Steve Jobs
Jobs introducing the iPhone 4 in 2010
Born Steven Paul Jobs[1]
February 24, 1955
San Francisco, California, U.S.
Died October 5, Palo Alto, California, U.S.
Resting place Alta Mesa Memorial Park
Education Reed College (no degree)
Years active 1971–2011
Known for Pioneer of the personal computer revolution with Steve Wozniak
Co-creator of the Apple II, Macintosh, iPod, iPhone, iPad, and first Apple StoreCo-founder, chairman,
and CEO of Apple Board member of The Walt Disney Company[2]
Apple Inc.
more."[10]
Childhood
I always thought of myself as a humanities person as a kid, but I liked electronics... then I read
something that one of my heroes, Edwin Land of Polaroid, said about the importance of people who
could stand at the intersection of humanities and sciences, and I decided that's what I wanted to do.
—Steve Jobs[11]
Paul Jobs worked in several jobs that included a try as a machinist,[12] several other jobs,[13] and then
"back to work as a machinist". Paul and Clara adopted Jobs's sister Patricia in 1957,[14] and by 1959 the
family had moved to the Monta Loma neighborhood in Mountain View, California.[15] Paul built a
workbench in his garage for his son in order to "pass along his love of mechanics". Jobs, meanwhile,
admired his father's craftsmanship "because he knew how to build anything. If we needed a cabinet, he
would build it. When he built our fence, he gave me a hammer so I could work with him ... I wasn't that
into fixing cars ... but I was eager to hang out with my dad."[16]
Home of Paul and Clara Jobs, on Crist Drive in Los Altos, California
The childhood family home of Steve Jobs on Crist Drive in Los Altos, California, is the original site of
Apple Computer. The home was added to a list of historic Los Altos sites in 2013.[17]
Jobs had difficulty functioning in a traditional classroom, tended to resist authority figures, frequently
misbehaved, and was suspended a few times. He frequently played pranks on others at Monta Loma
Elementary School in Mountain View. His father Paul (who was abused as a child) never reprimanded
him, however, and instead blamed the school for not challenging his brilliant son.[18] Jobs skipped the
5th grade and transferred to the 6th grade at Crittenden Middle School in Mountain View, where he
became a "socially awkward loner".[19] Jobs was often "bullied" at Crittenden Middle, and in the middle
of 7th grade, he gave his parents an ultimatum: either they would take him out of Crittenden or he
would drop out of school.[20]
The Jobs family was not affluent, and only by expending all their savings were they able to buy a new
home in 1967, allowing Steve to change schools. The new house (a three-bedroom home on Crist Drive
in Los Altos, California) was in the better Cupertino School District, in Cupertino, California.[21] The
house was declared a historic site in 2013, as the first site of Apple Computer.[17] As of 2013, it was
owned by Jobs's sister, Patty, and occupied by his stepmother, Marilyn.[22] When he was 13, in 1968,[23]
Jobs was given a summer job by Bill Hewlett (of Hewlett-Packard) after Jobs cold-called him to ask for
parts for an electronics project.[24]
Homestead High
Jobs's Homestead High School yearbook photo, 1972
The location of the Los Altos home meant that Jobs would be able to attend nearby Homestead High
School, which had strong ties to Silicon Valley.[11] He began his first year there in late 1968 along with
Bill Fernandez,[25] who introduced Jobs to Steve Wozniak, and would become Apple's first employee.
Neither Jobs nor Fernandez (whose father was a lawyer) came from engineering households and thus
decided to enroll in John McCollum's Electronics I class.[25] Jobs had grown his hair long and become
involved in the growing counterculture, and the rebellious youth eventually clashed with McCollum and
lost interest in the class.[25]
Jobs underwent a change during mid-1970. He later noted to his official biographer that "I started to
listen to music a whole lot, and I started to read more outside of just science and technology —
Shakespeare, Plato. I loved King Lear ... when I was a senior I had this phenomenal AP English class. The
teacher was this guy who looked like Ernest Hemingway. He took a bunch of us snowshoeing in
Yosemite." During his last two years at Homestead High, Jobs developed two different interests:
electronics and literature.[26] These dual interests were particularly reflected during Jobs's senior year,
as his best friends were Wozniak and his first girlfriend, the artistic Homestead junior Chrisann Brennan.
[27]
In 1971, after Wozniak began attending University of California, Berkeley, Jobs would visit him there a
few times a week. This experience led him to study in nearby Stanford University's student union.
