Gina Smith’s iWOZ
Gina Smith‘s book (she collaborated with Wozniak) iWOZ Computer Geek to Cult Icon is out, and is getting good reviews.
Business Week likes it:
Steve Wozniak is a Silicon Valley archetype–the brilliant, idealistic engineer for whom fame and fortune were just a happy accident that occurred as he pursued his passion. In what many see as the most staggering burst of technical invention by a single person in high-tech history, the “Woz” saw past a swarm of proto-PCs in the mid-1970s to singlehandedly define the PC as we know it today.
His Apple I and Apple II computers were the first successful personal computers because they came fully assembled, featured keyboards instead of punch-card readers, and had TV-style monitors for showing text and graphics, rather than just blinking lights.
In other words, Wozniak came up with what was likely the most influential product of the past fifty years–but you’d hardly know it if you met him. Steven Jobs, the younger sidekick who provided the entrepreneurial impetus to create Apple Computer Corp. (AAPL ), has gone on to become a billionaire and one of the world’s most powerful businesspeople.
But Wozniak’s role these days is as high tech’s minstrel-in-chief. He’s known for collecting odd gadgets such as a digital watch made with old-style vacuum tubes rather than chips and for organizing a polo league that uses Segway scooters instead of horses. When he gets serious, it’s usually to bemoan how coin-obsessed the tech industry has become–more interested in blockbuster IPOs than in the sheer joy of great engineering.
David H. Peterzell writes (on Amazon):
The book will be interesting to a specialized audience. You need to be interested in the early history of personal computers (e.g., the legendary Homebrew Computer Club).
You need to get a kick out of the amusing but sometimes unflattering lore that defined Apple’s history and culture. You need to want to know about Wozniak’s remarkably innovative engineering as well as Apple’s entrepreneurship.
You have to dig the views and personality of a successful but unusual and reclusive countercultural person. It probably helps if you resonate with Wozniak’s personal style, and dream about making innovative contributions somewhere, somehow.
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