Steven Paul Jobs was born in San Francisco on February 24, 1955.1 The circumstances of his arrival were tangled enough to belong in a novel. His biological parents — Joanne Carole Schieble, a Catholic woman of Swiss and German descent from rural Wisconsin, and Abdulfattah "John" Jandali, a Syrian-born doctoral candidate who served as her teaching assistant at the University of Wisconsin — were the same age, both twenty-three, and desperately in love.2 Walter Isaacson, Jobs' official biographer, states that Schieble's father "threatened to cut Joanne off completely" if she continued the relationship.2 When Schieble became pregnant, she arranged a closed adoption and traveled to San Francisco to give birth.3
Schieble requested that her son be adopted by college graduates.3 A lawyer and his wife had been lined up. Then, at the last moment, they changed their minds — they had wanted a girl. The baby passed instead to Paul and Clara Jobs. Paul had run into minor trouble during his military tenure and never rose above the lowest rank of Seaman. After marrying, the six-foot-tall tattooed mechanic, short on money, moved with Clara back to Wisconsin to live with her parents. After several years they relocated to Indiana where Paul worked a blue-collar job as a machinist for International Harvester. He would later quit and begin selling used cars.1 They were a hardworking, loving couple that had struggled with infertility, but they were not the college-educated couple that Schieble had been set to find for her son.4 When she learned this news, she was furious and refused to consent to the adoption. After several days and a promise to send the adopted child to college, Schieble finally agreed to sign.4
Jobs later recounted the story in his 2005 Stanford commencement address: "My parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: 'We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?' They said: 'Of course.'"5
Jobs would eventually come to refer to his biological parents as merely a "sperm and egg bank."6 He also, late in life, told Isaacson he never once felt abandoned — that Paul and Clara had looked him square in the eyes and said, slowly and with emphasis, "We specifically picked you out." The distinction between being abandoned and being chosen ran like a wire through his entire personality. He later told Isaacson: "I never wanted them to feel like I didn't consider them my parents, because they were totally my parents."3
The family moved from San Francisco when Steve was five, landing in Silicon Valley — "My parents moved from San Francisco to Mountain View," Jobs recalled, "and that was right in the heart of Silicon Valley, so there were engineers all around."7 The house on Diablo Avenue in the Monta Loma neighborhood was built in a style borrowed from modernist developer Joseph Eichler — open floor plan, walls of glass, clean lines slicing through Southern California-grade sun. Jobs would later recall that Eichler's homes "brought clean design and simple taste to lower-income people. They had awesome little features, like radiant heating in the floors."8 He told his biographer that the house greatly influenced his vision of what design for the masses should be: "I love it when you can bring really great design and simple capability to something that doesn't cost much. It was the original vision for Apple."9 He was talking about a subdivision ranch house. He was seven years old.
Paul Jobs was the other engine of his son's formation. Paul built a workbench in his garage for his son in order to "pass along his love of mechanics." Jobs 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." Jobs later clarified: "I wasn't that into fixing cars... but I was eager to hang out with my dad."3
The workbench gets told and retold, but the specifics matter. "When I was about five or six," Jobs recalled in a 1995 Smithsonian oral history, "he sectioned off a little piece of it and said, 'Steve, this is your workbench now.' And he gave me some of his smaller tools and showed me how to use a hammer and a saw and how to build things." 37 While helping his father build a fence around their home, Jobs' father told him they were going to make the back of the fence just as beautiful as the front. Confused, Jobs asked why he should bother, since nobody would know the difference. "You'd know," his father told him.10 That line — you'd know — became the philosophical bedrock of every Apple product.
