Steve Jobs on Founding and Origins

Steven Paul Jobs, born in San Francisco on February 24, 1955, and raised by adoptive parents in what became Silicon Valley, built the defining founder arc of the personal computer age. With Steve Wozniak he co-founded Apple Computer in 1976 to sell the Apple I, gained fame and wealth with the mass-produced Apple II, and pushed graphical computing into the mainstream with the 1984 Macintosh. The board removed him in 1985, and in exile he founded NeXT and bought the Lucasfilm graphics unit that became Pixar. Apple, near bankruptcy, acquired NeXT in 1997, returning Jobs to the company he had co-founded; as chief executive he revived it with the iMac, iPod, iTunes, iPhone, App Store, and iPad, and by 2011 it stood among the world's most valuable publicly traded companies. He resigned as chief executive in August 2011 and died of a pancreatic neuroendocrine tumor in Palo Alto that October, at fifty-six.

Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, remembered as the two Steves, first met in mid-1971 when mutual friend Bill Fernandez introduced twenty-one-year-old Wozniak to sixteen-year-old Jobs. Their first partnership was the blue-box business: Wozniak built the tone devices after reading an Esquire article, once using one to call the Vatican while posing as Henry Kissinger, and Jobs managed to sell some two hundred of them at $150 apiece, splitting the profit evenly. By 1975 both had left their universities and were attending Homebrew Computer Club meetings, where machines like the Altair 8800 inspired Wozniak to build a microprocessor into his video terminal design. Priced-out of the Intel 8080 and Motorola 6800 chips, he waited until MOS Technology released its $20 6502 in 1976, wrote a BASIC for it, and adapted his paper design; by March 1, 1976, the machine that became the Apple I was working, and Jobs immediately saw its commercial potential where Wozniak had intended to share schematics for free.

NeXT, Inc. was founded in 1985 by Steve Jobs, the Apple co-founder ousted earlier that year, and was headquartered in Redwood City, California. Jobs seeded it with $7 million of his own money and was running out of funds with no product on the horizon when billionaire Ross Perot, watching a television documentary about the company, invested heavily and joined its board. The company initially built workstation computers for higher education and business markets, with Jobs as chairman and chief executive, Avie Tevanian and Bud Tribble running engineering, and a corporate logo designed by Paul Rand. Wozniak later observed that during the NeXT years Jobs was really getting his head together. The venture became Jobs's twelve-year laboratory for the ideas Apple would later absorb: obsessive industrial design, object-oriented software, and an operating system durable enough to become the foundation of everything Apple shipped after 1997.

Pixar began as the Graphics Group of Lucasfilm's computer division, and George Lucas, needing money for a divorce, searched for investors to spin it out. President Edwin Catmull and co-founder Alvy Ray Smith had been declined by thirty-five venture capitalists and ten large corporations, including a General Motors deal that fell through three days before contracts were to be signed. Steve Jobs, freshly edged out of Apple in 1985 and building NeXT, made an offer Lucas initially considered too low; with no alternative buyers, Lucas accepted. On February 3, 1986, Jobs paid $5 million of his own money to Lucasfilm for the technology rights and put another $5 million in as capital, joining the board as chairman of the newly independent company incorporated in Richmond, California. Catmull stayed as president, Smith as executive vice president, and animator John Lasseter kept making the short demonstration films that would quietly define the studio's future.

Jobs was born to Joanne Carole Schieble, an American Catholic of Swiss-German descent, and Abdulfattah Jandali, a Syrian Muslim graduate student pursuing a doctorate at Wisconsin, a pairing her father opposed. Arranging a closed adoption, Schieble traveled to San Francisco to give birth and asked that her son go to college graduates; when the selected lawyer and his wife withdrew upon learning the baby was a boy, Paul and Clara Jobs adopted him instead. Schieble initially refused to sign the papers and went to court, relenting only after the couple promised to pay for his college education. Paul Jobs, a high-school dropout turned Coast Guard mechanic and machinist, and Clara, a bookkeeper, moved the family to Mountain View. Jobs later bristled whenever they were called his adoptive parents and described them, in his own phrasing, as his real parents a thousand percent over.

Paul Jobs built a workbench in the family garage to pass along his love of mechanics, and his son admired the craftsmanship of a father who could build any cabinet or fence and handed him a hammer to work alongside. The childhood home on Crist Drive in Los Altos, bought in 1967 with the family's savings so Steve could reach the better Cupertino schools, later became the original site of Apple Computer and was added to historic-site lists in 2013. School was a poor fit: Jobs resisted authority, played pranks at Monta Loma Elementary, skipped a grade, and after bullying at Crittenden Middle School gave his parents an ultimatum to move or lose him to dropout. At thirteen he cold-called Bill Hewlett of Hewlett-Packard asking for parts for a frequency-counter project, and Hewlett gave him a summer job. The neighborhood around Homestead High tied him early to Silicon Valley.

