iWoz - Computer Geek to Cult Icon: How I Invented the Personal Computer, Co-Founded Apple, and Had F

I’m a fan of computer history. Especially from my childhood and teens years: the eighties and nineties saw the rise of BBS (Bulletin Board Systems), the early Internet, the open source movement, Linux, Demoscene, Prince of Persia, Wolfenstein 3D, Shareware, naif hacking and much more. That’s why I enjoy reading biographies (or even better, autobiographies) of the pioneers: Jobs, Gates, Torvalds, Allen (this one of Microsoft's less-known co-founder, “The Idea man”, was my favorite). After reading “Just for fun” by Linus Torvalds I gave this one a try. I even found some similarities between Torvalds and Wozniak (their focus on technology, obsession for getting things right and achieving excellence, being reserved), It’s co-written by Gina Smith what in these cases means the star -Woz- had interviews with her and she is the one who wrote it using her vision and craft to give it structure and style (it's always a little bit disappointing when I found out that).

Having read about Apple, Jobs and Woz and watching many videos of them I already knew many of the facts he reveals: that he was the brains of Steve's partnership, that he is shy, that he loves engineering more than managing. But I found new staff like his interesting relationship with his father, how important was HP for him (even though that didn’t pay attention to his personal computer ideas and let him go), the concerts in which he lose millions of dollars but loved doing, his C9 start-up after Apple let him go without them worrying too much. I didn’t care too much about his philanthropy and his strange type of ego: when he tells that he was always the best at math, at science, at using the minimum amount of chips, etc. etc. it becomes a little annoying after a while.

But it’s interesting reading about the genesis of a computer genius: passion for engineering fostered by his father, reading engineering magazines as a kid, doing projects with friends that were nerds like him, Homebrew computer meeting as an important stage for him and the personal computer history in general. But I found also a lot of fillers like many details of some of his pranks that I found kinda boring instead of diving deeper in the blue box era that was their first (illegal) business together with Jobs (having passed almost half a century, I guess he is not going to go to jail for revealing something).

This book was written in 2006. Not much noteworthy happened in Woz’s life since then. Maybe he focused on his family, in giving talks around the world repeating this same story again and again like the talk he gave at Google. Jobs didn’t participate in any of the engineering of the Blue Boxes, the Apple I or Apple II, but was key for Woz to succeed. And was able to repeat the miracle with Jonathan Ive launching the Imac, Ipod, Iphone and Ipad without Woz. Woz instead couldn’t score another home-run like the ones in his youth with his friend.

In summary, you will not find life advice, wisdom or anything like that, but the life of a curious and genius engineer who happened to create a computer that took the world by storm and changed the field forever. Computer fans will like it.

Some quotes
“Having a huge project is a huge part of learning engineering -learning anything, probably.”
“The most important thing: that you’ve done the learning on your own to figure out how to do it.”
“You can’t teach somebody two cognitive steps above from where you are.”
“(...) consider intelligence the ability to think about matters on your own and ask a lot of skeptical questions to get at the real truth, not just what you’re told is it.”

I know this one's been out for a while -- We recently watched the Steve Jobs movie. Sadly, it focused on what a schmuck Jobs appears to have been. I was hoping to learn more about the development of the personal computer and of apple as a company. Maybe this book does that? Wozniak looks happy in all the pictures.

Reluctantly, I have to agree with reviewers who put the book down because it is written so badly. Truly. It reads as though someone wrote down Wozniak's casual conversation. I wish the second writer had added in historical context and other details. I almost gave up!

But then, around page 100, it gets better! I think it is because Wozniak is writing about times that were very exciting for him. He begins to use place names, dates, the names of the other people involved, and speaks with more detail about the projects he worked on.

I'm not an engineer; there are readers who have said that his claims about his own inventions and firsts are not true. It would have been great, again, if Gina Smith had rounded out the book with contemporary happenings in electronics and computer engineering.

Those were exciting times, though! The best part of the book is when Wozniak talks about using a slide rule, and how revolutionary it was when HP came out with its first home-use calculator. I remember: my dad worked for Grumman in the late 1960s and early 1970s. One Chanukah (and it must have been before 1973, because my parents were still married), he gave our mom a calculator. It was a very nice gift and, as we were told, it was "not a toy."

And, then! Did you know Wozniak was the creator of the Atari Breakout game? My best friend had an Atari system in the 70s and I remember playing Pong and Breakout and oh! how much fun it was! It was worth reading the book for these thrilling moments of nostalgia.

So, I want give this more stars (maybe 2.5) because I did learn some of what I set out to learn. And, I kinda like the Woz. He's a little bit charming, a little bit annoying (much like the glossary in the back of this book.) I do think that I need to be deliberate and choose a well-crafted story for my next read.

