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

I received this book as a gift from my wife who knows of my nostalgic love of the 8-bit era of computing. I almost wish I hadn't read this book, as it changed my impression of the character and credibility of Steve Wozniak. I had always thought of him as a soft-spoken, somewhat whimsical, brilliant engineer, who was the actual brains behind Apple's successes. Being of Polish descent was an extra bonus, since I am as well. I was always amazed at how Steve Wozniak could tolerate the rantings of the sociopathic Steve Jobs.

After reading the book, my opinion of his character has fallen. Steve's ego is an overwhelming presence throughout this book, and colors what would otherwise be a more entertaining read. I do understand that he is a brilliant guy, and has done many clever things throughout his life, but so have several other people, especially in open source - with far less ego.

His facts also leave something to be desired, although I believe this to be tainted by his having a personal role in things. The MITS Altair was the first personal computer, and the Commodore 64 came to be far more popular than the Apple II, eventually being in the Guinness Book of World Records as selling the most units. Even Xerox PARC pioneered much of the technology that Apple used much later in its own models.

For those with a love of the 8-bit era such as myself, I recommend a couple of more entertaining reads: [[ASIN:0887309895 Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age]] and [[ASIN:0973864907 On the Edge: the Spectacular Rise and Fall of Commodore]], which are far more factual and in-depth reviews of that era than Steve's ego-driven homilies.

I bought iWoz by Gina Smith but put it aside after the first 2 chapters. It is the biography of Steve Wozniak, one of the founders of Apple and has got to be one of the most irritating reads ever!!

The story of Apple's founding and growth is the stuff of legend but only if you can get past Steve's bragging and constant 'look at how amazing I am' pronouncements. It wore thin after a while. I kept putting it down after a couple of pages; had to drink some water to stop the gagging reflex! I hope Steve Jobs gets around to writing one himself or at least authorises someone to about Apple's founding some day.

Okay, well he's a nice jerk, but still...

This book typifies Apple the computer and Apple the company to a "T". Style and image and little real substance. In the main, that goes for Apple users as well.

Yes, Woz did some cool stuff, but so did many of the other pioneers of the the mid-70s era. And his stuff was by no means so revolutionary as he claims.

He goes on for several pages extolling his two-chip floppy card. Well, if he'd simply used a real floppy controller chip like the others (such as the Western Digital 17xx series FDCs used in the TRS-80) his drive might have actually worked. Because of his el-cheapo approach, he couldn't use the reliable FM and MFM encoding. Instead he was forced to use Group Code Recording, which is supposedly self-clocking. Yes, it works OK, but ***only when the drive is new***. When the head drifts out of alignment, the clamping mechanism starts slipping, or if the drive speed goes off, his amateurish scheme fails big time. His kludge substitute for an actual disk controller has no protocols for error detection or correction. I happen to know because I worked for several years as a disk duplicator for a big-time software publisher, and I saw for myself the people in the customer support department tearing their hair out and climbing the walls taking calls and processing returns from irate customers with their piece-of-**** Apple drives.

His info on the TRS-80 on pages 208 and 209 is completely wrong and demands that I set the record straight. The Rad Shack machine didn't earn the moniker "Trash-80" for nothing (spontaneous reboots, key bounce, lousy cassette, etc), but it was hardly as primitive as he describes.

He gloats because his Apple II can go up to 48K and the "Trash-80" only goes up to 4K. HA! In 1977 the first Model Is were sold with 4K (when many other computers only had 1K or 2K), but all could be later upgraded when 16K DRAMs became available.

Contrary to Woz, the TRS-80 also had a "real" keyboard. Unlike the Apple, you could install a numeric keypad in the main unit. So much for being the greatest ever "business machine" (I must admit though that Tandy skimped on lowercase letters, just to save $1 in hardware)

Yes Woz, the TRS-80 does graphics. Sure, they're block graphics in black and white, but with CPUs as slow as they were back in that day, that's all you can do well. The Apple had sharp color graphics, but all it could do was static displays because the piddling 1 Mhz 6502 lacked the horsepower to push all those pixels around. The '80 had many wonderful games with objects zooming all over the screen. Trash-80 coders knew how to work within the limits of the machine hardware and still deliver a satisfying user experience.

