Steve Wozniak Book iWoz is Every Engineer's Manifesto

When I started reading this book, it sounded just like Steve, the engineer, telling it. I had recently reviewed a book on Steve Jobs Biography is a Book for Anyone who likes Good Stories. This book is about Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple Computers.

To those who are not familiar with Steve Wozniak, he was born in 1950 and grew up in Sunnyvale, California. He is a co-founder of Apple Computer and helped shape the computing industry with his design of Apple’s first line of products the Apple I and II and influenced the popular Macintosh.

 

 The books starts with an interesting account of his life before forming Apple Computers, and includes the good ol' tales of the early days of personal computers. The next part of the book – where Steve describes his life in and out of college as he works for various computer companies -- is, to me, the most interesting. Steve takes several years and a couple of different colleges before he graduates. During this time in the 1970’s, he meets many early pioneers of the design and evolution of the personal computer, many through the Homebrew Computer Club. During these early years, Steve Wozniak designs computers on paper and ultimately with real parts. The most interesting aspect of the story has to do with Woz's days as an engineer at HP, prior to the launch of Apple. Here's a guy who had designed the Apple I in his free time and was pleading with HP management to let him get involved in their plans to make a personal computer. They not only turned him down, they went so far as to reject his design, giving him the freedom to develop the Apple I on his own. That hurts right! Well to the HP guys, the rest is history and some lessons learnt.

The book also covers other parts of his life in the book, his failed marriages, his children, his losses from major concerts he organized and his teaching. His book is a most enjoyable and readable reminder that the folks in the engineering labs who are truly responsible for these wonderful machines may not get all the credit they have earned, but they’re still having an awful lot of fun. The highlight of the book is the frank and no-nonsense narrative that keeps you smiling throughout! Must read. iWoz: Computer Geek to Cult Icon: How I Invented the Personal Computer, Co-Founded Apple, and Had Fun Doing It

As Guy Kawasaki puts it - "Every engineer—and certainly every engineering student—should read this book….It is, in a nutshell, the engineer's manifesto"

John Grisham - The Litigators

If you're a Grisham apostate, now might be the time to get reacquainted. This unique, snappy, well-turned novel called The Litigators might be a good place to start. Grisham brings his usual nuanced understanding of tort law and civil jurisprudence, but he seems just as interested in the non-experts. 

From B&N - The story is about two middle-aged lawyers "Finley & Figg" who are just getting by. Oscar Finley and Wally Figg qualify as the ambulance chasers, specialists in hapless shoplifting defendants and no-fault divorce cases. Then one day, while they're wading through yet another mundane day of paper-pushing in their modest Chicago office, everything changes forever. Their opportunity comes in the form of a class action lawsuit against a big Pharma company who's latest cholesterol drug is killing people. The arrival of burned out fast-track attorney David Zinc to the firm takes their pick-up game to a whole new level. Before long, they are grappling with a real legal case, one that involves a $25 billion pharmaceutical corporation and a slam-dunk class action suit with infinite possibilities. What Messrs. Finley and Figg don't yet realize is that their road to riches will pit them against a legal team not accustomed to losing. John Grisham's new courtroom thriller combines realistic strategies with likeable characters. Grisham brings the story full circle when the protagonist and his rag-tag bunch of litigators take the class action all the way to the supreme court and face off against a legal team led by the same company the protagonist left. Nobody does it better. 

This is not my favorite Grisham novel but it is yet again another great Grisham read.

Steve Jobs Biography is a Book for Anyone who likes Good Stories

It is always refreshing to get a peek into something as enigmatic and as insanely private as the Life of Steve Jobs. Day before, I got my hands on both the Kindle edition as well as the Paperback of Steve Jobs, a biography by Walter Isaacson. Although the book hit the bookstores on Monday, the digital version was released earlier on Sunday and was available on iBooks online store and Amazon's Kindle ebook store to all those who pre-ordered. After a 11 round of sipping expresso and a long reading of 650+ pages back to back, I feel this book is for anyone who likes to read Good stories. Here's my review on one of the best biographies I have read!

