So The Woz has written his autobiography… If you don’t know who I’m talking about, maybe you should be reading Paul Thurrott’s blog instead of this one… Mind you, you could be a recent switcher with no knowledge of Apple’s roots… So, in a word, Steve Wozniak is the cofounder of Apple, and genius inventor of the Apple I, Apple II and a bunch of other gadgets like the very first universal remote control…
I read the book and here’s my 2 cents.
First thing first, don’t read this if you’re looking for litterature… it’s quite poorly written, probably just like you or me could have written a book… well, since he probably didn’t write it, it’s probably carefully made so that it reads like some “nice, simple guy” telling the story.
Appart from that and some uninteresting bits on his parents, the whole reading is quite amazing… Woz started building electronic stuff when he was, like, 6… As a teenager he spent his time redesigning computers by reading their manuals and trying to make them with less chips and in a more elegant way. That’s actually a constant in his work: trying to make things simpler and more elegant.
The whole book doesn’t resolve around Apple, even if the company and his relationship with Steve Jobs take a big slice of the pie.
The thing I really enjoyed is the part where he tells the story of him deciding to fund his own version of woodstock, which he ended funding for around 25 million dollars for a total loss of $12 million… his comment? It was worth it because he had lots of fun!
So this guy goes from selling his HP calculator in order to fund Apple (along with the $500 that Jobs got from selling his WV combi) to having $100 millions in the bank overnight when Apple went public, and he ends up teaching computers to 5th grade kids in his local school, simply because he always wanted to be a teacher…

You can’t not like a guy like this…

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 23rd, 2006 at 21:44 CET and is filed under Apple talk. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.