He says the Apple could be programmed in machine language or BASIC, and that made it a business machine (Visicalc came later). Not the TRS-80, which is BASIC only. Wrong. Look back into all the articles in 80 Microcomputer having to do with coding in assembler, and moreover, how to interface BASIC with m/l subroutines in protected memory. The Apple has no means of protecting memory, it's all or nothing there, no flexibility.

Speaking of BASIC, only Tandy had the good sense to include Microsoft Basic in their machine. Compare Applesoft vs. TRS-80 Level II feature for feature. No contest, the Woz machine doesn't do complex strings, no double-precision floating point, file handling is a joke. Yes, Apple had Visicalc first, but that was only because Bricklin picked the Apple completely at random as his development target -- it says so in [[ASIN:0887308554 Accidental Empires: How the Boys of Silicon Valley Make Their Millions, Battle Foreign Competition, and Still Can't Get a Date]] by Robert Cringely. But Visicalc was not everything, there are hundreds of business apps besides, and in this day they were mostly written in BASIC, and the "Trash-80" was the only computer with a REAL BASIC.

This exemplifies Woz's whole approach to the Apple -- cheap cheap cheap. Cheap CPU, cheap disk drives, cheap software. Typically Apple: cheap in everything but customer $$$.

Woz completely omits the fact that to buy an Apple you had to buy it through mail-order (at least until later when they got some dealers). Of course he doesn't mention that Radio Shack was the first computer retailer EVER where you could bring it in for servicing or upgrading, buy approved accessories and software, and get training. Apple users had to settle for "user groups" for support. Since we're talking about Apple users here, perhaps I should say "user groupies".

Much is made of the Apple's presence in the educational market. Fact is, the TRS-80 had a greater market penetration here. It's not well known because Tandy was famous for not disclosing its sales figures. Here again Apple propaganda reigns supreme.
Which reminds me, it was Tandy's massive advertising efforts that were the coattails that Apple rode to the market on.

I hope all these specific examples show what this book is about: Woz's self-loving ego. I'm sure he's a nice guy and all, and there were some good things to the Apple (color hi-res 80-column screen, sound, slots), but he wasn't all that, child.

If you want to read a really good, even heroic, story of an inventor-genius, read this one: [[ASIN:0743251180 Copies in Seconds: How a Lone Inventor and an Unknown Company Created the Biggest Communication Breakthrough Since Gutenberg--Chester Carlson and the Birth of Xerox]] by David Owen. How a Lone Inventor and an Unknown Company Created the Biggest Communications Breakthrough since Gutenberg - Chester Carlson and the Birth of the Xerox Machine. And do get the hardcover, after you read this tale you'll be glad to have the deluxe version.

Woz could learn more than a thing or two about writing from this book.

I don't regret reading Steve's account of his childhood and teen years, but the historical accuracy of his claims are a quite far fetched. The book also suffers from being a bit juvenile and highly repetitive, but that is to be expected from an autobiography that was essentially a collection of stories told to the ghost writer over pie (@ the Hickory Pit).

Unfortunately Woz spent too many years listening to Jobs and their early marketing efforts touting the Apple I and II as the first 'real' computers.

To be clear, I do not question his sincerity in his recounting of the tale, it just happens to be wrong. Other reviewers have covered this in greater detail - the Commodore Pet and the TRS-80 - and the like.

With regards to his departure from Apple and his mythical relationship with Jobs, it does stand to reason that it's far less 'juicy' than what's commonly discussed. It seems logical that Steve simply got bored and wandered off once the Apple II was fully born and didn't leave as a result of pressure from Jobs. I believe Steve when he says his motive for writing this book was his attempt to 'set the record straight' about this. Not unlike his career however, he got excited in describing the minute details of his beginning and then wandered away when he got bored with the story.

Historical accuracy and rampant hyperbole aside, it was still an interesting read and an insight into one of the fathers of the 8bit computing era. Woz is definitely a character and I'm glad he's found some amount of immortality in his cult status.

I just finished reading iWoz last night and I have to say that I was extremely dissapointed.

This book offers advice at the end, almost as an afterhought. If Wozniak wanted to make the book more interesting it would have served him better to turn the last chapter into a phamplet and sell that.

