Many of you may think that I might have happened to meet with Steve Wozniak, one of Apple’s founders, but I’m not that lucky. I bought his biography, iWoz
I’m in love with history, especially the one related to computers and the Internet. Yes, I’m a real Freak. While I am reading iWoz I realise that even if it seems that we always arrive late to revolutions, there are always revolutions to start.
Steve Wozniak was the inventor of the first personal computer with a keyboard and which could be connected to a television, the Apple I, and this was a turning point that determined history as we know it nowadays. From that point on, a flourishing industry, where we can talk about many gamers apart from Apple, IBM, Microsoft, Intel and many others you probably remember, grew up. I would like to compare that turning point with the arrival of the Internet to Spain and with how many of us began our adventure much earlier with networks as Fidonet. Even though we had Servicom, CompuServe and AOL, we are talking about 1994 approximately; we were in love with Fidonet, and its forums, its private messages and with how everything was shared. This is the seed from which a lot of Internet and technological companies have been born in Spain. I can’t set myself to remember all the names, but I have lots of friends that got started with Fidonet and that have created and still do, big projects related to the Internet. Maybe we’ll be able to deal with it in depth in another article.
The thing is that without making any spoilers, which is very difficult since we all know great part of the story, I recommend you to read not only iWoz: How I Invented the Personal Computer and Had Fun Along the Way (2013), but also the recent biography of Steve Jobs
I don’t want to talk much more about Wozniak’s book, but I want to highlight that I’ve liked his point of view, and the way in which he suggests to live, to bet on our engineers’ dreams and not to be afraid to work by ourselves. In the same way we speak about the entrepreneur’s solitude, the engineer’s solitude also exists.
I hope you like it, and of course, the links to Amazon and Fnac on this article contain my associate identifier, but it’s optional you buy it here. You can buy it in any bookshop or you can go for a walk to find the paper book. In my case it’s been the paper book this time, although I enjoy a lot my Kindle PaperWhite
Buying the books on the Internet:
- iWoz: How I Invented the Personal Computer and Had Fun Along the Way (2013) Buy it from Amazon
- Steve Jobs biography Buy it from Amazon
- Bill Gates’ books Buy it from Amazon
Here you have a list of recommended freaky books published in 2010.
Original post in Spanish by David Carrero Fernández-Baíllo and translation by Dolores María Carrero Fernández-Baíllo.