Steve Wozniak

In iWoz: Computer Geek to Cult Icon: How I Invented the Personal Computer, Co-founded Apple, and had Fun Doing It, Steve Wozniak recounts his life from his boyhood experiments engineering basic electronics with transistors through the early 2000s and seeing the changes in Apple with the iMac and iPod. He describes his ethical background and desire to develop products that improve the lives of ordinary people as well as the simple joy of solving the engineering problems necessary to show more accomplish that desire. Woz details the first motherboards he constructed, his experiments with phone phreaking and what it taught him about understanding systems, his work with Hewlett-Packard, and more, offering a candidness that’s refreshing for the reader. He also challenges some of the narratives that have built up around his early years with Apple, such as he and Steve Jobs building the Apple I in their garage (they only did the final assembly in the garage), or his leaving the company because he was dissatisfied (he had other ambitions, though he recognized that some employees were dissatisfied). Though Woz wrote this in 2006, it’s a good history of the early days of Silicon Valley from someone who was there and is likely to inspire readers to go out and find a way to make a difference, whether or not they choose engineering. He and co-author Gina Smith’s writing is very readable and conversational, which helps when he describes technical processes. Overall, an enjoyable and inspiring memoir. show less

I loved this book! I loved Woz! He seems like a really cool guy. So I was shocked -- shocked -- at the many instances of overt hostility toward this book by so many reviewers. Man, they hate it! They think the writing is terrible, even though it has a professional co-author. They think he's arrogant and conceited. They think he over-inflates his worth. I couldn't disagree more. I enjoyed the writing. I thought it was intentionally conversational and easy to read. What do people want -- a show more damn textbook??? It makes tech easy for anyone to understand and I think that's good. As to his arrogance, when you've done the things he has done -- and very few people have -- you have a right to be arrogant, in my opinion. He was the youngest HAM operator is the world, quite possibly. He very likely invented the personal computer and changed everyone's lives forever. He built, solely, one of the greatest computers ever -- the Apple II. He invented the universal remote. And he's not entitled to be proud of his achievements? Give me a break! If I had done this, I'd sure to tooting my own horn, that's for certain. And as for the few dissenters claiming he didn't invent the personal computer, it's plausible there were earlier personal computers, such as the Altair, but hobbyists had to put them together themselves, they didn't have keyboards or screens -- just lights and buttons. He really did create the personal computer as we know it. Of course, he didn't get where he got without the help of Steve Jobs, but if anyone was ever an egomaniac, it was Jobs, not Woz. Jobs was the biggest narcissist ever seen, I believe. I don't know how Woz could have worked with him for so long. I enjoyed reading about his upbringing, about his early phone phreaking, about constructing and selling blue boxes, about his educational efforts, about his reluctance to start a new company, about his desire to remain a geek forever and never go into management, his thoughts about other people both in and out of the Apple world. I loved this book! I again just don't understand why so many people hate it. It makes no sense to me. This is what I want out of an autobiography -- a reader-friendly, true life account of an interesting person's life and exploits. Excellent. Strongly recommended. show less

Steve Wozniak is well known to tech savvy people as one of the two cofounders of Apple Computer, and the driving force behind the development of the original Apple I and Apple II personal computers. More recently, he has achieved a slighly more kitschy kind of fame as Kathy Griffin's boyfriend on Kathy Griffin: My Life on the D List and a short-lived contestant on Dancing with the Stars, in which his slightly off-kilter personality came to the fore. In iWoz it becomes apparent that while show more Wozniak is a very quirky individual, he is probably quirky in a way that we should all be thankful for, because without his ability to work out computer achitecture on sheets of paper, program in binary in his head, and has an odd fondness for repeating numbers and other number patterns, then it is quite possible that the personal computer as we know it would not have been developed when it was, if ever.

