Steve Jobs Biography Words

Because I assumed that he was still in the middle of an oscillating career that had many more ups and downs left, I demurred.

I had known him since 1984, when he came to Manhattan to have lunch with Time’s editors and extol his new Macintosh.

As an executive, Jobs has sometimes been petulant and harsh on subordinates.

We stayed in touch, even after he was ousted from Apple.

When he had something to pitch, such as a NeXT computer or Pixar movie, the beam of his charm would suddenly refocus on me, and he would take me to a sushi restaurant in Lower Manhattan to tell me that whatever he was touting was the best thing he had ever produced.

But his more important goal, he said, was to do what Hewlett and his friend David Packard had done, which was create a company that was so imbued with innovative creativity that it would outlive them.

And indeed he did turn out to be skittish when word trickled back to him of people that I was interviewing.

Shakespeare’s Henry V—the story of a willful and immature prince who becomes a passionate but sensitive, callous but sentimental, inspiring but flawed king—begins with the exhortation “O for a Muse of fire, that would ascend / The brightest heaven of invention.”

He was musing about why folks over thirty develop rigid thought patterns and tend to be less innovative.

When Paul Jobs was mustered out of the Coast Guard after World War II, he made a wager with his crewmates.

He was a taut, tattooed engine mechanic, six feet tall, with a passing resemblance to James Dean.

Even though his father was an alcoholic and sometimes abusive, Paul ended up with a gentle and calm disposition under his leathery exterior.

After she and Jandali divorced in 1962, Joanne embarked on a dreamy and peripatetic life that her daughter, who grew up to become the acclaimed novelist Mona Simpson, would capture in her book Anywhere but Here.

As Jobs showed it off to me, he caressed the stockade panels and recalled a lesson that his father implanted deeply in him.

As Jobs showed it off to me, he caressed the stockade panels and recalled a lesson that his father implanted deeply in him.

Jobs was so incredulous he called a Disney executive to vent: “Do you know what Michael just did to me?”

He showed me the rudiments of electronics, and I got very interested in that.”

Even more interesting were the trips to scavenge for parts.

He was proud that his father never adopted a servile attitude or slick style that may have made him a better salesman.

We like to think everything was idyllic in the 1950s, but this guy was one of those engineers who had messed-up lives.

Its roots stretched back to 1938, when David Packard and his new wife moved into a house in Palo Alto that had a shed where his friend Bill Hewlett was soon ensconced.

The house had a garage—an appendage that would prove both useful and iconic in the valley—in which they tinkered around until they had their first product, an audio oscillator.

In a move that would help transform the area into the cradle of the tech revolution, Stanford University’s dean of engineering, Frederick Terman, created a seven-hundred-acre industrial park on university land for private companies that could commercialize the ideas of his students.

Then a more disconcerting discovery began to dawn on him: He was smarter than his parents.

That same summer, between his sophomore and junior years at Homestead, Jobs began smoking marijuana.

Reflecting years later on his spiritual feelings, he said that religion was at its best when it emphasized spiritual experiences rather than received dogma.

To the left of the entrance is a bullpen of desks with young designers; to the right is the cavernous main room with six long steel tables for displaying and playing with works in progress.

It was to electronics what his father’s junkyards were to auto parts: a scavenger’s paradise sprawling over an entire city block with new, used, salvaged, and surplus components crammed onto warrens of shelves, dumped unsorted into bins, and piled in an outdoor yard.

It was to electronics what his father’s junkyards were to auto parts: a scavenger’s paradise sprawling over an entire city block with new, used, salvaged, and surplus components crammed onto warrens of shelves, dumped unsorted into bins, and piled in an outdoor yard.

At the wooden counters up front, laden with thick catalogues in tattered binders, people would haggle for switches, resistors, capacitors, and sometimes the latest memory chips.

The juxtaposition highlighted the shift from the interests of his father’s generation.

He found an outlet by playing juvenile pranks.

Wozniak decided to use as few chips as possible, both as a personal challenge and because he did not want to take advantage of his colleague’s largesse.

“Dylan taped all of his concerts, and some of the people around him were not scrupulous, because soon there were tapes all around.

“The two of us would go tramping through San Jose and Berkeley and ask about Dylan bootlegs and collect them,” said Wozniak.

So Jobs, in his felicitous way, convinced the guy to meet him and Wozniak at a public place.

Jobs found himself deeply influenced by a variety of books on spirituality and enlightenment, most notably Be Here Now, a guide to meditation and the wonders of psychedelic drugs by Baba Ram Dass, born Richard Alpert.

Five years earlier Timothy Leary, the guru of psychedelic enlightenment, had sat cross-legged at the Reed College commons while on his League for Spiritual Discovery (LSD) college tour, during which he exhorted his listeners, “Like every great religion of the past we seek to find the divinity within.

Many of Reed’s students took all three of those injunctions seriously; the dropout rate during the 1970s was more than one-third.

The closest of those friends was another wispy-bearded freshman named Daniel Kottke, who met Jobs a week after they arrived at Reed and shared his interest in Zen, Dylan, and acid.

Kottke, from a wealthy New York suburb, was smart but low-octane, with a sweet flower-child demeanor made even mellower by his interest in Buddhism.

In the end Jobs’s pride in the objects he made overcame his sensibility that people should eschew being attached to such possessions.

She helped prepare each of the slides as Jobs fretted over everything from the wording to the right hue of green to serve as the background color.

Near the end of his speech, he paused for a sip of water and began to talk in more subdued tones.

Friedland had stewardship of a 220-acre apple farm, about forty miles southwest of Portland, that was owned by an eccentric millionaire uncle from Switzerland named Marcel Müller.

At Robert Friedland’s farm, his job had been to prune the apple trees so that they would stay strong, and that became a metaphor for his pruning at Apple.

Monks and disciples from the Hare Krishna temple would come and prepare vegetarian feasts redolent of cumin, coriander, and turmeric.

In the meantime Jobs eked out a bohemian existence on the fringes of Reed.

Both could be rude, but with Gates—who early in his career seemed to have a typical geek’s flirtation with the fringes of the Asperger’s scale—the cutting behavior tended to be less personal, based more on intellectual incisiveness than emotional callousness.

That day Jobs walked into the lobby of the video game manufacturer Atari and told the personnel director, who was startled by his unkempt hair and attire, that he wouldn’t leave until they gave him a job.

Atari’s founder was a burly entrepreneur named Nolan Bushnell, who was a charismatic visionary with a nice touch of showmanship in him—in other words, another role model waiting to be emulated.

His chief engineer was Al Alcorn, beefy and jovial and a bit more grounded, the house grown-up trying to implement the vision and curb the enthusiasms of Bushnell.