Agent Palmer

There’s something to be said for telling your story in your own words. In 2006, Steve Wozniak reached that point at age 55.

In his own words, he wrote, “I think it’s time to set the record straight. So much of the information out there about me is wrong. I’ve come to hate books about Apple and it’s history so much because of that. For instance, there are stories that I dropped out of college (I didn’t) or that I was thrown out of the University of Colorado (I wasn’t), that Steve and I were high school classmates (we were several years apart in school) and that Steve and I engineered those first computers together (I did them alone).”

An In-depth Report by Agent TBD.

How do you make a feature length film about an event that only lasted for three and a half minutes? The short answer is that you show the event twice and you don’t start the first time until about a third of the way into the film.

The better answer is that you don’t make the movie about those three and a half minutes. You make it a character study of the man who lived through that event.

“The New New Thing” by Michael Lewis is a fantastic trip through the history of Silicon Valley, and beyond that it’s the story of Jim Clark.

He starts by stating that “this book is about a search that occurs on the frontiers of economic life.” But it is also about the history of economics and the technological advancement that brings about growth and change, not just for economics and the market but for everyone.

Sometimes the story is of the game and not just in the game.

Such is the case for my favorite games Wolfenstein 3-D, Doom, Quake, I played them all and I played them a lot. On occasion I still pull out the original Quake and play away my stress by blasting monsters to bits. So I was intrigued when I learned of Masters of Doom by David Kushner about the two Johns; Carmack and Romero, who came together to create these games and more.

If you’re looking for the whole story of the personal computer or microcomputer industry, you have to read a few books. You owe it to yourself to at least cover the two diametrically opposed players in the game: Steve Jobs and Bill Gates.

I’ve read the Steve Jobs biography written by Walter Isaacson, so next up was a Bill Gates biography called Gates: How Microsoft’s Mogul Reinvented an Industry and Made Himself the Richest Man in America by Stephen Manes and Paul Andrews.