In the late 1970s, Steve Wozniak, then an engineer for Hewlett-Packard Corp., went to his bosses with an off-the-wall idea: Why not develop a small computer that the average person could have in their home?

“I offered my computer to Hewlett-Packard, but they turned me down — five times! — for my personal computer idea,” the 65-year-old home computing trailblazer said.

So Mr. Wozniak went in a different direction. He formed a partnership with Steve Jobs. “We thought we might make money,” he said.

In fact, Mr. Wozniak, co-founder of Apple Computer and the designer/​inventor of its revolutionary Apple I and Apple II computers, made a lot of money and Apple helped launch the home computing industry.

“We knew it would have a major impact on the world,” said Mr. Wozniak, who discussed his role in the computer industry and offered thoughts on other subjects Monday night to a crowd of 3,200 at the University of Toledo’s Savage Arena.

IN PICTURES: Computer pioneer Steve Wozniak in Toledo

The computer pioneer was in Toledo for the university’s Jesup Scott Honors College Distinguished Lecture series.

Contrary to popular knowledge, Apple was founded twice, Mr. Wozniak said.

The first start with Mr. Jobs was the invention of the Apple I — a circuit board that had no power supply, no case, and no keyboard. They made the computer for $20 and sold it for $40 with the hope of making their money back.

“The second one was for real. That involved money,” Mr. Wozniak said. “The second time we knew marketing was important.”

They hired an ad agency, and it made up a story of Mr. Wozniak and Mr. Jobs as “two kids in a garage,” he said. But actually, they had a third partner, Ronald Wayne, who had money, business expertise, and vision.

“He was the one who set up the company” in 1976, Mr. Wozniak said.

Once the company developed the Apple II, the Apple co-founder said nobody was sure what it could be used for. Mr. Wozniak said that, through Mr. Jobs’ former association with Atari Inc., it was clear the Apple machine would be used to play games.

“I said for a computer to go in the home it would have to play games,” he said, adding that he began developing several games for the computer. But in order to play them properly, they needed color, which led Mr. Wozniak to design a way to create color games on a TV set using a $1 chip for the computer.

Mr. Wozniak also was involved in development of the Apple Macintosh, a machine that he said ended up being his “most heartbreaking” experience in computing.

The problem was 1 megabyte of random-access memory cost about half the price of a Macintosh, and Mr. Jobs thought the machine should be priced around $1,000. So the machine’s memory was cut and its abilities downsized.

“We heard a lot about that, that it was a toy,” Mr. Wozniak said.

“Steve didn’t understand computers and what it took to design computers,” Mr. Wozniak said. The failure of the Macintosh caused Apple’s stock to drop and eventually prompted Mr. Jobs to resign from the company.

The company “could have grown to 10 times what it was but we gave [market share] to Microsoft,” he said.

“We had to work hard for three years to build a better market for this product,” he added. “We lost a lot of money doing it, but we had to build a better market. We later went to Microsoft and paid them to write a spreadsheet for us.”

Asked what kind of people he would seek today if he were starting a technology company, Mr. Wozniak said creative people are important, but not everything.

“First, go as hard as you can without money. Find some engineers like you, who will work as hard without money, then develop a working model,” he said.

But “you need to have a businessman who says, ‘We have to make money.’ You need a marketing person who has to understand the needs of people, what features and performances are important,” he said. “Apple, when we started it, we knew it would be a marketing-driven company. Hewlett-Packard was an engineering-driven company.”

Most importantly, find an inventor “who likes to show off,” Mr. Wozniak said. “That’s the kind you want, even if they’ve never gone to a university a day in his life.”

Mr. Wozniak, who left Apple in 1985 and later taught fifth grade in an elementary school, addressed several education issues during his 70-minute discussion.

He said experience taught him that what you teach students is less important than teaching them to want to learn, and that process can be helped by computers.

Unfortunately, he said, computers until now have been used mainly to teach everyone the same things and to “make homework look prettier.”

But computing technology of the future could be used not just to help teachers, but to be teachers.

“What if a computer was more like a real person?” he asked.

What if they were made to think and care about a person’s life and family? he asked.

“Maybe that can be your personal guide to education. ... That could reorganize education,” Mr. Wozniak said.

Contact Jon Chavez at: jchavez@theblade.com or 419-724-6128.

First Published February 2, 2016, 5:00 a.m.