Woz: The Prodigal Son of Silicon Valley

by Doug Garr

Book Overview

Woz: The Prodigal Son of Silicon Valley, The Amazing Steve Wozniak and his Apple Computer This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0380884844
• ISBN13: 9780380884841
• Release Date: January 1984
• Publisher: Avon Books
• Length: 160 Pages
• Weight: 0.22 lbs.

Customer Reviews

WOZ the way it wuz

"WOZ: The Prodigal Son of Silicon Valley" is the best, most concise and earliest of all the books on the subject I have found. Written 10 years before the "The Mac Bathroom Reader" and 20 years before "iWOZ: How Invented the Personal Computer...", Doug Garr recorded the beginnings as if he were sitting in on everything while it was happening, capturing the environment and the active nurturing of a father and mother who gave Woz his technical skills and wild sense of humor which culminated in his designing, engineering and building the little circuit board which would become the Apple /, then Apple // computer, and the foundation of the Apple empire. The sub-title of "iWoz: How I invented the Personal Computer..." simply states that Steve Wozniak invented the personal computer. And he did! OK, so the "personal computer" was really invented at Xerox PARC but they never sold any and had they done so, you wouldn't have been able to afford one. Credentialed engineers were building personal computers in their garages, some guys even packaged and sold early attempts--for a time. That little blue Altair 8800 featured in the film "War Games" wasn't really quite up to its starring roll and I doubt whether even Woz could have coaxed such functionality from it, but Woz insisted in the beginning, on engineering the Apple // to have the expandability to run many peripherals and software such as Visicalc when it came along. When the common (cheap) cassette tape recorder proved inadequate for data storage and retrieval, Woz read a book on industrial disk drives, simplified the design and built one for the Apple //. Steve Jobs provided the vision and persistent marketing skills which transformed an idea into a corporation but absent Steve Wozniak's zeal to build an affordable personal computer for himsellf alone, we might all be gazing perpetually at the blue screen of death. This book belongs in your llibrary. so says Bill Srack and I'm never rong!