What I liked about the Book

- This book is for Everyone - techies and nontechies alike.

- The book provides a different perspective at the professional and personal life of one of the men who have changed the world of computing as we know it.

- Reflects the passion, psychologically-savvy thinking of Jobs and how he believed in keeping things simple yet most effective

- Fascinating to read how Steve looked at the stormy, often difficult relationship with the business world of Silicon Valley partners and rivals, and how Jobs communicated his key business beliefs.I also enjoyed the anecdotes and conversations between Silicon Valley giants.

- The Flash war, disapproval of Android and how Jobs acknowledged the Antennagate mistake when he heard someone quoting "Apple was becoming the new Microsoft"

- Jobs plans of delving into textbook industry and how he wanted to change the way we see Television, providing the simplest possible interface.

- Interesting stories like the New Spaceship Headquarter plans, a four-story, circular building with a massive interior courtyard on a 150-acre piece of landscape and how his son disapproved of the intial design.

What I did not like about the Book

- The Binding and Paper could be better

-  Kindle edition could be cheaper

Some facinating details I learnt about Steve

"We all have a short period of time on this earth. We probably only have the opportunity to do a few things really great and do them well. None of us has any idea how long we're going to be here nor do I, but my feeling is I've got to accomplish a lot of these things while I'm young"

- Steve frequently visited a restaurant in 80's owned by his biological father. At that time, neither of them knew they were related

- Steve stopped going to the church at 13 after he saw the images of starving children in Life magazine

- Apple Designer Jony Ive was Steve's spiritual partner and one of the most important people in Steve's life.

- Steve would have been a Poet in Paris if he hadn't started Apple

- Bill Clinton had called up Steve for his advice during Monical Lewinsky's scandal. Jobs had adviced the president, "I don't know if you did it, but if so, you've got to tell the country."

- Jobs hated Eric Schmidt. According to him, Eric had stolen iPhone's interior design to make Android.

- Jobs thought Bill Gates to be unimaginative and one without the power to invent. However Bill Gates was one person he wanted to meet before he died.

- Jobs decided to build a spaceship-like campus since his son did not like the first design

- 'Apps' was one of the prime reasons why Apple gadgets including iPad was accepted so well. Steve was against the idea of Apps until Apple employee Art Levinson changed his mind.

- Steve had requested Walter Issacson for an 'Awesome Book Cover'. Walter delivered :)

As Jay put it "Steve was the man who transformed the way we Connect, Consume and Communicate". R.I.P. Steve!

Go, Buy the Book! Steve Jobs Biography

Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire

In a biting biography and computer-industry expose, two Seattle Post-Intelligencer journalists here relate in dramatic detail how a moody, computer-dazzled prep-school whiz kid, a Harvard dropout at age 19, formed his own company, now Microsoft Inc., with a few friends. They developed and marketed in aggressive style a series of personal-computer software applications and operating systems, the phenomenal sales of which by some accounts have made 37-year-old William H. Gates Jr. the richest person in America.

This book also talks about the Federal Trade Commission's recent investigation of Microsoft for possible antitrust violations. The authors present a history of developments in the computer and software industry and the relationships among notable companies, including IBM, Microsoft, and Apple. Daniel Ichbiah and Susan L. Knepper's 


Peek-A-Book

As Robert Crawford puts it - While a student at Harvard in December, 1974, Bill Gates III and Paul Allen informed Ed Roberts by telephone that they had invented a BASIC computer language for the MITS Altair 8080, which was the first "personal computer" kit for hobbyists. Could they license it along with each Altair kit, Gates asked to customers, for a royalty fee? It was an audacious proposal, because not only had Gates and Allen invented no such thing, but they neither owned an Altair kit nor did they even know the technical specifications for the Intel 8080 chip. Skeptical of their claim, Roberts replied that whoever demonstrated a working BASIC would win the account: Gates and Allen were in competition, he told them, with 50 other "geeks" who already had made the same claim. Gates and Allen then hunkered down for 8 weeks to write the first BASIC for a microcomputer. The resulting "software", which immediately won over Roberts, was the first application of what would become Microsoft BASIC. Gates was 19. 