Instead of joining the electronics club, Jobs put on light shows with a friend for Homestead's avant-garde
jazz program. He was described by a Homestead classmate as "kind of brain and kind of hippie ... but he
never fit into either group. He was smart enough to be a nerd, but wasn't nerdy. And he was too
intellectual for the hippies, who just wanted to get wasted all the time. He was kind of an outsider. In
high school everything revolved around what group you were in, and if you weren't in a carefully defined
group, you weren't anybody. He was an individual, in a world where individuality was suspect." By his
senior year in late 1971, he was taking a freshman English class at Stanford and working on a Homestead
underground film project with Chrisann Brennan.[28][29]
Around that time, Wozniak designed a low-cost digital "blue box" to generate the necessary tones to
manipulate the telephone network, allowing free long-distance calls. He was inspired by an article titled
"Secrets of the Little Blue Box" from the October 1971 issue of Esquire.[30] Jobs decided then to sell
them and split the profit with Wozniak. The clandestine sales of the illegal blue boxes went well and
perhaps planted the seed in Jobs's mind that electronics could be both fun and profitable.[31] In a 1994
interview, he recalled that it took six months for him and Wozniak to design the blue boxes.[32] Jobs
later reflected that had it not been for Wozniak's blue boxes, "there wouldn't have been an Apple".[33]
He states it showed them that they could take on large companies and beat them.[34][35]
By his senior year of high school, Jobs began using LSD.[26] He later recalled that on one occasion he
consumed it in a wheat field outside Sunnyvale, and experienced "the most wonderful feeling of my life
up to that point".[36] In mid-1972, after graduation and before leaving for Reed College, Jobs and
Brennan rented a house from their other roommate, Al.[37]
Reed College
In September 1972, Jobs enrolled at Reed College in Portland, Oregon.[38] He insisted on applying only
to Reed, although it was an expensive school that Paul and Clara could ill afford.[39] Jobs soon
befriended Robert Friedland,[40] who was Reed's student body president at that time.[41] Brennan
remained involved with Jobs while he was at Reed.
I was interested in Eastern mysticism which hit the shores about then. At Reed there was a constant
flow of people stopping by – from Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert, to Gary Snyder. There was a
constant flow of intellectual questioning about the truth of life. That was the time when every college
student in the country read Be Here Now and Diet for a Small Planet.
—Steve Jobs[42]
After just one semester, Jobs dropped out of Reed College without telling his parents.[43] Jobs later
explained this was because he did not want to spend his parents' money on an education that seemed
meaningless to him. He continued to attend by auditing his classes,[44] including a course on calligraphy
that was taught by Robert Palladino. In a 2005 commencement speech at Stanford University, Jobs stated
that during this period, he slept on the floor in friends' dorm rooms, returned Coke bottles for food
money, and got weekly free meals at the local Hare Krishna temple. In that same speech, Jobs said: "If I
had never dropped in on that single calligraphy course in college, the Mac would have never had
multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts".[45]
1974–1985
See also: History of Apple § 1971–1985: Jobs and Wozniak
I was lucky to get into computers when it was a very young and idealistic industry. There weren't many
degrees offered in computer science, so people in computers were brilliant people from mathematics,
physics, music, zoology, whatever. They loved it, and no one was really in it for the money [...] There are
people around here who start companies just to make money, but the great companies, well, that's not
what they're about.
—Steve Jobs[46]
Pre-Apple
In February 1974, Jobs returned to his parents' home in Los Altos and began looking for a job.[47] He
was soon hired by Atari, Inc. in Los Gatos, California, as a computer technician.[47][48] Back in 1973,
Steve Wozniak designed his own version of the classic video game Pong and gave its electronics board to
Jobs. According to Wozniak, Atari only hired Jobs because he took the board down to the company, and
they thought that he had built it himself.[49] Atari's cofounder Nolan Bushnell later described him as
"difficult but valuable", pointing out that "he was very often the smartest guy in the room, and he would
let people know that".[50]
Jobs traveled to India in mid-1974[51] to visit Neem Karoli Baba[52] at his Kainchi ashram with his Reed
College friend and eventual Apple employee Daniel Kottke, searching for spiritual teachings. When they
got to the Neem Karoli ashram, it was almost deserted because Neem Karoli Baba had died in September
1973. Then they made a long trek up a dry riverbed to an ashram of Haidakhan Babaji.[48]
After seven months, Jobs left India[53] and returned to the US ahead of Daniel Kottke.[48] Jobs had
changed his appearance; his head was shaved, and he wore traditional Indian clothing.[54][55] During
this time, Jobs experimented with psychedelics, later calling his LSD experiences "one of the two or three
most important things [he had] done in [his] life".[56][57] He spent a period at the All One Farm, a
commune in Oregon that was owned by Robert Friedland.