As for what the garage bestowed beyond carpentry — Jobs would later explain it precisely: "This experience gave me several things. It gave me an understanding of what was inside a finished product and how it worked. But maybe even more importantly it gave one the sense that one could build things that one saw around oneself in the universe. These things were not mysteries anymore." 37
His mother Clara had taught him to read by the time he started kindergarten.11 "My mother taught me how to read before I got to school," Jobs recalled. "And so when I got there, all I really wanted to do was just two things. I wanted to read books because I love reading books and I wanted to go outside and chase butterflies." 37 The school was not prepared for him. As Jobs put it: "You should have seen us in third grade. We basically destroyed our teacher. We would let snakes loose in the classroom and explode bombs."12 Jobs was expelled — or close to it — multiple times. "I encountered authority of a different kind than I had ever encountered before, and I did not like it," he said. "And they really almost got me. They came this close to really beating any curiosity out of me." 37
Rescue arrived in the form of a woman named Imogene "Teddy" Hill. His savior was Imogene "Teddy" Hill, his fourth-grade teacher, who bribed him into doing challenging work with a giant lollipop. The bribes became unnecessary: "I just wanted to learn and to please her... if it hadn't been for her I'm sure I would have gone to jail."13 Hill would tell him, "I really want you to finish this workbook — I'll give you five bucks if you finish it." The little bribes, along with her belief in his ability, changed his study habits. He started performing brilliantly.12 Jobs later called her "one of the saints in my life." "She got hip to my whole situation in about a month and kindled a passion in me for learning things. I learned more that year than I think I learned in any year in school."12 His test scores so alarmed administrators that they wanted to skip him ahead to high school — a proposal his parents declined.11
The neighborhood that shaped him was changing too. The Jobs family was not affluent, and only by expending all their savings were they able to buy a new home in 1967 — a three-bedroom house on Crist Drive in Los Altos, California, in the better Cupertino School District.3 Around the same period, a new neighbor appeared six or seven houses down the block. The man turned out to be an engineer at Hewlett-Packard who was also a ham-radio operator, deeply into electronics. What he did to introduce himself to the neighborhood was, as Jobs later described, "a rather strange thing: he put out a carbon microphone and a battery and a speaker on his driveway, where you could talk into the microphone and your voice would be amplified by the speaker."7
The man's name was Larry Lang. Jobs proudly went home to tell his father that this man was amplifying voice with just a battery — contradicting everything Paul had taught him. His father told him he didn't know what he was talking about and they got into a very large argument. So Jobs dragged him down and showed him, and his father was "a little befuddled." That was how he got to know Larry Lang, who taught him a great deal about electronics.14
Lang built Heathkits — those products you would buy in kit form that, remarkably, cost more than the finished product if one was available.7 The point was the building itself. These kits came with detailed manuals, all the parts laid out and color-coded. You would actually build the thing yourself. As Jobs later described it, this gave you an understanding of what was inside a finished product and how it worked, and — perhaps more importantly — gave you the sense that you could build the things you saw around you in the universe. These things were not mysteries anymore.14
Lang worked at Hewlett-Packard and brought Jobs to the HP Explorer's Club, where the students met in the cafeteria and engineers talked to them about their projects: lasers, holography, light-emitting diodes. Jobs was in heaven. It was at HP that he saw his first computer.15 "I fell in love with it," he said. He was ten or eleven when he first saw a computer. It was down at NASA Ames Research Center — technically a terminal connected to a computer on the other end of a wire. "I fell in love with it."14
What followed was a cold call that would have been unthinkable from most twelve-year-olds. Jobs wanted to build a frequency counter and needed parts. He picked up the phone book, found Bill Hewlett of Hewlett-Packard listed under Palo Alto, and called him at home. Hewlett answered and was real nice. He chatted with Jobs for about twenty minutes. He didn't know him at all, but he ended up giving him some parts and got him a summer job assembling frequency counters. "Assembling may be too strong," Jobs said. "I was putting in screws. It didn't matter — I was in heaven."16
Around this time, Jobs' friend Bill Fernandez had something to show him — a washing-machine computer that an older kid in the neighborhood had built. While hanging out, Fernandez and Jobs ran into Wozniak, who was four years ahead of them. "Woz was out on the street washing his car," Fernandez recalled. "And I thought to myself, here are two electronics buddies — they might be interested in meeting each other."17 As Wozniak later described it: "We first met in 1971 during my college years, while he was in high school. A friend said, 'You should meet Steve Jobs because he likes electronics, and he also plays pranks.' So he introduced us."18 Pranks and electronics — the precise combination. Their first collaboration was a high-school prank: Jobs and Wozniak made a huge cloth poster of a hand with the middle finger raised, weighted the ends with rocks, and put it up on the roof of Homestead High. It was positioned so that during graduation, they could cut some strings to release it to roll down over the side of the building facing all the parents. It read "Best Wishes, Class of '72!" and was giving them the finger.17
Then came the blue boxes. Their first real business partnership began when Wozniak read an article titled "Secrets of the Little Blue Box" from the October 1971 issue of Esquire, which described how phone phreaks were building devices that enabled free long-distance calls.18 One day, at the back of a tech library, they found the AT&T technical journal listing all the different calling tones needed. "Way in the bowels of their technical library, way down in the last bookshelf, in the corner bottom rack, we found the AT&T technical journal that laid out the whole thing," Jobs recalled. "And when we saw this journal, we said, my God, it's all real."19 They built a box that worked. They were able to call a payphone, Wozniak's uncle, and even prank-called the Vatican impersonating Henry Kissinger.19
Jobs handled the sales of the blue boxes, managing to sell about two hundred of them for $150 each, splitting the profit with Wozniak.18 Jobs later described the lesson plainly: "It was the magic of the fact that two teenagers could build this box for a hundred dollars' worth of parts and control hundreds of billions of dollars of infrastructure in the entire telephone network in the whole world from Los Altos and Cupertino, California." Jobs later told his biographer that if it had not been for Wozniak's blue boxes, "there wouldn't have been an Apple."20 The operating principle — that a small group of people with ingenuity and nerve could reach into a massive institution and make it do something entirely new — was the principle on which Apple was built.
