Steve Jobs- book

Steve Jobs

Rating 9 out of 10

In 1985 my little Lubbock, Texas roofing company went nuts when a huge hail storm wiped out 80% of the cities roofs.  I was getting 75-100 calls a day.  I needed some sort of computer to keep track of everything.  I had heard about these little Apple Iic computers and how easy they were to operate.  I had always been amazed by computers so I took the plunge.  I was nothing short of amazed at what this little thing would do.  It came with a Scribe printer that printed in COLOR!  Well, it did have colors.  You could print these (now) cheesy cards on the reel type paper and make the font one color and the graphic another.  At first people were impressed with my cheesy holiday cards.  Soon they figured out I was just being cheap!

I was hooked from the time I took the cool looking computer out of the box.  No internal hard drives.  Everything kept on the little 512k floppy disk!  Later I upgraded to the Apple IIgs that was even more amazing.  I paid $500 for a used 20 MEG external hard drive.  I was so excited my hands were shaking when I connected it to my computer!  I think I have owned just about every type of computer they have put out since that little Iic.  Been a fan and was always amazed.  I have been to MacWorld in San Francisco twice and was like a kid in a candy store.

Oh yeah, the book.  I tend to like biographies as a whole when I read (listen) books.  This was one I was looking forward to.  Jobs went to the author Walter Isaacson and asked him to do the book.  He told him to talk to whoever he wanted and Jobs would do nothing to censor the book before it was released.  This gives us an unvarnished look at Jobs warts and all.  We see that Jobs was a bit of a goof ball in his younger years.  Given up for adoption by his birth parents he never really gets over the abandonment feeling.  After high school he gets into dropping acid and spends a year in India studying the Zen religion.

The book outlines his being dumped by the Apple board and his successful return few years later.  With his many one on one interviews we learn some of the background on how the iPod, iPhone and iPads came to be.  He talks about how Bill Gates stole their idea for Windows.  He thinks Gates is a good guy who "got rich selling crap".

I think someone who knows little about Jobs and Apple's history would enjoy this book even more than I did.