Steve Wozniak's autobiography "iWoz: From Computer Geek to Cult Icon" arrived a few weeks ago, and I was so into it I read it cover to cover in about 16 hours.

The tone of the book is blog-like, and I realized why when he mentioned in the acknowledgments that the book was based on fifty-six two-hour interviews. I imagine they were recorded and transcribed, thus the casual tone.

Woz starts at the beginning, telling about his early childhood and early interest in engineering that stemmed from his relationship with his dad. He tells about the long hours spent on science projects in junior high, and the even longer hours working on more complex designs in high school. He covers Apple's founding and rise to the top, discusses why he left, and talks about his adventures after Apple, which I knew little about. He includes commentary on aspects of his life as he tells the story, and makes a number of insightful statements about a wide array of life-related topics. In the end, I was most impressed with Wozniak's ethics and pure engineering prowess.

Ethics
Woz talks early on about his Dad imparting the importance of being honest:

"…my dad believed in honesty. Extreme honesty. Extreme ethics, really. That's the biggest thing he taught me. He used to tell me it was worse to lie about doing something bad under oath than it was to actually do something bad, even murdering someone. That really sunk in."

These extreme ethics are seen later in the book when, after the Apple IPO, Woz sells a bunch of his Apple shares at the pre-IPO price to engineers who he thought deserved shares but didn't receive any. Call it a strong sense of ethics, or simply an emphasis on the importance of people over money, but Woz comes off as a class act because of it.

Genius & Preparation
One interesting point about Woz is that he knows he's a really smart guy. He talks openly about it in the book. At one point he says he was the best logic designer in the world. This was probably true at the time, but it's interesting how much he discusses his engineering superiority; I didn't expect that going in. It's hard to accuse the guy of bragging when he single-handedly designs the first PC, is the first to integrate a keyboard and monitor into a computer, and designed the first low-cost floppy disc controller.

When he was in high school he got his hands on some manuals for minicomputers. Whenever he had a free weekend he'd read through a manual and re-design the computer with fewer chips. He'd often return to a design after new chips were released and re-design it again with even fewer chips. It was a game he played with himself, and one that would directly translate into his ability to design the Apple I just a few years later. The funny thing during this time is that Woz didn't have money to build any of his designs; they were all on paper.

"Typically, once I started a design, I'd stay up very late one or more nights in a row, sprawled on my bedroom floor with papers all around and a Coke can nearby…I was competing with myself and developed tricks that certainly would never be describable or put in books. I had a hunch after a year or so that nobody else could do the sort of design tricks I'd come up with to save parts. I was now designing computers with half the number of chips the actual company had in their own design, but only on paper."

The stage was being set for the design of the Apple I.

On Being an Engineer
"[My dad] drilled into me what it means to be an engineer. A serious engineer. [He said] engineering was the highest level of importance you could reach in the world, that someone who could make electrical devices that do something good for people takes society to a new level. He told me that as an engineer, you can change your world and change the way of life for lots and lots of people. To this day, I still believe engineers are among the key people in the world."

As I said in my initial mention of the book a few months ago, I love this quote from Steve's friend Allen Baum that convinced him to leave HP to go start Apple: "Think about it. You can be an engineer and become a manager and get rich, or you can be an engineer and stay an engineer and get rich."

Patience
"…I acquired a central ability that was to help me through my entire career: patience…Patience is so underrated…I learned to not worry so much about the outcome [of my engineering projects], but to concentrate on the step I was on and to try to do it as perfectly as I could when I was doing it."

Woz's Secret to Life
"I was just starting to figure out that the secret to life - and this is still true for me - is to find a way to be happy and satisfied with your life and also to make other people happy and satisfied with their lives."

There are a lot more great anecdotes about the early days of Apple and the amazing series of events that led to Woz designing the Apple I. This is a book by and about one of the most influential engineers of the last century; if you have some spare cycles you should check it out.