At Homestead High, Jobs held two divergent interests, electronics and literature, a duality he traced to reading Polaroid founder Edwin Land on the importance of people who stand at the intersection of humanities and sciences. Bill Fernandez introduced him to Steve Wozniak in 1971, and Jobs visited Wozniak weekly at Berkeley, studying in nearby Stanford's student union and staging light shows for Homestead's avant-garde jazz program instead of joining the electronics club. A classmate remembered him as half brain and half hippie, smart enough for the nerds, too intellectual for the hippies, an individual where individuality was suspect. In his senior year he took a freshman English class at Stanford and read Shakespeare and Plato, King Lear above all. The friendship with Wozniak, five years older and already a self-taught engineer of rare gifts, became the technical-commercial pairing on which Apple would later be built.

Around 1971, Wozniak read an Esquire article on the blue box, an illegal tone-generating device that tricked the telephone network into free long-distance calls, and designed a low-cost digital version. Jobs decided the pair should sell them and split the profit, and the clandestine sales went well enough that Jobs later credited the episode as the seed of Apple: without the blue boxes, he argued, there would have been no Apple at all, because the experience proved two young men could take on large companies and beat them. The episode fixed a division of labor that recurred at Apple — Wozniak as the inventor of elegant, minimal engineering, Jobs as the salesman who found the market, set the price, and captured the value. It also marked his first exercise of pricing power and margin thinking applied to somebody else's brilliant circuit design, skills he would spend four decades scaling from gadgets to global product lines.

In September 1972 Jobs enrolled at Reed College in Portland, an expensive school he insisted on although his parents could ill afford it, drawn by its countercultural intensity. After a single semester he dropped out without telling them, unwilling to spend their money on an education that seemed meaningless, but stayed months longer auditing whatever interested him, including Robert Palladino's calligraphy course. In the 2005 Stanford commencement address he described sleeping on friends' dorm-room floors, returning Coke bottles for food money, and walking seven miles across town each Sunday for a free Hare Krishna meal. The audited calligraphy course resurfaced a decade later, when the Macintosh shipped with multiple typefaces and proportionally spaced fonts that no rival machine offered, a connection Jobs treated as the clearest proof that dots can only be connected looking backward. The dropped-out-but-still-around posture became permanent parts of his founding mythology.

Back home in 1974, Jobs took a technician job at Atari in Los Gatos, where co-founder Nolan Bushnell judged him difficult but valuable, often the smartest person in the room and eager to let people know it. Mid-year he left for seven months in India seeking guru Neem Karoli Baba, whose ashram he found nearly deserted because the teacher had died, and returned with a shaved head, Indian clothes, and a commitment to Zen Buddhism under Kobun Chino Otogawa, including long retreats at the Tassajara mountain monastery. At Atari in 1975 Bushnell assigned him the Breakout circuit-board job, offering a bounty for every chip eliminated; Wozniak, sketching by day at HP, cut the design to forty-five chips inside four days. Jobs reported a $750 payout and split it with Wozniak, who learned only a decade later the actual bonus had been $5,000, an early glimpse of the transactional edge beneath the idealism.

By March 1976 Wozniak had finished the basic design of the Apple I and showed it to Jobs, who proposed they sell it despite Wozniak's initial skepticism. On April 1, 1976, Jobs, Wozniak, and administrative overseer Ronald Wayne founded Apple Computer Company as a partnership in the Crist Drive house, the operation starting in Jobs's bedroom and moving to the garage; Wayne exited within days, leaving the two Steves as the active co-founders. The name came from Jobs's stay at the All One Farm commune in Oregon. To fund the first boards, Wozniak sold his HP scientific calculator and Jobs sold his Volkswagen van. The plan was fifty-dollar bare circuit boards for hobbyists until retailer Paul Terrell ordered fifty fully assembled units at $500 each; roughly 200 Apple I computers were ultimately produced, enough to convert a garage project into a company with revenue and a roadmap.

Jobs and Wozniak took the wraps off the Apple II at the West Coast Computer Faire in April 1977, the first consumer product sold by Apple and one of the first highly successful mass-produced microcomputers in the world. Wozniak designed the machine; Jobs oversaw its unusual case, and Rod Holt engineered its novel power supply. During development the two fought over expansion slots, Jobs wanting two for simplicity and Wozniak eight for flexibility, nearly splitting before settling on eight, an argument that previewed their lifelong disagreement about whether elegance or openness should win. The Apple II carried the company through its first growth decade, built the personal computer market for schools, small businesses, and homes, and made Jobs wealthy young: he was worth over $1 million at twenty-three and an estimated $250 million at twenty-five, among the youngest self-made names ever to reach the Forbes list of the nation's richest people.