Becoming Steve Jobs

by Brent Schlender

  STEVE WAS NOT really a star in this local crowd of budding technologists. But in 1969 a friend named Bill Fernandez introduced him to someone who was: Stephen Wozniak. Stephen Wozniak from nearby Sunnyvale. The son of a Lockheed engineer, “Woz” was an engineering genius. Steve, it turned out, was a great enabler of genius. This would turn out to be the first great collaboration of his career.

  Nerdy and shy, Woz was five years older yet far less assertive than Steve. Like Steve, he had learned about electronics from his father and from other neighborhood dads. But he had immersed himself much more deeply into the subject, in school and out, and had even created a rudimentary calculator, made of transistors, resistors, and diodes, when he was just entering his teens. In 1971, before the single-chip microprocessor had been commercialized, Woz designed a circuit board loaded with chips and electronic components that he called the “Cream Soda Computer,” since that was his favorite sugary soft drink at the time. Woz turned himself into an extraordinarily talented hardware designer whose uncanny electronic engineering instincts were coupled with a great software programmer’s imagination—he could see shortcuts both in circuits and in software that others simply couldn’t envision.

  Steve didn’t have Woz’s innate talent, but he did have a native hunger to put really cool stuff into the hands of as many people as possible. This unique trait fundamentally separated him from other hobbyists messing around with computers. From the start, he had the natural inclination to be an impresario, to convince people to pursue a goal that often only he could see, and then to coordinate and push them toward the creation of that goal. The first sign of that came in 1972, when he and Woz started in on an unlikely commercial collaboration.

  With Steve’s help, Woz developed the first digital “blue box”—a machine that could mimic the tones used by telephone company switches to connect specific phones anywhere in the world. A prankster could hold one of these clever (and illegal) battery-powered gadgets up to the mouthpiece of any telephone and fool Ma Bell’s switching systems into making long-distance or even international calls for free.

  Woz would have been happy to just build the circuit and share it—as would be his inclination later with the circuit board that formed the heart and soul of the Apple 1 computer. Steve, however, proposed that they try to make some money by selling completely assembled machines. So while Woz polished his circuit design, Steve pulled together the necessary materials and priced the finished boxes. He and Woz netted some $6,000 selling the illegal devices at $150 a pop, mostly to college students. The two boys would wander dormitory hallways, knocking on doors and asking the occupants if this was George’s room—a fictional George who supposedly was an expert phone phreak. If the discussion prompted interest, they’d demonstrate what the blue box could do, and sometimes make a sale. But business was spotty, and when they went further afield the venture foundered—the boys closed up shop after one supposed customer pulled a gun on Steve. Still, it wasn’t bad for a first effort.

  IT MAY SEEM strange to include Steve’s spiritual life as one of the source materials of his career. But as a young man, Steve, with great sincerity, sought a deeper reality, a plane of consciousness beneath the surface. He pursued it with psychedelic drugs, and he pursued it with religious exploration. This spiritual sensibility contributed greatly to the unusual breadth of his intellectual peripheral vision, which eventually led him to see possibilities—ranging from great new products to radically reinvented business models—that escaped most others.

  Just as Silicon Valley was the environment that birthed and nurtured Steve’s technological optimism, the 1960s was the decade that fueled an inquisitive teen’s natural impulse to search for deeper truths. Like so many other young people of the time, Steve embraced the questioning and yearning of the counterculture movement. He was a baby boomer who experimented with drugs, drank deeply of the insurgent lyrics of musicians like Dylan, the Beatles, the Grateful Dead, the Band, and Janis Joplin—even the radical, more abstract sonic musings of Miles Davis—and delved into the works of people he considered philosopher kings, spiritual thinkers like Suzuki Roshi, Ram Dass, and Paramahansa Yogananda. The messages of the time were clear: question everything, especially authority; experiment; hit the road; be fearless; and work to create a better world.

  Steve’s own grand quest began immediately after graduating from Cupertino’s Homestead High School, when he headed off to Reed College in Portland, Oregon. It didn’t take long before the headstrong freshman was only attending the classes that fascinated him, and after just one semester, he abruptly dropped out, without even telling his parents. He spent a second semester auditing classes, including one calligraphy course that he would cite in later years as the inspiration for the Macintosh’s ability to produce a diverse panoply of typographical fonts. He also delved more deeply into Asian philosophy and mysticism, and dropped acid with greater frequency, at times almost as a spiritual sacrament.

  The next summer, after returning, flat broke, to live with his parents again in Cupertino, he spent considerable time commuting back and forth to work at an Oregon apple orchard that doubled as a sort of commune. Eventually he landed a job back home as a technician at Atari, the video game company started by Nolan Bushnell, the inventor of Pong. He proved adept at repairing game machines that had gone on the fritz, and was able to convince Bushnell to let him fix some coin-operated kiosks in Germany, as part of a deal to pay his way to India, where he would join his pal Robert Friedland, the charismatic owner of that Oregon orchard.

  It was all part of a romantic search for a way of life that had real meaning, at a time when the culture smiled on such quests. “You’ve got to keep Steve in the context of the time,” says Larry Brilliant. “What were we all looking for? There was a generational split then, a split that was far deeper than the left-right split we have now, or the fundamentalist-secular split. And even though Steve had wonderfully supportive adoptive parents, he would get letters from Robert Friedland and other people who were in India, who had gone there seeking peace and believed they’d found something. That was what Steve was looking for.”

