Insanely Great by Steven Levy is a book that I picked up at a Half Price Books in Indianapolis a couple of years ago. I had previously read Crypto and The Perfect Thing, both by Steven Levy, and I enjoyed them. Although I never owned a Mac when this book was published (or re-published, since the version I read had two Afterwords), I have owned and used Macs regularly since 2004. I always had a strong interest in reading it, but somehow never got around to doing so.

Steve Jobs died this week, and my interest in the book changed. I’m not sure when I started it, but it must have been sometime Thursday evening. I finished it this past Saturday.

The book is a wonderful combination of both its title and its subtitle. The title comes from Steve Jobs’s desire to one-up the development of the Apple Lisa, which was just a ‘great’ computer. Steve wanted the Macintosh to be ‘insanely great’ and much of the book focuses on Steve Jobs’s influence on the development of computers at Apple. The subtitle of the book is “The Life and Times of the Macintosh, the Computer That Changed Everything,” and the remainder of the book focuses on illuminating just how important the Macintosh was to computing.

The ‘title’ part of this book is easier to believe than the ‘subtitle’ part. Steve Jobs clearly had a profound influence on the development of the Macintosh. Many of the quotes from those who were interviewed for the book point to Jobs as the largest individual influence on the development of the Macintosh. It’s worth noting that this book was originally published in 1994, prior to Steve Jobs’s return to Apple as CEO. Thus, it wasn’t possible for Levy to be influenced by Jobs’s success in turning Apple around.

It’s difficult to evaluate the ‘subtitle’ part of the book because history doesn’t always allow us to identify exactly why something happened. It’s certainly true that everything changed, but it’s not certain that the Macintosh was the reason for that change. If the Macintosh had never been developed, the desktop metaphor and the mouse could still have become the dominant paradigm for computing. The Macintosh was the first commercially-available personal computer that used these devices, and it also demonstrated them to be successful.

Unfortunately, there’s no way to prove that these concepts would have failed without the Macintosh to popularize them. As Insanely Great mentions, both of the desktop metaphor and the mouse were originally developed elsewhere in the computing industry. Obviously, these concepts were a big part of the success of personal computers. Historians are simply left to assign credit where credit is due. Levy clearly places the lion’s share of that credit on the Macintosh.

Levy includes quite a bit of material from his numerous interviews with many of the people who were involved with the development of the Macintosh. These are quite fascinating, and they definitely provide some insight into the thought process that went into the creation of the Mac.

Levy also includes some of his own personal observations of computing. In fact, the last official chapter of the book details some of his own problems using a Macintosh to write the book itself. These anecdotes range from interesting insights to rather bland, subjective commentary. I sort of wished that Levy kept the focus on the Mac and the people who developed it. Still, if an author is going to provide an opinion, I would prefer that they do so directly rather than try to embed it into the rest of the story.

Overall, I would recommend Insanely Great to anyone interested in the early history of the personal computer. Although, I thought Crypto was definitively better and The Perfect Thing was somewhat better, Insanely Great is still a extremely well-written, easy to read, and enjoyable. Lastly, for anyone else waiting for Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs, this is a quick read that may alleviate some of the wait.