Steve Jobs Declines to Write Forward to Wozniak's Autobiography

by , 2:55 PM EDT, April 14th, 2006

Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak revealed during a Q&A with Seattle Times reporter Kim Peterson that he asked Steve Jobs to write the foreword to his upcoming autobiography but Mr. Jobs declined. "I don't know why because I'm nice to him, so there must have been something he didn't like," he said.

Mr. Wozniak said that Mr. Jobs "had indicated he'd write a forward. But he'd never written a forward before and I said, 'Just write what we were like back then.' We sent him the book and he said, 'Oh, I saw some excerpts, and I'm going to decline writing the forward.'"

"I was a little disappointed," Mr. Wozniak admitted. He said that readers "can expect stories about what really happened, how things were really done, key elements of it."

This isn't the first time Mr. Jobs has taken exception to a book. Last year, Apple pulled all of John Wiley & Sons' books from its retail stores because it was upset over the unauthorized biography iCon Steve Jobs: The Greatest Second Act in the History of Business. The company declined then to say why it did so.

Mr. Wozniak was also asked about Boot Camp, to which he replied: "I don't think anything of it at all. You know, people say a bunch of PC people will now buy Macs. No. What I really want is just a window that I can go back and forth instantly. I don't have to reboot. I go to Macintosh, I go to the PC, I go to Macintosh, so right now I use 'Virtual PC.' It's a program on the Mac that emulates a PC but it's slow."

Mr. Wozniak was in Seattle to speak to a University of Washington class attended by his goddaughter. He spent 45 minutes telling the students about his early days at Apple. Afterward, the professor told Ms. Peterson: "I want every student in the class to say, 'I can do what Steve Wozniak did.'"