Letters to Steve_ Inside the E-Mail Inbox of Apple's Steve Jobs - Mark Milian [2]
The story of Steve is long and involved. His biological father, Syrian immigrant Abdulfattah Jandali, impregnated Joanne Schieble before the two married, and she gave Steve up for adoption. Steve was adopted by Paul and Clara Jobs, a couple living in California’s fledgling Silicon Valley who was initially deemed by Steve’s biological mother to be unfit to raise him because they were not college-educated. The Jobses promised that they would send Steve to school when the time came. Steve attended Reed College in Portland, Oregon for one semester before dropping out because, as he had said, he did not want to waste his parents’ money, though he also had issues dealing with authority.
During the next few months, when Steve was showing up occasionally to classes he wasn’t enrolled in, he attended a calligraphy course, which he said greatly contributed to the development of graphical user interfaces. (After poring over an e-mail from Steve, John Casasanta, who runs the app developer Tap Tap Tap, noted in a conversation with me: “Interestingly, he used two spaces after each sentence. I wouldn’t have expected that from a typography geek.”) Steve had a daughter, Lisa, in his 20s, and he initially denied paternity. He later repented. In 1983, Apple released a computer called the Apple Lisa. The inspiration for the name is obvious and inextricable to the personal life of Steve Jobs, as are so many parts of the company.
This barely begins to explain why he acted his certain way or why he wore that distinct uniform or why he was such a hit maker. Adorned in his own sort of clerical garb — a black turtleneck, bluejeans and sneakers — Steve took to the stage to launch hit after hit after hit. Enough people had eaten up these slices by 2011 for Apple to briefly overtake Exxon Mobil Corporation to become the most valuable corporation in the world by market capitalization. Not bad for a business that, according to Steve, was, ninety days away from bankruptcy in the late-1990s before Steve’s return to the company he started with Steve Wozniak. The other Steve has been out of the picture for many years. In the story of Apple, Steve Jobs is the hero protagonist, the Johnny Appleseed
Well, technically, Mike Markkula, Apple’s second chief executive, went by the nickname Johnny Appleseed when credited as a software programmer. But Steve said in a 1997 interview with the New York Times about his separation from Apple that he “felt betrayed by Mike,” and so he was cast out and forgotten. That is perhaps why Mike is now rarely associated with Apple’s creation myth. The vengeful Steve made him a casualty of a necessary situation.
Despite the blockbuster introduction of the Macintosh computer in 1984 that was kicked off with a memorable Super Bowl commercial showing a woman bucking uniformity by throwing a hammer at a giant screen, Steve Jobs was forced out a year later from the company he started in his parents’ garage in 1976. Many employees disliked Steve and complained that he was a relentless tyrant of a boss; the board of directors was concerned that Steve was incapable of functioning in a mature corporation; and John Sculley, the PepsiCo president who Steve recruited to be Apple’s CEO, won a vicious power struggle over the co-founder. Mike sided with the CEO, and that’s where the betrayal set in. Still, John has been cast as a villain of sorts, while Mike, also an Apple co-founder, was swept under the rug.
“What ruined Apple was values,” Steve Jobs said in a 1995 interview with the Computerworld Honors Program. “John Sculley ruined Apple and he ruined it by bringing a set of values to the top of Apple which were corrupt and corrupted some of the top people who were there, drove out some of the ones who were not corruptible, and brought