In the fall of 1972, Jobs enrolled at Reed College in Portland, Oregon — the one school he would consider attending, because it was not Stanford and not Berkeley and was, he later said, too artistic and interesting for the kids who already knew what they wanted to do. His parents were spending a significant portion of their life savings on his tuition at Reed.21 Like many a freshman, Jobs was intoxicated with the spirit of Reed, but intimidated by the curriculum. He took humanities, psychology, and philosophy, but was so focused on his own obsessions that he did not work hard on his studies. Feeling guilty about asking his parents to spend their savings on classes he was only sporadically attending, he dropped out.22
He did not, however, leave. Instead of moving back home, he stayed at Reed for another eighteen months as a drop-in student. Because he was no longer paying tuition, he didn't have a dorm room and often slept on the floors of friends' rooms. He returned Coke bottles for five-cent deposits to buy food and walked seven miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal at the Hare Krishna temple.23 He continued auditing classes, including Shakespeare, modern dance, and calligraphy.24
The calligraphy class was taught by Robert Palladino, a former Trappist monk who had spent eighteen years under a vow of silence before becoming the finest calligraphy instructor in the country. Palladino's first impression of Jobs: "All the other students really liked him. That surprised me, because there were all these geniuses floating around, and Steve was a dropout. But they detected greatness even then."25 As Jobs later told Stanford graduates, "Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus, every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and sans serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture."26 About two years later, Palladino recalled, "Steve came back to Reed to tell me he was working on computers out of his parents' garage. He wanted to consult with me about my Greek letters."25 The calligraphy room in Portland was, in an odd but literal sense, where the Macintosh's visual soul was formed — before Wozniak had written a line of code for it.
Jobs left the Pacific Northwest and, in mid-1974, took a job as a technician at Atari in Los Gatos — getting hired largely by showing up and refusing to leave until they gave him a position. That same year he traveled to India with his Reed College friend Daniel Kottke, searching for spiritual enlightenment at Neem Karoli Baba's Kainchi ashram.27 He arrived at the ashram only to find that the spiritual leader had passed away the previous year.28 Jobs had swapped his jeans and T-shirts for lungis as he set out from Delhi for the Himalayas. Along the way, he and Kottke slept in abandoned buildings and survived on local food.29 Having picked up lice and dysentery, they set off to see Tibet, contracted scabies near Manali, and worse — Kottke's traveler's checks got stolen, which ended their trip.27
After seven months, Jobs left India ahead of Kottke. Jobs had changed his appearance — his head was shaved and he wore traditional Indian clothing.3 During this time, Jobs experimented with psychedelics, later calling his LSD experiences "one of the two or three most important things I had done in my life."3 After returning, Jobs and his girlfriend Chrisann Brennan both became practitioners of Zen Buddhism under the guidance of Zen master Kōbun Chino Otogawa. Jobs engaged in lengthy meditation retreats at the Tassajara Zen Mountain Center, the oldest Sōtō Zen monastery in the United States.3 He eventually considered taking up monastic residence at a temple in Japan, and maintained a lifelong appreciation for Zen, Japanese cuisine, and artists such as Hasui Kawase.3 The India journey stripped illusions and left something more useful in their place: a bone-deep conviction that intuition was a form of intelligence, and that the machine in the hands of the user mattered more than the machine itself.
Back at Atari, Jobs was assigned to a problem: reduce the number of chips in the circuit board for the arcade game Breakout. According to Atari co-founder Nolan Bushnell, Atari offered $100 for each chip eliminated. Jobs had little interest in circuit board design and made a deal with Wozniak to split the fee evenly if Wozniak could minimize the chip count. Wozniak reduced the number of chips by fifty — a design so tight it was impossible to reproduce on an assembly line.30 Jobs told Wozniak they'd been paid $700 for the work. The actual check was $5,000. Wozniak didn't learn the truth for ten years.