Reading through this book you will find several digs at Steve Jobs. Immediately I realized that Woz is quite bitter and resentful against Jobs.

There is no doubt in my mind about Woz's intelligence and what he has created but he talks about it in such a boastful way that it begins to become draining. "I was the first to do this, I was the first to do that" over and over again.

What I realized at the end of the book is that Wozniak has taken everything he has for granted. He forgets what while he may have invented many things he would not have financially benefited from ANY of it without Apple and without Jobs. He would still be a engineer at HP in their calculator division had OTHERS not worked with him. He rarely credits others for getting him where he is today.

My opinion of Steve Wozniak was much higher BEFORE I read this book. Unfortunately this book made me see what kind of person Steve Wozniak is, perhaps this is why he's burnt through so many wives. He's arrogant, self-centered and egotistical. Perhaps if you want a lesson in how to be thankless to those who've helped you reach much success you should give this book a read.

While Woz claims he did this book to 'set the story straight' it reads more like a last ditch attempt at not being forgotten.

This book made me feel bad for Steve Wozniak. I realized, for the first time, that a lot of the actual work that we give Jobs credit for was actually the work carried out by poor little Wozniak. It's very evident that this is the story of an introvert genius who was both very lucky and very unlucky to have been friends with Jobs. Lucky because Apple could never have become Apple without Jobs, and unlucky because Jobs completely overshadowed Wozniak.

This book is interesting because it not only covers many of the little nuggets of corporate history that get forgotten, but also a peek into the freaky mind of a geek who created that cult product, the Mac.

The early '80s were heady times for computer geeks. Steve Wozniak gives us a glimpse in to the early days of the personal computer revolution, life in silicon valley, and the beginnings of Apple Computer.

In this heavily first person account, the reader can be easily overwhelmed by his first person references. Unfortunately, Woz's rather egocentric views detract from the fascinating story of Apple's early days. The book is written at a fairly low reading level, probably around 6 or 7th grade. Until the reader is fairly deep into the book, this choice is inexplicable. As the story evolves, Woz lets on that he is most moved by his experience working with elementary students and feels a particular affinity to those who are out of the mainstream. He is not explicit, however, it seems his desire is to have his autobiography be an inspiration to those students.

Even with its literary short falls, I found iWoz to be an enjoyable, interesting, and quick read.

Really good to read this aspect of the history of computers. Wozniak's contributions are often overlooked by most people. But it was his engineering genius which gave us the first true desktop computer. And even though Steve Jobs is given all the credit, he botched things up for Apple by pushing everyone in the direction of the Mac rather than the Apple II line. Although I never used any of the Apple II computers, after reading Wozniak's book I wish I could have owned an Apple IIGS, which was a very advanced computer for its time, and which was better and faster than anything anyone else had. If Steve Jobs would have listened to the person who was one of the greatest computer engineers of all times (Steve Wozniak) rather than being all caught up with his own ideas, Apple likely would have become the dominant player, the leader, in the emerging desktop computer market. Alas, it wasn't to be, and as a result of Steve Jobs' hard-headedness, Apple would languish near the bottom of the desktop computer market, barely staying in business with 10% of the market share, until they came up with the iPad, iPod, and iPhone, which propelled them to the top of those markets and brought the company back to a sound financial footing.

If not for the engineering genius of Steve Wozniak, there wouldn't be an Apple Computer corporation. Too bad Steve Jobs couldn't see that.

While this book is not a great piece of literature, I found it to be a very interesting read. Wozniak is a great character, and having just completed "Steve Jobs" by Walter Isaacson, it was fascinating to contrast the two personalities. Some of the other reviewers stated that Steve Wozniak was arrogant but I thought he came across as humble. In the book when he makes claims such as "I was one of the best in the world at..." or "The Apple II was the first computer to have...", it didn't strike me as conceit but as a statement of fact. Overall, I found the book was very enjoyable and that his character was well illustrated.

This book was unexpectedly great. I really enjoyed listening to it. As en engineer I felt I could relate to Steve and he inspires to continually follow your passions. He reminds how to create something new, and how to design and build quality systems. Lastly it was very interesting to hear his version of the history of Apple and the development of the first home computer. This book may not be for everyone, but if you can relate to 'nerd culture' then I think you would like it.