Desktop Icon (Published 2006) (2024)

An autobiography tends to be a fairly emotional narrative for many authors. Leave it to an engineer, however, to write a memoir that includes a nine-page technical glossary to define terms like “logic gate” and “hexadecimal.”

As the book’s unwieldy subtitle announces, “iWoz” is a rambling stroll down memory lane by Steve Wozniak, the computer wizard best known for founding Apple Computer back in the mid-1970’s with the company’s current chief executive, Steven P. Jobs. Wozniak’s childhood in Sunnyvale, Calif., and his work designing computers make up the bulk of the book, but he also recounts his adventures as a concert promoter, the creator of the Bay Area’s first Dial-a-Joke hotline, a San Jose philanthropist, the inventor of the first universal remote control and a fifth-grade teacher.

“I can tell you almost to the day when the computer revolution as I see it started,” Wozniak writes halfway through the book, when he is still working days at Hewlett-Packard. According to Woz, it was at the first meeting of “a strange, geeky group of people called the Homebrew Computer Club in March 1975.” That meeting inspired him to start designing the future Apple I, the first computer to feature two elements — a video screen and a keyboard — that are used to this day by the beige, white, black or silver boxes parked on desks and airplane tray-tables everywhere.

For those averse to technical terminology, “iWoz” can feel like a day pass to Nerd World: “Man, I sniveled at Basic back then. Compared to Fortran, it was a weak, lightweight language.” But the glossary, along with boxed articles on the history of the transistor and the floppy disk, helps clarify the jargon.

Despite the aid of the journalist Gina Smith, the book’s nontechnical prose is not particularly graceful. But Wozniak himself points out that language was not his forte in school: “I was struggling in my head with the fact that I had been extremely smart in math and science and weaker in English and history. Why was that?”

There are numerous repetitions and mangled metaphors throughout the text; a particularly exuberant moment of engineering success is compared to “getting a hole in one from 40 feet away.” Given the average yardage from tee to green on a standard golf course, perhaps he meant a “40-foot putt” — or remembered the thrill of knocking the ball through the windmill on a miniature golf course.

Although he’s still an Apple employee (he mostly makes public appearances for the company), there are no inside development secrets of the Macintosh — the first mainstream computer to free people from code, with its now familiar point-and-click interface — since Wozniak wasn’t directly involved in it and left the company’s day-to-day operations to pursue other interests in 1985. This revelation also makes the book’s title seem a bit disingenuous, as it’s obviously trying to snag eyeballs with an allusion to Apple’s iPod, iMac, iLife, iSight and all its other iStuff. (I notice this because I’ve written a book or two on the iPod myself.)

But it was the Wozniak-designed Apple II computer in 1977 that put him — and the company — on the map, and one can’t help getting caught up in his excitement when reading about it firsthand because it really was a turning point down the road of modern computing. The Apple II was the first home PC to have sound, color, high-resolution graphics and the ability to work game controllers.

However prideful he may sound when describing it, Wozniak has earned the bragging rights: PC World magazine recently named the Apple II the best personal computer of all time and “the Machine That Changed Everything.” In “Insanely Great,” his 1994 book about the Macintosh, Steven Levy wrote: “Wireheads and hackers were uniformly impressed by Wozniak’s virtuoso design. They regarded its motherboard, the main circuit board, as a beautiful work of art.”

Wozniak’s timing for his own book — years after his triumph — feels a bit random, but he clarifies his motives in the last chapter: “At this point in my life — I’m 55 as I write this — I think it’s time to set the record straight. So much of the information out there about me is wrong. I’ve come to hate books about Apple and its history so much because of that.” He quickly debunks a few myths, mainly that he and Jobs were high school classmates (they were years apart) and that they both designed Apple’s first computers (Wozniak claims sole credit).

This book may not be the smoothest read in town, but it does seem to accurately reflect the restless, inventive mind of its author. Budding computer-science majors, Apple aficionados and electronics buffs will find plenty to ingest here, as Wozniak recounts the inspirations and thought processes for his designs. One thing is evident after wending your way through “iWoz”: Steve Wozniak learned to “think different” long before the company he helped found ever started using that phrase in a marketing campaign.