Despite occasional pretension to the contrary, we’re a bookwormish bunch at Kosmix. More than once I’ve watched folks lugging a stack of books from the library across the street, and several Kindles float around the office amongst those on the tech bleeding edge. I thought it might be useful to share a fascinating tome I’m buried in: “West of Eden: The End of Innocence at Apple Computer”.

Oh, did I mention that a few of us are also certified Apple fanboys? They haven’t issued my membership card yet, but I’ve certainly not given up hope. In the meanwhile, I’m killing two birds with one stone/book.

West of Eden discusses the tumultous 80s at Apple, in Silicon Valley and in the computer industry in general. It chronicles the launch of the Apple II, the launch of the Macintosh, the failure of Lisa, the defrocking of Steve Jobs in 1985 and lots of other details that follow therefrom.

If you work in tech or in Silicon Valley, some of the nuggets – the pirate flag outside the Mac building, say – are part of industry lore. But Frank Rose, the writer, conducted interviews with 100 Apple employees from the period, including Steve Jobs, John Sculley, Bill Campbell, Woz and other early timers. The result is a book that is far richer in detail and texture than any story you’ve heard while waiting in line at the Apple store the night of the iPhone launch (yes, I have pictures to prove I was there. Don’t judge).

But the best parts of the book are great by a happy accident of time and progress. The book was published in 1989 and whole paragraphs of the book read like they were written in the Dark Ages. Did you know, for example, that the first Macintosh of 1984 had no hard disk? The designers explicitly chose not to put one in because, um, who would want one at the additional cost?

I also love that the book expends a whole chapter – tens of pages! – on the subject of Lisa’s floppy disk drives, a topic that would definitely lull anyone under ten right to snoring slumber. It starts with an “explanation” of what floppy disk drives are and goes downhill from there. Go ahead, laugh, I’ll wait for you.

You also see the initial signs of Steve Jobs’ idiosyncratic but eventually correct notions of perfection in product design. As early as 1983, Steve had declared that Apple computers would have no fans for cooling and any computer that had one was “ipso facto a piece of shit”. If you’ve ever had a conversation over the drone of a computer fan gone wild, you appreciate the man’s foresight and stubborn vision.

The Macintosh launch was a seminal industry event; 15 million dollars were spent to do 20 page advertising inserts in Newsweek, Time and other magazines. What?! A 20 page ad to discuss a computer? Computers in 1984 must have made toast and levitated to have required such erudition (I kid, of course). And I won’t even go into the book’s discussion of the “1984″ ad. You read it yourself.

The final fascinating thread that continues through the book is Apple’s fear of Big Blue IBM. Hell, they even organized a sales conference of thousands of reps around the theme “BlueBusters” as a parody of the Ghostbusters movie. When was the last time you heard people talk about IBM like they were Voldemort?

I leave you, then, with a link to the Amazon page for the book. Read it.