As the company founders, Gates and Allen shared a vision that virtually every home and every office desk would eventually have a PC on them, all operating with their software. To run Microsoft full time, Gates dropped out of Harvard in January, 1977. Their business quickly expanded beyond the Altair as competing brands of personal computers emerged, including the Tandy from Radio Shack and the Apple II computer; they were also called upon to program BASIC into a number of other electronic devices. All along, Gates' goal was to gain market share, in effect setting the software standard for most, if not all, PC users. As a true believer who intimately knew the product, Gates was the principal salesman, while Allen concentrated on technical development. 

During this formative period, Microsoft's corporate culture was established. Perhaps as a result of hiring many of his programmers straight out of university, Microsoft's offices (and later the campus in Redmond, Washington) took on the look and feel of a college campus, that is, an informal and a freewheeling intellectual atmosphere with "late hours, loud music, walls full of junk, anything goes dress, Coke, adrenaline, unbuttoned behavior." Employees tended to be very young with a programmer or engineering mentality; they designed their products for tech-savvy customers - male in their early 20s - like themselves, a kind of fellowship for computer adepts. Like Gates, they loved to play with and program electronic gadgets. 

Microsoft hired the brightest programmers with demonstrated practical abilities. Employees were also expected to work extremely long hours as a team toward a common goal, not as strident individualists. Gates encouraged them to develop their entrepreneurial passions, forcefully advancing their own ideas of useful products for new markets. Overseeing it all was Gates, who gained the reputation of a harsh and challenging critic with a relentless drive for excellence, whether to beat the competition or out of fear of falling behind in such a fast-changing industry. As the sole remaining founder after Allen's departure in 1983, Gates remained deeply involved in both technical and business details as well as the general direction of company strategy. Nonetheless, as the principal revenue generators, Microsoft's product groups increasingly became the seats of decision-making power, in spite of Gates' active engagement. 

At the end of 1979, Microsoft had $US 4 million in sales. Most of these revenues came from BASIC, which enabled programmers to create applications, such as word processing and accounting spread sheets. The level below BASIC and the other languages under development at Microsoft was the computer operating system, which performed the most elementary tasks required to run computers. With the prospect of providing software to IBM for the basic PC it was planning to market for a reasonable price, Gates and Allen began to acquire the rights to, and then develop, software for a computer operating system. Known later as DOS, it again set an industry standard that would enable Microsoft to efficiently develop languages and software applications in a single engineering environment rather than painstakingly customize them for a variety of incompatible operating systems. This would immensely simplify Microsoft's programming process as well as enhance its efficiency. 

As Gates foresaw, this was a near-ideal position to occupy at the moment that the PC market was poised to grow explosively with the introduction of the inexpensive IBM PC, which was made of off-the-shelf components and hence easy to copy, or "clone". With the dual ownership of DOS and several major programming languages, Microsoft became one of the fastest growing companies in the world. By 1985, just prior to its IPO, on revenues of $US 140 million, Microsoft had a pre-tax profit margin of approximately 34%, no long-term debt, and cash reserves of $US 38 million. By 1987, the company surpassed Lotus to become the world's largest software vendor for PCs. Gates was on his way to become the richest man in the world, at least for a time. 

