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“He doesn’t want photographs right now,” she said.

The Stanford University dormitory lounge looked like a poorly lit set for a nineteenth-century Gothic romance. Imitation-marble plinths sagged above the radiators, gilt-edged chandeliers threw yellow shadows across a ceiling painted crème de menthe. Branches of trees, thinned by fall, brushed in a drafty dusk against the windowpanes. A hundred or so freshmen, most of whom seemed to possess an earnest desire to graduate, were folded in various states of repose. A couple were fidgeting with small tape recorders. They had come to listen to Steve Jobs. The informality did not extend to the three women from the Regis McKenna Public Relations Agency who perched at the rear of the room. They had helped select the students’ invitation from among the two dozen or so requests that Jobs received every week. The youngest of the trio had not met Jobs before, but monitored him with marital familiarity and clucked to a magazine photographer, “He isn’t in a good mood. He doesn’t want photographs right now.”

For the students the chairman of Apple Computer was a welcome break from the diet of familiar college administrators and professors they had been fed on previous occasions. Jobs was dressed with formal indifference in a well-cut cotton sports coat and jeans: chest courtesy of San Francisco clothier Wilkes Bashford, legs furnished by Levi Strauss. While a student made some introductory remarks Jobs shucked his jacket, tugged off a pair of worn corduroy boots which revealed a pair of argyle socks, and took up a lotus position on a coffee table.

The students seemed a touch intimidated but the line of questions quickly showed that the subject under inspection possessed, in their eyes, the same molecular structure as Apple Computer. Jobs used the questions to give a seductive talk which, with slight variations, served as his standard speech for magazine editors, congressional committees, state commissions, business school students, electronics conventions, politicians, and visiting academics. It explained part of the reason for Apple’s popular appeal and why Jobs, some months before, had made the cover of Time. It was a cross between technological evangelism and corporate advertisement and Jobs busily juggled the roles of standard bearer and corporate promoter.

He told how Apple got started. “When we first started Apple we really built the first computer because we wanted one.” Then he said, “We designed this crazy new computer with color and a whole bunch of other things called the Apple II which you have probably heard about.” He added, “We had a passion to do this one simple thing which was get a bunch of computers to our friends so they could have as much fun with them as we were.”

Suddenly the magazine photographer’s light flashed and Jobs asked, “What’s that?” and provoked a barrel of snickers. The photographer crouched near a pillar and raised her camera. Jobs paused and stared into the lens and said, “Hi!” and the questions stopped. When they resumed a student wanted to know when the company stock would rise. “I cannot talk about that,” he said demurely. He said that he hoped Apple would someday sell half a million computers a month. “It’s still kind of a pain in the ass to use a computer.” He told the students about the company’s Lisa computer, disclosed his dream of putting a computer in a book, and promised, “We won’t put garbage in a book because our competitors will do that.”

He proceeded to tell the students about his plan to give a computer away to every high school in the country. Cynics said that it was a cold marketing ploy to produce generations of Apple users, but at the start it had been a romantic gesture. The plan was formally called The Technology Education Act of 1982, but at Apple it had become known as the “Kids Can’t Wait” program and reflected Jobs’s impatience to get things done. On his first serious excursion, he had spent a couple of months lobbying congressmen,