Had Scott Johnson not died violently in Sydney in 1988, his big brother Steve might have written a different book about their lives: the adventures of two American boys who grew up dirt-poor, “Dickensian urchins in the California sun”, who scaled mountains together and forged long and dazzling careers, the younger as a maths wunderkind, the elder building a multi-million-dollar fortune as a global pioneer among the super geeks.

All of that, except for Scott’s long career, does appear in the book that Steve Johnson is now releasing,........

© The Sydney Morning Herald