Any of you who follow the computer industry are probably well aware of Steve Jobs, founder and current CEO of Apple Computers, and renowned marketing visionary and temper-tantrum-thrower. But Apple Computers would not have come into existence without "the other Steve" -- Stephen P. Wozniak, the engineering genius who designed and built the first Apple computers, and co-founded the company with Jobs. As described in this autobiography, "Woz" became enamored of digital logic at an early age, and in his 20's, while working for Hewlett-Packard, conceived of a so-called "personal computer" which could be used by anyone. HP was uninterested in building and marketing such a device, but Woz's friend Jobs saw the potential, offered his parents' garage as a production factory, and the Apple I went on sale in 1976. The rest, as they say, is history.
As a card-carrying Apple fanatic, I enjoyed the insider view of the founding of Apple Computer, but of even greater interest was the description of Woz's formative years, when he developed his ethos of technology as an enabler of human potential, rather than technology for its own sake. He gets into a bit of technical detail, but the book is primarily about people, not computers, so if you don't know a NAND gate from a EEPROM chip, you will probably still find it an illuminating tale.
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