This charming personal memoir records, in extreme detail, what the author wishes to reveal about his life from 1950 to 2005. Although rambling, and clearly assembled from many long oral recitations, it is, as the author intended, entertaining. Wozniak has four purposes: to record his version of his life, to name and honor his mentors, to correct some previously published stories about him, and to stimulate young people whose talents and interests are somewhat like his own. His advice is that they should follow their hearts, and go for it.

Wozniak was a prodigy who was shoved into electronics by his father. He was bored in high school and college, where he devised electronic tone generators that could trick the phone companies into allowing free long-distance calls. Here, he hooked up with Steve Jobs, who showed him that these boxes were more than clever pranks: they could be sold. After college, Wozniak joined Hewlett-Packard, then still operating under the paternal style of its founders. He says that it was a wonderful place for engineers. Here, he dabbled with early versions of the personal computer. He reunited with Jobs, left Hewlett-Packard, and together the two Steves founded Apple Computer. By early 1976, Wozniak had completed the design of the Apple I, and the pair had their first big order. Woz recreates the heady atmosphere of the San Francisco Bay area of those days, when 100 new and better computers bloomed on each new chip, and then faded away. At this time, Wozniak believed that the most important function of personal computers was to allow better and more elaborate computer games.

As Apple prospered, it became like other successful firms, and grew unfriendly to employees who were freewheeling prankster inventors. Wozniak stayed on as a lone engineer, without any management responsibilities. He continues on the Apple payroll today, with a tiny paycheck.

Now immensely rich, Wozniak tried many things: he sponsored benefit rock concerts, he taught at a public school, he married three times, and he returned to Berkeley to get his computer engineering degree (using, as an assumed name, Rocky Raccoon Clark, a combination of his dog’s name and that of his fiancée).

Wozniak succeeds in his basic aim of giving advice to young engineers. He corrects and amplifies, with names and dates, accounts of almost all of the major computer events in which he took part. The chief omission from his story is a full and frank picture of his great business collaboration with Steve Jobs.

The lack of an index is inexcusable in a book about computing by an admitted geek. However, I recommend this book as an interesting story, as a contribution to the history of computing, and as a correction of some previously published Apple history stories. Most importantly, I recommend this book as an under-the-covers bedtime book for incipient young inventors.