Wozniak starts, logically enough, at the beginning and proceeds to tell his life story more or less in chronological order. One of the more interesting elements of his biography is the relatively scant amount of attention that is paid to Woziniak's time developing the original Apple computer and his time with the company. While this is obviously what he is most famous for, it is also obvious that it isn't of substantial consequence to him. His pride in the technical achievement of getting a machine with keyboard input and video output comes through clearly, as does the fact that using his designs Apple put a pair of high quality products on the market, but it is also clear that just about everything else about Apple wasn't that important in Wozaniak's eyes. He also makes clear that he did not leave Apple on bad terms, in fact, he never left the company at all, and is still listed as an employee on its payroll. This illustrates that loyalty is one of the key elements that Wozniak considers to be of high importance in a person, a fact that comes up over and over again.

Over and over in the book the striking thing is how nice, and yet truly odd Wozniak is. As a kid he was a Little League star (which is unsurprising as his father was a star quarterback in college) who loved to build technological toys like an improvised intercom system between all of the neighborhood kids' houses. He spends a decent chunk of the book discussing his involvement with the phone phreaks and building devices to work around the phone system to get free calls, but asserts ethical reasons for doing so. Wozniak developed the original Apple computer while working at Hewlett-Packard, and was loyal enough to offer the machine to them up front (they turned him down). He gave portions of his own stock in Apple to employees he didn't feel had gotten enough, and based upon a verbal committment sold some of his stock to an outside investor for a ridiculously low price. He is the guy who ran a dial-a-joke line for years, just because he wanted to make people laugh. But this is the same guy who ran up huge computer fees in college running programs that spat out Fibonacci numbers or who was overjoyed to move into a house in which the address had all of the first five digits in its number. The person that comes through is one who is definitely an oddball, but a well-meaning, gentle, and kind one, and one who it seems, would be an intensely loyal and valuable friend.

Wozniak seems to be something of a utopian, not really caring about money in a way that only someone who has become truly rich can, but to be fair, he seems to have felt this way before Apple made him a multimillionaire. It seems that so long as he has someone to joke with, and a technical project that interests him, he's a happy guy, and everything else is just gravy to him. For anyone who wants the inside scoop on the doings at Apple in the early years, and the machinations of Steve Jobs jockeying for position in the industry this book will likely be a disappointment. But for anyone who is interested in a portrait of what gentle genius looks like (and Wozniak is so forgiving that it doesn't even bother him that Jobs cheated him when they developed Breakout for Atari), then this book will give a fascinating glimpse into that mind. Before I read this book I had tremendous respect for Wozniak's accomplishments, and thought of him as a bizarre genius. After having read the book, I have come to see him as much more, a truly rare kind of person who is not only genius, but who is full of humanity as well.

This review has also been posted to my blog Dreaming About Other Worlds. show less

A very interesting first person account from the person who designed and built the first two Apple Computers, and was one of the most important people in kick-starting the personal computer revolution.

Woz himself is a plausiblly reliable, but obviously very selective narrator (there was very little substantive about his marriages and divorces, for example). He mostly wants to talk about his engineering, which, happily, was what I was most interested in.

There is no false-modesty about Woz - show more he is proud of and outspoken about his achievements, going all the way back to early childhood. But while he is obviously pleased about them, he doesn't actually seem boastful. It's more matter-of-fact than that. Indeed, in some of his anecdotes there seems to be a certain lack of emotional intelligence, which could all be part of the same thing.

Similarly, when he talks about what is important to him in life - happiness, having fun, doing what you love - I totally believe him. While nowhere near as famous, nor as rich, and perhaps not as accomplished as Steve Jobs, he is clearly the happier of the two. (In fact, his energy, curiosity and apparent ease with complex ideas reminded me most of Richard Feynman - or the Feynman that comes out through his own anecdotes at least).

Unfortunately, some of the technical explanations of Woz's innovations weren't as clear as they should have been - I guess that's for reasons of space, but I would have preferred it if a little more had been devoted to cleaner, clearer explanations for the layman (and I'm an experienced software engineer - I don't have much hardware experience, but still I would have thought I should have been able to grasp the basics of what was done, and often I couldn't).

You wouldn't read this for the writing style - it's quite hokey at times - but for the insight into a transformative period of technology, by one of the people at the very forefront. It's very engaging, and Woz is very impressive, and likeable. I wish the technical explanations were a little clearer and more detailed, but overall I enjoyed this a whole lot. show less