EXCLUSIVES

Apple Confidential: The Real Story Of Apple Computer > by Owen W. Linzmayer

Words by A. David Cooper

Not All Apple history books are created equal. In fact, when you get right down to it, most books about the history of Apple Computer offer stinging jabs at various figures, but fail to deliver the nit picky details that most Mac fans are longing for Apple Confidential: The Real Story Of Apple Computer Inc. by Owen W. Linzmayer (No Starch Press) delivers on all the tiny, little known facts that Mac fans obsess over.

The book starts off with the incredible revelation that Apple Computer had not two founders, but three. According to Linzmayer, one of the original founders was an older man (41 at the time of the company's inception) by the name of Ronald Gerald Wayne. The book claims that Wayne, fearing that Apple would be his third failed entrepre-neurial attempt, decided to back out of the partnership early on and sold his ten percent stake in the company back to Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs for a mere $800. Wayne says, "If Apple had failed, I would have had bruises on top of bruises. Steve Jobs was an absolute whirlwind and I had lost the energy you need to ride whirlwinds." Amazingly, when asked if he's bitter that he missed out on an opportunity that would have made him a millionaire, Wayne tells the book's author that he has no regrets.

Although packed with great information, the book's tone seems a bit schizophrenic. In one chapter, John Sculley, the man who originally ousted Steve Jobs, is depicted as enthusiastically stepping down from his role at Apple to pursue other interests, and yet in another chapter the book characterizes Sculley's departure as a situation where the company's Board of Directors "forced" him to step down. Another two- sided taste of the book is its painting of Steve Jobs as the man you love to hate, but the book alternately praises him for saving the company.

One profit/loss chart within the book even shows how Jobs fared better than his predecessors by immediately yielding higher profit margins. In the end, it seems as though Linzmayer couldn't figure out a way to be completely objective, so he decided to throw both positive and negative spins on the story, thus adding confusion to the already mysterious history of Apple Computer. But, if you can get beyond the book's two-sided tone, you'll find enough insight into the history of Apple Computer to make the book more than worth the read. www.nostarch.com Price: $17.95

Pattern Recognition > by William Gibson

Words by Chris Mace

William Gibson started the genre of Cyber-punk with his first novel, Neuromancer. Though relegated to the Sci-Fi sections in most bookstores, Gibson is well known and generally credited with coining the term, cyberspace. His eighth novel, Pattern Recognition, reached #4 in the New York Times Book Review Best Sellers List in its first week and now the father of cyber-punk stands to become the John Le Carre of the information age.

PR, is the story of Casey Pollard, a freelance marketing consultant with a third eye and a high price tag. Finishing a job in London she is hired to find the auteur of some mysterious footage that has been surfacing on the web; footage she has been obsessed with for nearly two years, along with an international cult following, that her employer wants to harness. When she cautiously accepts a corporate credit card for her pursuit, along with a cell phone and a Mac iBook that might be tapped, the globetrotting begins.

Cayce fights a narcotic strength jetlag as she slogs through 14 time zones from London to Tokyo and back, then to Russia. Her biological clock has defaulted to "Cayce Pollard Time" and her soul struggles to keep up with her: "Souls can't move that quickly, and are left behind, and must be awaited, upon arrival, like lost luggage."

PR is set in a patchwork of "mirror worlds," encountered upon waking up in a new land: "the plugs on appliances are huge, triple pronged, for a species of current that only powers electric chairs, in America . . . the covers of paperbacks look like Australian money," and price points stand out as reliable indicators of difference.

In Russia, "she stops, staring at the streetscape of this old residential neighborhood and is acutely aware of her mind doing the but-really-it's-like thing it does when presented with serious cultural novelty; but really it's like Vienna, but it isn't, and really it's like Stockholm, but it's not, really . . ."

Win, her ex-NSA father, last seen headed toward the World Trade Center on 9/11 (thankfully we don't dwell on that), taught her a bit about self defense and espionage ­ knowledge that comes in handy as help and harm come from unlikely places.

Like Cayce, we question the far-reaching plot threads and wonder how to differentiate between mere coincidences and causal links. How to discern the pattern is the trick.
www.williamgibsonbooks.com Price: $25.95 Publisher: Putnam Publishing Group