During this time period, Jobs and Brennan both became practitioners of Zen Buddhism through the Zen
master Kōbun Chino Otogawa. Jobs engaged in lengthy meditation retreats at the Tassajara Zen
Mountain Center, the oldest Sōtō Zen monastery in the US.[58] He considered taking up monastic
residence at Eihei-ji in Japan, and maintained a lifelong appreciation for Zen,[Japanese cuisine, and
artists such as Hasui Kawase.jobs returned to Atari in early 1975, and that summer, Bushnell assigned
him to create a circuit board for the arcade video game Breakout in as few chips as possible, knowing
that Jobs would recruit Wozniak for help. During his day job at HP, Wozniak drew sketches of the circuit
design; at night, he joined Jobs at Atari and continued to refine the design, which Jobs implemented on a
breadboard] According to Bushnell, Atari offered $100 (equivalent to about $600 in 2023) for each TTL
chip that was eliminated in the machine. Jobs made a deal with Wozniak to split the fee evenly between
them if Wozniak could minimize the number of chips. Much to the amazement of Atari engineers, within
four days Wozniak reduced the TTL count to 45, far below the usual 100, though Atari later re-
engineered it to make it easier to test and add a few missing features.[According to Wozniak, Jobs told
him that Atari paid them only $750 (instead of the actual $5,000), and that Wozniak's share was thus
$375.] Wozniak did not learn about the actual bonus until ten years later but said that if Jobs had told
him about it and explained that he needed the money, Wozniak would have given it to him.Jobs and
Wozniak attended meetings of the Homebrew Computer Club in 1975, which was a stepping stone to the
development and marketing of the first Apple computer.[] According to a document released by the
United States Department of Defense, Jobs claimed that in 1975, he was arrested in Eugene, Oregon,
after being questioned for being a minor in possession of alcohol. Jobs alleged that he "didn't have any
alcohol", but police questioned him, and subsequently determined that he had an outstanding arrest
warrant for an unpaid speeding ticket. Jobs claimed he then paid the $50 fine. The arrest allegedly
occurred "behind a store"
Apple Basically Steve Wozniak and I invented the Apple because we wanted a personal computer. Not
only couldn't we afford the computers that were on the market, those computers were impractical for us
to use. We needed a Volkswagen. The Volkswagen isn't as fast or comfortable as other ways of traveling,
but the VW owners can go where they want, when they want and with whom they want. The VW
owners have personal control of their car By March 1976, Wozniak completed the basic design of the
Apple I computer and showed it to Jobs, who suggested that they sell it; Wozniak was at first skeptical of
the idea but later agreed. In April of that same year, Jobs, Wozniak, and administrative overseer Ronald
Wayne founded Apple Computer Company (now called "Apple Inc.") as a business partnership in Jobs's
parents' Crist Drive home on April 1, 1976. The operation originally started in Jobs's bedroom and later
moved to the garage. Wayne stayed briefly, leaving Jobs and Wozniak as the active primary cofounders of
the company.The two decided on the name "Apple" after Jobs returned from the All One Farm commune
in Oregon and told Wozniak about his time in the farm's apple orchard.[73] Jobs originally planned to
produce bare printed circuit boards of the Apple I and sell them to computer hobbyists for $50
(equivalent to about $270 in 2023) each. To fund the first batch, Wozniak sold his HP scientific calculator
and Jobs sold his Volkswagen vanLater that year, computer retailer Paul Terrell purchased 50 fully
assembled Apple I units for $500 each.Eventually about 200 Apple I computers were produced in
total.image icon Jobs and Steve Wozniak with an Apple I circuit board, c. 1976.A neighbor on Crist Drive
recalled Jobs as an odd individual who would greet his clients "with his underwear hanging out, barefoot
and hippie-like". Another neighbor, Larry Waterland, who had just earned his PhD in chemical
engineering at Stanford, recalled dismissing Jobs's budding business compared to the established
industry of giant mainframe computers with big decks of punch cards: "Steve took me over to the
garage. He had a circuit board with a chip on it, a DuMont TV set, a Panasonic cassette tape deck and a
keyboard. He said, 'This is an Apple computer.' I said, 'You've got to be joking.' I dismissed the whole
idea." Jobs's friend from Reed College and India, Daniel Kottke, recalled that as an early Apple employee,
he "was the only person who worked in the garage ... Woz would show up once a week with his latest
code. Steve Jobs didn't get his hands dirty in that sense." Kottke also stated that much of the early work
took place in Jobs's kitchen, where he spent hours on the phone trying to find investors for the company.
[22]They received funding from a then-semi-retired Intel product marketing manager and engineer
named Mike Markkula.[79] Scott McNealy, one of the cofounders of Sun Microsystems, said that Jobs
broke a "glass age ceiling" in Silicon Valley because he'd created a very successful company at a young
age.[35] Markkula brought Apple to the attention of Arthur Rock, which, after looking at the crowded
Apple booth at the Home Brew Computer Show, started with a $60,000 investment and went on the
Apple board.[80] Jobs was not pleased when Markkula recruited Mike Scott from National
Semiconductor in February 1977 to serve as the first president and CEO of Apple.[81][82]For what
characterizes Apple is that its scientific staff always acted and performed like artists – in a field filled with
dry personalities limited by the rational and binary worlds they inhabit, Apple's engineering teams had
passion. They always believed that what they were doing was important and, most of all, fun. Working at
Apple was never just a job; it was also a crusade, a mission, to bring better computer power to people.
At its roots, that attitude came from Steve Jobs. It was "Power to the People", the slogan of the sixties,
rewritten in technology for the eighties and called
