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ShareiWoz, Computer Geek To Cult Icon: Getting To The Core Of Apple's Inventor
Steve Wozniak, with Gina Smith
Much of Steve Wozniak's autobiography iWoz... is set against the background of the 1970s race to build the world's first-ever personal computer. While Wozniak, who founded Apple Computers with Steve Jobs in 1976, was putting together his clunky Apple I, rival groups like Altair (for whom Bill Gates worked), IBM, Hewlett Packard, and others who later fell by the wayside, were all trying to beat each other to come up with the most efficient, most portable and ready-to-use computer. As such, this book could've made for a great whodunit.
What Wozniak does instead, is to turn the story of his life into a snail-paced narrative of remarkable accidents and coincidences, and some wrong-turned-right decisions over which he seemingly had no control. One example of a defining moment in his narrative ending up as an anticlimax comes at what might have been the all-important juncture in the book: the West Coast Computer Fair in San Francisco in 1977, where Apple is about to unveil to the world its best-selling piece, the Apple II. Instead of detailing how the tech world reacted to the new, breakthrough model, or even how it influenced and changed the way other companies began building PCs, Woz (as he was called) goes into excruciatingly painful detail about a prank he plays on the bigwigs who attended the meet, and then moves on with the narrative. A reader expecting some insight into the till-then shadowy world of geeks and gadget whizs, might feel a bit cheated. Sadly, there are many such inexplicable elisions in the book. At places where one would have liked his comments on times that were, in tech terms, truly world-changing, Wozniak hardly offers any.
There are some other puzzlers as well. You'd think Wozniak's buddy and partner for over 30 years, the man with whom he engineered a tech revolution, would be more than just a passing mention. But Steve Jobs literally does a cameo in the book; microprocessors, circuit boards and DRAMs get more print space than him. Except -- and those looking for insider gossip would love this -- when Woz takes Jobs down a paragraph or two and writes about how the latter undercut him on their first-ever assignment, made wrong decisions, or compromised on his ideals and allowed the big, bad marketing team to take control of Apple. Similarly, other important people in Wozniak's life -- his parents, two wives, children, other partners at Apple like the remarkable Mike Marakula, the hard taskmaster who gave the company its first big vision and taste of success as well, members of the Homebrew computer club, the garage gathering which started it all -- are mostly dispensed with in a by-the-way manner. Woz clearly hero-worships his father Francis Jacob, an electronics engineer who initiated his son into the magical world of HAM radios, lightbulbs and AND and OR connections, and devotes a greater part of the first section idolising him in print. But apart from incidental family details, Woz, the geeky, child-like genius wrapped up in his own world of math and BASIC programmes, reveals very little of himself. Non-techie readers might get the feeling that he holds back and would rather stick to 'safer' subjects like his inventions.
To be fair, though, to Woz's much-awaited book -- Jobs published his autobiography a few years ago, and this, by that token, has been overdue -- techies might find a lot of "aha!" moments here. Wozniak details the invention of every chip, microprocessor, circuit board and new technology that came out in the decades leading up to the 90s. Many of the people he mentions, like Marakula, later became stars in their own right, and it is interesting to read about their early lives. Woz's book might appear racy to some for precisely this reason. Wozniak, often considered the more remarkable of the two Steves, is undoubtedly an icon. And an insight into any part of his life is interesting. So if you can make your peace with the fact that Woz, the man, is largely missing from this autobiography, this one's for you.