However, the ownership of DOS and the programming languages would also, critics later claimed, confer an "unfair advantage" on the company. First, the Microsoft applications groups were accused to obtaining "inside information" from the operating systems group, which enabled them to design their products to function more quickly and smoothly than competitors could. Second, because each change in DOS required competitors to supply their latest products to Microsoft programmers to ensure compatibility, critics charged that this amounted to an inside peek into their strategy at the cutting edge of their capabilities. It was a symbiotic relationship that made many outside vendors - independent companies developing applications to run on Microsoft operating systems -uneasy and resentful. Third, DOS programmers were accused by rivals of inserting "hidden bugs" into the operating system in order to hinder the function of competing products, such as the Lotus spread sheet, damaging their competitive position and brand. The resulting negative publicity did a great deal of damage to the Microsoft brand, which began to be seen as the industry bully. 

While Gates insisted that he had erected a "Chinese Wall" between Microsoft's applications division and its Operating System's Group, it was not enough to deter the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) from opening a probe into the company for anti-competitive practices that purportedly hurt consumers. By 1991, when the FTC probe became widely known, Microsoft controlled one-quarter of the applications market and dominated the operating systems market with Windows. There was speculation about the imminent breakup of Microsoft into separate companies for these markets, similar to the dismantlement of AT&T. For their part, defenders of Microsoft argued that it was winning because it was better and smarter, presenting its customers with superior products at bargain prices. 

This is an excellent early history, but not with all the details. However, in my opinion this is one of the best books i have read.

Highly Recommended! Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire

Dreams From My Father

As written by Ashden

"Dreams from my Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance" is a memoir written by Barack Obama first published in 1995. It became a US bestseller and was reissued in 2004.   

This moving memoir is a picture of a young black American (Barack Obama) in search of his identity, a belonging, in a white American community. His journey is about himself as he painlessly takes his readers with him to find that identity.

Obama was born in 1961 to a white mid-western American woman and a black Kenyan student who came to the US to study. He was reared in Hawaii by his mother and her parents as his father left the family to pursue further studies back to Africa. 

As a youth, although not lonely, Obama experienced that voyage to racial awareness, school tensions, along with his lessons in black literature taught in a white community.                       

The recounting of this emotional yet unsentimental odyssey of Obama's search for identity begins in New York when Obama learns that his father, he never knew as a man but more of a myth, has been killed in a car accident in Kenya. This event motivated him to pursue an emotional journey - first to a small town in Kansas, from which he retraces the migration of his mother's family to Hawaii, then to his childhood home in Indonesia, then finally to Kenya, where he meets the side of his father's family. In Kenya he finds out the harsh realities of his father's life, and ultimately, reconciles himself to his divided loyalties, heritage and culture.   

The title "Dreams from my Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance" is clearly significant and compellingly apt in its telling: first, as a growing young black American, then having to confront the challenge of defining himself in white America; second, his work as a black American leader in Chicago community; and third, idealizing the father he never knew; and ultimately, reconciling with his own discovery of who his father and grandfather really are.   

It's a poignant, heartwarming and probing memoir - the search for identity, and more, what it means after finding it. Brilliantly written.

The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin

I've always been fascinated by Benjamin Franklin since my school days. No matter which way you look at him, he was a great, smart American. I love the stories and folktales about him, his life and his wonderful words and sayings. This autobiography of his life was written by Ben Franklin when he was sixty-five. It was written in letter format to his son, and it he reminiscences about his eventful early life. Throughout we see Benjamin's powerful literary style and his great humour.

Written in a seemingly desultory manner, Franklin tells about his life from his beginnings in Boston to his contributions to science and the enlightenment. I found the first half of the book (Franklin's account of having come to the colonies as a young man, and his various trials in making his way in the world) quite fascinating. I was a little disappointed later because there was no writing about the American revolutionary war or the drafting and formation of the American Constitution or a detailed account of his discovery of Electricity -three things that Franklin is known for. However, this book does shed light on the American spirit.

If you enjoy history, this Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin is still well worth a visit if only to get a first-hand look at a very colourful historical American. Franklin has a way with words, and I recommend a version that is not updated for the modern reader, as the differences in spelling and grammar lend quite a bit of charm.