By March 1975, Jobs had begun attending meetings of the Homebrew Computer Club with Wozniak.30 Inspired by new microcomputers like the Altair 8800, Wozniak envisioned creating his own computer, initially working on paper because the Intel 8080 and Motorola 6800 processors — costing $179 and $170 respectively — were beyond his budget. When MOS Technology released its $25 6502 chip, Wozniak's plans were set into motion. He crafted a fully functional computer around the affordable processor and wrote a version of BASIC to power it.31
By March 1, 1976, less than two months after getting married at age twenty-five, Wozniak had completed the basic design of his computer and proudly showed it off at the Homebrew Computer Club meetings. Jobs quickly saw the potential to profit from Wozniak's computer.32 Wozniak recalls: "Steve didn't do one circuit, design, or piece of code. But it never crossed my mind to sell computers. It was Steve who said, 'Let's hold them up in the air and sell a few.'"32
Initially, Wozniak intended to share the schematics of the machine for free. Jobs insisted they should build and sell printed circuit boards. Wozniak originally offered the design to Hewlett-Packard, but was denied by the company on five occasions.33 Wozniak, at first skeptical, was eventually convinced by Jobs that even if they were not successful, they could at least say to their grandchildren that they'd had their own company.34
Jobs told Isaacson he was "on one of my fruitarian diets" when he conceived the company name, and thought the word "Apple" sounded "fun, spirited and not intimidating... plus, it would get us ahead of Atari in the phone book."33
To bring in a third party who could settle disputes between two twenty-somethings inclined to argue — Jobs was twenty-one, Wozniak twenty-five — they recruited Ronald Wayne, a forty-one-year-old draftsman at Atari who drew the company's first logo and wrote the partnership agreement in exchange for a ten percent stake. Wayne had a ten percent stake in the company, while Jobs and Wozniak each held forty-five. As Jobs described Wayne's role: "We both trusted him so much that he would resolve any conflicts we had."35 On April 12, less than two weeks after the company's formation, Wayne left Apple, selling his ten percent share back to the two Steves for $800.33 His explanation years later was memorable: "If Apple had failed, I would have had bruises on top of bruises. Steve Jobs was an absolute whirlwind and I had lost the energy you need to ride whirlwinds."32
On April 1, 1976 — April Fools' Day — Jobs, Wozniak, and Wayne founded Apple Computer Company as a business partnership in the Jobs family's home at Crist Drive.3 The operation started in Jobs' bedroom and later moved to the garage.3
The day after the Homebrew demonstration, Jobs walked barefooted into the Byte Shop, the computer retailer in Mountain View operated by Paul Terrell, and exclaimed: "I'm keeping in touch." Jobs' salesmanship was sufficient — Terrell agreed to buy 50 computers for $500 each, cash on delivery. There was one catch: Terrell wanted fully assembled computers.32 In order to raise the money needed to produce the first batch of printed circuit boards, Jobs sold his Volkswagen Type 2 minibus for $1,500 and Wozniak his HP-65 programmable calculator for $500.33
Much of the early work took place in Jobs' kitchen, where he spent hours on the phone trying to find investors for the company.3 A neighbor named Larry Waterland, a freshly minted Stanford PhD in chemical engineering, was one of the first outsiders invited into the garage to see what they were building. "Steve took me over to the garage," Waterland recalled. "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."3
The Apple I went on sale in July 1976 as an assembled circuit board with a retail price of $666.66.33 Wozniak later said he had had no idea about any occult association with the number and simply liked repeating digits. Jobs looked for investments to expand the business, but banks were reluctant to lend him money; the idea of a computer for ordinary people seemed absurd at the time. In August 1976, Jobs approached Nolan Bushnell, who recommended he meet Don Valentine, the founder of Sequoia Capital. Valentine was not interested in funding Apple, but introduced Jobs to Mike Markkula, a millionaire who had worked under him at Fairchild Semiconductor. Markkula saw great potential in the two Steves and became an angel investor.33 He invested in Apple to the tune of $250,000 in January 1977.36
The twenty-one-year-old who walked into that first investor meeting wore no shoes and had arrived from a fruit farm commune in Oregon. When Apple launched, Jobs was twenty-one, precocious but inexperienced and unpolished. At Apple's first board meeting, he put his bare feet on a conference room table, earning a quick rebuke from the board chair.7 He had survived abandonment in a San Francisco hospital, a blue-collar garage in Mountain View, the Himalayan foothills, a Trappist monk's calligraphy room in Portland, and a police pat-down with a blue box in his pocket. Now he had $666.66 computers and a purchase order for fifty of them. "There is a lot of ways to be as a person," Jobs said once, "and some people express their deep appreciation in different ways. But one of the ways that I believe people express their appreciation to the rest of humanity is to make something wonderful and put it out there." 37 The garage on Crist Drive was where he began to do exactly that. Steve Jobs died on October 5, 2011, of complications from a pancreatic neuroendocrine tumor.
