I thought this was a nicely told story of the birth of Apple and the birth of the personal computer interwoven with the personal story of Apple's co-founder Steve Wozniak, the creator of the original Apple I and Apple II computers. As an engineer myself and as someone who is pretty much unfamiliar with the details of the Apple origins story I found it inspirational to get into the mind of a real engineer's engineer, to read what it takes to be a real good inventor and creator. I liked the book as a whole but if there's one chapter that really stood out for me it was the first and the impact that Steve's father had on him through exposure to electronics from a really young age. It's a good life lesson that it's not just what we build in terms of electronics and software that's important but also how we teach and inspire the younger generation to succeed us.
Below are some quotes from the book:
"He [my father] never started out by trying to explain from the top down what a resistor is. He started from the beginning, going all the way back to atoms and electrons, neutrons, and protons. He explained what they were and how everything was made from those. I remember we actually spent weeks and weeks talking about different types of atoms and then I learned how electrons can actually flow through things – like wires. Then, finally, he explained to me how the resistors work – not by calculations, because who can do calculations when you're a second grader, but by real common sense pictures and explanations. You see, he gave me classical electronics training from the beginning. For engineers, there's a point in life when you understand things like how a resistor works. Usually it comes much later for people than it did for me. By the fourth grade, I really did understand things like that."
"But even with all of this – all the lessons and explanations a kid could understand – I want to tell you about the single most important lesson he taught me. Because this is what I have always hung on to, more than even the honesty thing. He drilled into me what it means to be an engineer. What I am talking about is what it means to be an engineer's engineer. A serious engineer. I so clearly remember him telling me that 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."
"... I remember watching all those engineers who just wanted to do the technical side, to just put some chips together so the design worked. But I wanted to put chips together like an artist, better than anyone else could in a way that would be the absolute most usable by humans. That was my goal when I built the first computer, the one that later became the Apple I. It was the first computer to use a keyboard so you could type into it, and the first to use a screen you could look at."
"We [my and my parents] had discussions about science and truth and honesty, the first discussions of many that formed my values. And what he [my father] told me was, he just wanted things to be testable. He thought that to see if something is true, the most important thing is to run experiments, to see what the truth is, and then you call it real."
"For me it's the engineering, not the glory, that's really important."
"Sometimes I think, Man, I lucked out. It seems like I was just pointed in such a lucky direction in life, this early learning of how to do things one tiny little step at a time. I learned not to worry so much about the outcome, but to concentrate on the step I was on and to try and to do it as perfectly as I could when I was doing it. Not everyone gets this in today's engineering community, you know. Throughout my career at Apple and other places, you always find a lot of geeks who try to reach levels without doing the in-between ones first, and it won't work. It never does. That's just cognitive development, plain and simple. You can't teach somebody two cognitive steps above from where you are – and knowing that helped me with my own children as well as with the fifth graders I taught later on. I kept telling them, like a mantra: One step at a time."
"If you read the same things as other and say the same things they say, then you're perceived as intelligent. I'm a bit more independent and radical and consider intelligence the ability to think about matters on your own and ask a lot of skeptical questions to get at the real truth, not just what you're told it is"
"I think most people with day jobs like to do something totally different when they get home. Some people like to come home and watch TV. But my thing was electronics projects. It was my passion and it was my pastime. Working on projects was something I did on my own time to reward myself, even though I wasn't getting rewarded on the outside, with money or other visible signs of success."
"When I look back, I see that all these projects, plus the science projects I did as a kid and all the stuff my dad taught me, were actually threads of knowledge that converged in my design of the first and second Apple computers."
"I wanted to be like my dad, I remember his conversations with me; he would always point out all sides of an issue. I would know what he thought about it, but he would let me come to my own decisions, which very often turned out to be like his. He was a very, very good teacher. So I intended to be that way, too."
