equals emancipation - while inadvertently foreshadowing the fight that never ends: who gets to own the machines that shape everyone else’s choices.