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!

It is one of the oddest feelings to read a book-- by a complete genius, nerd, geek, mastermind, who is experienced and aged in life, and who changed the face of technology forever and always-- written in seemingly a 6th Grade reading level. I had a lot of trouble reading this for the content, and history, and occasionally even science, when in every other sentence Woz used a filler word, or finished a sentence with "You know?" or started a sentence with "Anyways", "So", "I always believed", "I remember thinking/feeling/seeing". It was incredibly annoying. The vocabulary in the entire book seemed to be limited to the top 2000 English words. Woz didn't write much about other people, what was happening in the world, or really anything other than what he "felt" or "believed". He is all about his convictions and moral high-ground. That said, if he is who he portrays himself to be, he is a genuinely good person. A loving person. A teddy bear really.
For this reason, the portrayal felt insincere. Fake. I can't see this guy at a cocktail party. I can hardly see him in his room being a mastermind. All I can see is him on the Kids Table- talking about the months and months of his life that he spent thousands of dollars on ridiculous pranks. Talking about living life for the moment, and never lying, and being a good, a happy person. Talking about rigging phones, his obsession with numbers, not doing drugs, and he'll talk your ear off about his dad who he introduces in the first page, saying he didn't even know what his dad did, and then continued to talk about all his dad did for the rest of the book.

Alas it seems that Wozniak was the worst person to write about Wozniak. He said he wanted to set the record straight about some things that weren't well documented in the media, but he could have done that in an op-ed or interview. The memoir filled in few gaps. Woz shouldn't have had to write about himself. He deserves a well-sourced biography by a credible author.

Thanks for all you did Steve. Sorry your book sucks.

A personal memoir, and a important counterpart to all the Svengali-like portrayals of Steve Jobs as the evil genius behind Apple. Because in the beginning there were the Two Steves, each a necessary part of the original Apple, and in this book, Steve Wozniak steps out from behind Jobs' shadow with a grin and a wave.

Woz is a study in stereotypes--a brilliant engineer who thinks in electrons, and a socially-inept geek who can't talk to girls. A guy who wants to change the world for the better, and a gleeful early-adopter of cutting-edge technologies just because they are so COOL! He forgives chicanery and donates stock, he blows a bundle on a neo-Woodstock that he recalls with great fondness, he crashes an airplane, he teaches school and invents the universal remote and devotes massive amounts of time, money, and attention to the arts and to his beloved children. He's Thomas Edison, Santa Claus, and Gandhi all rolled into one.

Bad things: the voice is difficult for me to read. Probably it sounds just like him, and in real life that would be doable, but on paper it comes across as juvenile and simplistic. Also, the flights of engineering enthusiasm are eye-glazing. Probably not for engineers, though. But I'm not one, and chances are, you aren't either. Eventually, I just skipped over the parts where he describes schematics, and that helped a lot.

So, for it me it was a one-timer. But I'm glad I looked in.

If you're reading this, you owe it to a guy named steve. If you're peering at this through a finger-smudged screen, thank Steve Jobs. If you have a crumb-filled keyboard in front of a display, you owe Steve Wozniak.

According to his own account in iWoz, everything in his life groomed him for his role in shaping the personal computer. His father was an engineer for Lockheed that instilled him a love of technology and a strong moral compass. He could see from a young age that computers were something great, even though in those days the main way to interact with them was enigmatic switches and lights. He never had the money to play with them directly, so he read about them, learned the logic behind the chips they used, and made a game out of improving the design of each new computer. He did this for years, playing a secret game of making the designers look like fools by tweaking their designs and reducing the complexity and cost of the design without sacrificing function.

It was years before his put this to practice with Steve Jobs in the Apple 1 and later the Apple II, but when he did it was breathtaking. He applied all the tricks he had learned in his years to put together the first computer that the average person could use, one that out of the box interfaced with a TV and keyboard. More importantly, the Apple 1 just worked, as soon as you got it, unlike the kit computers of the day like the Altair 8800. After the Apple 1 came out, other companies took notice and started imitating it. This continued on with the wildly successful Apple II, which inspired the IBM PC, the granddaddy of just about every computer in the universe.

Early on Steve describes how he decided that it was more important in his life to be happy and have fun rather than be rich and powerful, which explains a lot of the decisions he made in life. He intentionally never held onto his position as the founder of Apple, being more interested in designing technology than steering the fledgling company. This doesn't stop him from offering his criticisms aspects of Apple history, though often this is just to present his side of events. Whether or not he meets his own definition of success is somewhat open to interpretation. He certainly had fun, just like he claims on the cover, but like so many he has never lived up to the innovation he achieved early in life, a problem unique to visionaries like himself, but overcome by his comrade Steve Jobs who returned Apple to its former glory after faltering in the 90s.

This book, which is awkward to attempt to start a sentence with, is a love letter to technology, and filled with detailed descriptions of how he overcame obstacles and engineered things from a TV jamming prank machine to the Apple II's fantastic floppy drive. His enthusiasm for these projects after all these years highlights his true ambition. It's not power and fame he seeks, it's fun and the thrill for coming up with an elegant solution to a tricky problem.

This is few of those books which come across as an honest journey of a person, in this case it's steve woznaik.

In this book, he talks about his inspirations, things he did apart from computing and clears various gossips around him. What I loved most about him was that while he was one of the pioneer or The pioneer of Apple however he was a simple person before Apple formed and he remained simple after Apple got formed. (He was never behind money but behind his true motivation of engineering)

It's a great book for people who love to create things and learn from one of the geniuses of our time. It also showed me that what kind of person you need in the team and while Steve Jobs has got lot of credit for creating Apple, however it was a team-- Neither Woznaik or Jobs would have been able to do it alone.

A great book written in a simple, understandable and enjoyable language.