Steve Jobs, by Walter Isaacson

Steve Jobs was an asshole. He was brutally honest, took credit for other people's work, and believed ordinary rules didn't apply to him. (My "favorite" example of this last attribute is that he never put a license plate on his car and always parked it in a handicap spot.) For someone that is renowned as an artist and visionary, he ironically saw the world in black and white: everything was either "genius" or "bullshit." Despite all this, he changed the world in a profound way that hasn't been seen since Thomas Edison.

Isaacson does an excellent job of describing this mercurial and complicated person. Jobs comes across as temperamental and unsympathetic, but his passion for his work shined through allowing his friends and employees to forgive a lot of his behavior. He had the uncanny knack of seeing to the heart of a problem, but still allowed himself to be swayed by psychics, herbal therapies and natural healers, and bizarre diets and cleanses. He raged against Microsoft and Google, often accusing them of stealing his work, when in reality he himself stole virtually everything unique about the Macintosh from Xerox. Isaacson takes the difficult task of describing an unlikable man and achieves something amazing: at the end I found myself admiring Steve Jobs.

First Sentence:

When Paul Jobs mustered out of the Coast Guard after World War II, he made a wager with his crewmates.

Accidental Empires, by Robert X. Cringley

Accidental Empires tells of the rise of software and the downfall of hardware. Companies like Microsoft, Apple, Aldus, and Adobe as well as products such as Lotus 1-2-3, WordPerfect, and IBM’s PC family all have their histories told in varying degrees of detail. Those sections are both engrossing and informative. However, when Cringley talks about the individuals involved (especially Gates and Jobs) he comes off as a bit angry; for instance, Gates’ poor personal hygiene and Jobs’ megalomania are often ridiculed—I suspect the intent was humorous but instead it seemed snarky. The book really goes off the rails, though, in the sections where the narcissistic tendencies of the author are in full force. We get Cringley’s opinions on what makes a company succeed or fail and advice for entrepreneurs. We hear many times of the greatness of InfoWorld (Cringley’s employer at the time) and which software luminaries ask Cringley for advice. We even learn his draft number for Vietnam and the fact that he wears cotton briefs instead of boxers. While I’m sure the author’s family was impressed, I wasn’t.

Last updated in 1996, this book is badly dated. NeXT is presented a viable platform, Novell “absolutely controls the PC networking business,” open computing is equated with client-server architectures, and Y2K is predicted to utterly destroy the mainframe industry. Hmmm. (The most unfortunate quote has to be, “Think of Bill Gates as the emir of Kuwait and Steve Jobs as Saddam Hussein.” Considering today’s common perception today that Microsoft is evil and Apple is visionary, this is particularly ironic.) To be fair, I imagine a book written today about current events will appear to be out-of-date in ten years so it is hard to complain too much, but it was a bit distracting.

I picked this up because I liked the subtitle: How the Boys of Silicon Valley Make Their Millions, Battle Foreign Competition, and Still Can’t Get a Date. The style implied by the cover doesn’t disappoint; I found the tone to be funny, informal, and irreverent. If you are interested in a broad overview of the history of the modern software industry, this is an excellent read. If you don’t like smug commentary, though, you might want to look elsewhere.

First Sentence:

Years ago, when you were a kid and I was a kid, something changed in America.

Revolution in the Valley, by Andy Hertzfeld

Andy Hertzfeld was one of the early Apple employees, and part of the team that gave birth to the Macintosh. Here Hertzfeld recounts the story of how that computer was developed in a series of vignettes. Interspersed with the stories are many, many pictures of both the development team (not the most attractive bunch you’ve ever seen) and Macintosh internals. The anecdotes run the gamut from deeply personal to highly technical, but all are fairly interesting.

Like Just a Geek, this is a reworking of text first found online. Unlike Just a Geek, the vignettes here weren’t reworked into a normal narrative but remain pretty much in their original form. This leads to a fair amount of redundancy, with bits of the same story told multiple times in different anecdotes. There are also a lot of see also links that refer to other stories—I found it disconcerting to find what screams for a hyperlink in a normal book. A bit odd, but overall it worked.

First Sentence:

Toward the end of my first week as an Apple employee in August 1979, I noticed that someone had left a black binder on my desk, with a handwritten title that read, Apple II: Principles of Operation.