SYDNEY – Fresh from startling the crowds queuing for iPhones at a suburban Brisbane Apple store, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak bobbed up in Sydney yesterday to spruik the virtues of his new employer, server-flash memory specialist Fusion-io.

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Accompanied by his boss, Fusion-io chairman/CEO David Flynn, the Woz – now Fusion-io chief scientist – told the reptiles that once he saw the Fusion technology he knew it would be a winner, so when they asked him to be involved, he had no hesitation in saying yes.

“I haven’t been so excited about technology since Apple was launched. I am not involved with the engineering, have no stock involvement or money invested. I just knew it was the right technology for the times,” quoth the Woz.One example: it was taking Woolworths 17 hours to process the data required for its Monday morning business intelligence meetings.

By using Fusion-io memory this is reduced to three hours, which means the company has all the data from weekend trading to analyse at the Monday chinwag.All attending media and analysts at the Sydney Westin event were given an autographed copy of Steve’s book iWoz to take away.

Woz is an undoubted, if at times humble, history maker in the world of IT so it was prophetic that CDN’s copy fell open to a page where he was talking about getting a job at H-P in the 1970s to design the next generation of scientific calculators.

He said, “It was like getting to be part of history.”Quite an understatement back then, considering what he has achieved since. Changing the world, for instance. – Merri Mack