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Best known for founding Apple Computer, Steve Wozniak's autobiography isn't the most masterful of books but it reflects its author's restless inventiveness, says JD Bierdorfer

An autobiography tends to be a fairly emotional narrative for many authors. Leave it to an engineer, however, to write a memoir that includes a nine-page technical glossary to define terms like "logic gate" and "hexadecimal".

As the books unwieldy subtitle announces, iWoz is a rambling stroll down memory lane by Steve Wozniak, the computer wizard best known for founding Apple Computer back in the mid-1970s with the company's current chief executive, Steven P Jobs. Wozniak's childhood in Sunnyvale, California and his work designing computers make up the bulk of the book, but he also recounts his adventures as a concert promoter, the creator of the Bay Areas first Dial-a-Joke hotline, a San Jose philanthropist, the inventor of the first universal remote control and a fifth-grade teacher.

"I can tell you almost to the day when the computer revolution as I see it started," Wozniak writes halfway through the book, when he is still working days at Hewlett-Packard. According to Woz, it was at the first meeting of "a strange, geeky group of people called the Homebrew Computer Club in March 1975". That meeting inspired him to start designing the future Apple I, the first computer to feature two elements – a video screen and a keyboard – that are used everywhere to this day.

For those averse to technical terminology, iWoz can feel like a day pass to Nerd World. Despite the aid of journalist Gina Smith, the books nontechnical prose is not particularly graceful. But Wozniak points out that language was not his forte in school: "I was struggling in my head with the fact that I had been extremely smart in math and science and weaker in English and history."

There are numerous repetitions and mangled metaphors throughout the text; a particularly exuberant moment of engineering success is compared to "getting a hole-in-one from 40 feet away".

Although he's still an Apple employee (he mostly makes public appearances for the company), there are no inside development secrets of the Macintosh – the first mainstream computer to free people from code with its now familiar point-and-click interface – since Wozniak wasn't directly involved in it and left the company's day-to-day operations to pursue other interests in 1985. This revelation also makes the books title seem a bit disingenuous, as it is obviously trying to snag eyeballs with an allusion to Apple's iPod, iMac, iLife, iSight and all its other iStuff.

But it was the Wozniak-designed Apple II computer that put him and the company on the map in 1977 and it's hard not to get caught up in his excitement when reading about it firsthand because it really was a turning point down the road of modern computing. The Apple II was the first home PC to have sound, colour, high-resolution graphics and the ability to work game controllers.

However prideful he may sound when describing it, Wozniak has earned the bragging rights: PC World magazine recently named the Apple II the best personal computer of all time and "the machine that changed everything". In Insanely Great, his 1994 book about the Macintosh, Steven Levy wrote: "Wireheads and hackers were uniformly impressed by Wozniaks virtuoso design. They regarded its motherboard, the main circuit board, as a beautiful work of art."

Wozniak's timing for his own book years after his triumph feels a bit random, but he clarifies his motives in the last chapter: "At this point in my life – I'm 55 as I write this – I think it's time to set the record straight. He quickly debunks a few myths, mainly that he and Jobs were high-school classmates (they were years apart) and that they both designed Apple's first computers (Wozniak claims sole credit).

This book may not be the smoothest read in town, but it seems to accurately reflect the restless, inventive mind of its author. Budding computer-science majors, Apple afficionados and electronics buffs will find plenty to ingest here, as Wozniak recounts the inspirations and thought processes for his designs. One thing is evident after wending your way through iWoz: Steve Wozniak learned to "think different" long before the company he helped found ever started using that phrase in a marketing campaign. p

JD Biersdorfer is the production editor of the Book Review.

© New York Times