Inside Steve's Brain - Leander Kahney [2]
What a remarkable career Jobs has had. He’s making an immense impact on computers, on culture, and, naturally, on Apple. Oh, and he’s a self-made billionaire, one of the richest men in the world. “Within this class of computers we call personals he may have been, and continues to be, the most influential innovator,” says Gordon Bell, the legendary computer scientist and a preeminent computer historian.4
But Jobs should have disappeared years ago—in 1985, to be precise—when he was forced out of Apple after a failed power struggle to run the company.
Born in San Francisco in February 1955 to a pair of unmarried graduate students, Steve was put up for adoption within a week of his birth. He was adopted by Paul and Clara Jobs, a blue-collar couple who soon after moved to Mountain View, California, a rural town full of fruit orchards that didn’t stay rural very long—Silicon Valley grew up around it.
At school, Steven Paul Jobs, named after his adoptive father, a machinist, was a borderline delinquent. He says his fourth-grade teacher saved him as a student by bribing him with money and candy. “I would absolutely have ended up in jail,” he said. A neighbor down the street introduced him to the wonders of electronics, giving him Heathkits (hobbyist electronics kits), which taught him about the inner workings of products. Even complex things like TVs were no longer enigmatic. “These things were not mysteries anymore,” he said. “[It] became much more clear that they were the results of human creation, not these magical things.”5
Jobs’s birth parents had made attending college a condition of his adoption, but he dropped out of Reed College in Oregon after the first semester, although he continued to unofficially attend classes in subjects that interested him, like calligraphy. Penniless, he recycled Coke bottles, slept on friends’ floors, and ate for free at the local Hare Krishna temple. He experimented with an all-apple diet, which he thought might allow him to stop bathing. It didn’t.
Jobs returned to California and briefly took a job at Atari, one of the first games companies, to save money for a trip to India. He soon quit and headed out with a childhood friend in search of enlightenment.
On his return he started hanging around with another friend, Steve Wozniak, an electronics genius who’d built his own personal computer for fun but had little interest in selling it. Jobs had different ideas. Together they cofounded Apple Computer Inc. in Jobs’s bedroom and soon they were assembling computers by hand in his parents’ garage with some teenage friends. To fund their business, Jobs sold his Volkswagen microbus. Wozniak sold his calculator. Jobs was twenty-one; Wozniak, twenty-six.
Catching the tail of the early PC revolution, Apple took off like a rocket. It went public in 1980 with the biggest public offering since Ford Motor Company in 1956, making instant multimillionaires of those employees with stock options. In 1983, Apple entered the Fortune 500 at number 411, the fastest ascent of any company in business history. “I was worth about over a million dollars when I was twenty-three and over ten million dollars when I was twenty-four and over a hundred million dollars when I was twenty-five, and it wasn’t that important because I never did it for the money,” Jobs said.
Wozniak was the hardware genius, the chip-head engineer, but Jobs understood the whole package. Thanks to Jobs’s ideas about design and advertising, the Apple II became the first successful mass-market computer for ordinary consumers—and turned Apple into the Microsoft of the early eighties. Bored, Jobs moved on to the Mac, the first commercial implementation of the revolutionary graphical user interface developed in computer research labs. Jobs