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By Root 403 0

to a ceiling carrying grimy pipes and dusty neon lights. Hundreds of thousands of parts filled bins fashioned out of old cardboard cartons. Some of the cartons sprouted spasticated leads. Resistors lay packed in rolls while there were entire shelves devoted solely to capacitors. The more expensive pieces of equipment were housed in glass cases or along more hallowed aisles. Some had exotic names like the Leeds and Northrup Speedomax and the Honeywell Digitest. Even generators, which convert mechanical energy into electrical energy, had as many varieties as the rose: signal and sweep, multisweep, ligna sweep, and (a hybrid) varisweep. According to one frequent visitor, wandering around a surplus store like Haltek “was like walking around an immense tool kit. It gave you an idea of what was possible.” It was also a place where the engineers came to hear about the reputations of machines that needed piano movers and others that were lighter than a leaf.

Jobs spent some weekends working behind the counter at Halted Specialties located in Sunnyvale. He became familiar with the value and going rate for parts ranging from the latest semiconductor chips to measurement instruments. At one point he astonished Wozniak when the pair spent a Saturday morning sorting through the pickings at the San Jose Flea Market, a vast combination of garage sale and country fair which seemed to attract every scavenger south of San Francisco. Jobs bought some transistors which he later resold—at a profit—to his boss at Halted. Wozniak recalled: “I thought it was a flaky idea but he knew what he was doing.”

But there was a lot more to Jobs’s life than electronics. He was curious and adventurous and open to the sensations of life. He spent as much time dabbling with artistic and literary pursuits as he did with frequency counters and laser beams. He was attracted by literature and classic movies, studied some Shakespeare, idolized his English teacher, and was enchanted with movies like The Red Balloon. When swimming practice started to devour too much of his time, he quit and took up water polo but abandoned that when the coach encouraged him to knee opponents in the groin. “I wasn’t a jock. I was a loner for the most part.” Some high-school contemporaries, like Stephen Wozniak’s younger brother, Mark, thought Jobs was “really strange.” For a time he played the trumpet in the school marching band.

With a few friends he formed an offbeat group called the Buck Fry Club whose name could be unraveled into an obscene message. They painted a toilet seat gold and cemented it on a planter and they hoisted a Volkswagen Beetle onto the roof of the school cafeteria.

At the end of Jobs’s junior year he, Wozniak, and Baum engineered a stunt for the graduating class: a king-sized sheet, tie-dyed in the school’s green and white colors, which unfurled down the side of a building to reveal a giant hand giving a time-honored gesture. Baum’s mother painted the hand, having been told that it was a Brazilian good-luck sign. At the bottom of the sheet the three combined their initials! SWABJOB PRODUCTIONS. It wasn’t long after Jobs was summoned to the principal’s office to do some explaining that Paul Jobs arrived to act a counsel for the defense.

Steven Jobs also ventured farther afield in both body and spirit. The arrival of his first car, a red Fiat coupe that Paul Jobs considered small, cramped and unreliable, made it easier to leave Los Altos. Jobs found that his car let him visit friends. Unlike many high-school students—when a difference of a year seems like a decade—Jobs was friendly with people several years his senior. A couple were students at Berkeley while one or two others attended Stanford. Jobs took to driving his temperamental car across San Francisco Bay to Berkeley and he also liked lingering around the Stanford University coffee shop. The forays into a larger world broadened his general interest. He started to experiment with sleep deprivation and several times stayed up for a couple of consecutive nights. He started smoking marijuana and