I'm not sure why I keep giving autobiographies so many chances. Well, to be fair, I guess there's a smattering of fantastic ones out there, just enough to keep me hunting. This wasn't one of those, though.

Woz clearly fancies himself a Feynman type, but honestly, he lacks a lot of the charm. Don't get me wrong; he seems like a decent enough guy, and he's definitely very smart, and he never came across as likely to be very annoying in the way Feynman did in his autobiography. But I mean... well, the pranks didn't sound very funny. Maybe you had to be there.

I think the main issue with this book is highlighted towards the end: he wrote it to set the record straight, and the fact is that the truth according to Woz is not very exciting. He's out to deny all drama, defuse all tension, and insist that everything else is water under the bridge. From what he's said, the only thing that might be juicy is the story about what went wrong with Breakout, and he only ever alluded to that just once, referring to it as "that thing that happened" while taking pains to insist that it wasn't even such a big deal. What wasn't a big deal, Woz? What happened?? This is what we're here for! Don't do this to us!!

Anyway. If you like technical stories about how he figured out the engineering problem of minimising the number of chips required for a given piece of hardware, then this is the book for you. If you want any insight into Apple, Steve Jobs, or even Steve Wozniak, you're better off looking elsewhere.

A lot of people will not like this book, will not rate it that well and complain about the style of writing. However, this book is everything it should be. It’s not a story about Apple and it shouldn’t have been. We have read and heard so much about Steve Wozniak but most of it is repetitive and limited to few incidents that don’t give any insight into his obsessive mind. This book is an amazing journey into how someone’s thought processes are shaped who just liked to design products and do one better than anyone else out there. Someone who likes to be a first at many things and imagined what others couldn’t. How the small stories we have read about Wozniak actually happened and what are the technical details. This book will not resonate with people who like to read big success stories but it will with people who just like the journey itself regardless of the outcome.

I quit! On page 52 I finally became so tired of the "I am the best, the smartest, the most athletic, the most wonderful . . ." that I give up. The biography of Steve Jobs made Wozniak sound like a brilliant, shy, introspective and under appreciated genius, but Wozniak's own autobiography disproved that. I'm also tired of the insulting parenthetical notes that insult the readers intelligence, explaining basic math and computer concepts that a 6th grader should know by now. But he does say several times that his IQ is much higher than everyone else's, so we really are too stupid to be reading his book anyway.
If you want to read a book with a sickening amount of self-ass kissing, read iWoz. If you want a book that explains the revolution in computers, Silicon Valley and the instrumental people who set forth that revolution, read something else.

Moved to gwern.net.

Not a fan. Having read Walter Isaacsons great book about Steve Jobs made me want to get the perspective of Steve Wosniak on the Apple saga.
While some of the stories of development of the Apple ll are very interesting and the reasoning and description of how layout and creation of the engineering was invented are enjoyable, the book unfortunately seems to drift from them.
The writing style was odd/weird from the start and I only finished the book because I had read almost half by the time I lost interest.
The story telling is often redundant, repeating the same statements in the same sentence, paragraph and/or chapter(s). Quite a few pages could have been saved by editing some of that.
As other reviews have mentioned, there are so many I and me statements that it sounds like a kid in a "my dad is stronger then your dad" argument. I thought that Steve Jobs came off like an egotist after reading the book about him- Woz sounds a lot alike.
To my disappointment it seemed, from the book, that Woz was hugely responsible for the development of the early Apple products, the Apple ll and work on some universal remote but not much after that (?)
Statements in the book about how great his pranks were, though some may have created problems for others, sounds like a computer geek brat kid who might create malicious viruses for fun and not like a 55 year old man reflecting on his highlights and positive contribution to society.
In retelling stories about creating a TV jammer and almost getting caught, then almost pinning blame on somebody else, printing out huge amounts of paper as a prank and using up the computer classes entire budget (not to mention the waste) or selling a product to defraud the phone company may sound like fun pranks to adolescents but to have a 55 year old guy proudly retell it, boast about it and claim he should have been awarded for some of the pranks instead of reprimanded seems like poor judgment and immaturity.
Finally his tip to future youth/engineers about working alone is something I would totally disagree with. Walter Isaacsons book The Innovators demonstrates that the best invention has come from teams working together while some great creations were lost due to isolationism.

Steve Wozniak = Crazy Technical Genius. I'm glad I ignored most reviews about this book. Anyone starting to read this book expecting to be wowed by a literary genius or amazing elaborate stories need to a reality check.

What I love about this book is that you totally get that Steve Wozniak is a pure bred engineer and anyone who has spent any significant amount of time with engineers would understand that his commentary is not about boasting or arrogance, it's simply the way engineers think! He explicitly lays out why he wrote the book and I'm glad he did. After reading it I felt like doing two things, designing something to create and also pulling some pranks of my own!! In fact ... I will!