  Steve ostensibly went to India hoping to meet Neem Karoli Baba, known as Maharaj-ji, the famous guru who was an inspiration to Brilliant, Friedman, and other seekers. But Maharaj-ji died shortly before Steve’s arrival, to his lasting disappointment. Steve’s time in India was splintered, as unfocused as the searches of many young people seeking a broader vision than the one they were handed as children. He went to a religious festival attended by ten million other pilgrims. He wore flowing cotton robes, ate strange foods, and had his head shaved by a mysterious guru. He got dysentery. For the first time he read Yogananda’s Autobiography of a Yogi, a book that he would return to several times throughout his life, and that would be given to everyone who attended the reception following Steve’s memorial service at Stanford University’s Memorial Church on October 16, 2011.

  Early in his stay, according to Brilliant, “Steve had been flirting with the idea of being sadhu.” Most Indian sadhus live a monklike existence of deprivation as a way of focusing solely on the spiritual. But Steve was obviously too hungry, too driven, and too ambitious for that kind of life. “It was a romance,” says Brilliant, “with the idea of being a renunciate.” But that doesn’t mean he came back to the United States disillusioned, or that he dismissed Eastern spiritualism altogether. His interests migrated toward Buddhism, which allows for more engagement with the world than is permitted ascetic Hindus. It would enable him to blend a search for personal enlightenment with his ambition to create a company that delivered world-changing products. This appealed to a young man busy trying to invent himself, and it would continue to appeal to a man of infinite intellectual restlessness. Certain elements of Buddhism suited him so well that they would provide a philosophical underpinning for his career choices—as well as a basis for his aesthetic expectations. Among other things, Buddhism made him feel justified in constantly demanding nothing less than w
hat he deemed to be “perfection” from others, from the products he would create, and from himself.

  In Buddhist philosophy, life is often compared to an ever-changing river. There’s a sense that everything, and every individual, is ceaselessly in the process of becoming. In this view of the world, achieving perfection is also a continuous process, and a goal that can never be fully attained. That’s a vision that would come to suit Steve’s exacting nature. Looking ahead to the unmade product, to whatever was around the next corner, and the two or three after that one, came naturally to him. He would never see a limit to possibilities, a perfect endpoint at which his work would be done. And while Steve would eschew almost all self-analysis, the same was true of his own life: despite the fact that he could be almost unfathomably stubborn and opinionated at times, the man himself was constantly adapting, following his nose, learning, trying out new directions. He was constantly in the act of becoming.

  None of this was readily apparent to the outside world, and Steve’s Buddhism could befuddle even his closest friends and colleagues. “There was always this spiritual side,” says Mike Slade, a marketing executive who worked with Steve later in his career, “which really didn’t seem to fit with anything else he was doing.” He meditated regularly until he and Laurene became parents, when the demands on his time grew in a way he hadn’t anticipated. He reread Suzuki’s Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind several times, and made the intersection of elements of Asian spiritualism and his business and commercial life a regular subject of the conversations he and Brilliant enjoyed throughout his life. For years, he arranged for a Buddhist monk by the name of Kobun Chino Otogawa to meet with him once a week at his office to counsel him on how to balance his spiritual sense with his business goals. While nobody who knew him well during his later years would have called Steve a “devout” Buddhist, the spiritual discipline informed his life in both subtle and profound ways.

  WHEN STEVE RETURNED to America in the fall of 1974, he landed back at Atari, mainly doing hardware-related troubleshooting tasks for Nolan Bushnell’s pioneering—and poorly managed—company. Atari was such a loose, strange organization that Jobs could still comfortably disappear for a couple of weeks to pick apples at Robert Friedland’s orchard and not get fired, or even be missed, really. Meanwhile, Woz was working at Hewlett-Packard, in a safe, well-paying, but not particularly challenging gig. Nothing about Jobs’s life at this time would have suggested that he would achieve extraordinary success in business, computer technology, or anything else, for that matter. But unbeknownst even to himself, Steve was about to begin the real work of creating his life. In the next three years, he would morph from a scruffy, drifting nineteen-year-old into the cofounder and leader of a revolutionary new American business.

  Steve was blessed to live at a moment that was ripe and ready for someone with his talents. It was an era of change on so many fronts, and especially in the world of information technology. In the 1970s, big machines called mainframes defined computing. Mainframes were enormous, room-sized computing systems sold to customers like airlines, banks, insurers, and large universities. The programming required to get a result—say, to calculate a mortgage payment—was beyond cumbersome. At least it seemed that way for anyone studying computer science in college, which is where most of us had our introduction to making a mainframe actually do something. After settling on the problem you wanted the machine to solve, you would painstakingly write down, in a programming language like COBOL or Fortran, a series of line-by-line, step-by-step instructions for the exact, logical process of the calculation or analytical chore. Then, at a noisy mechanical console, you would type each individual line of the handwritten program onto its own rectangular “punch card,” which was perforated in such a way that a computer could “read” it. After meticulously making sure the typed cards were arranged in the right order—simple programs might need a few dozen cards that could be held by a rubber band, while elaborate programs could require reams that would have to be stacked carefully in a special cardboard box. You would then hand the bundle to a computer “operator,” who would put your deck in the queue behind dozens of others to be fed into the mainframe. Eventually, the machine would spit out your results on broad sheets of green-and-white-striped accordion-folded paper. More often than not, you would have to tweak your program three, four, or even dozens of times, to get the results you were looking for.

  In other words, computing in 1975 was anything but personal. Writing software was a laborious and slow process. The big, expensive, high-maintenance computers were manufactured and sold, appropriately enough, by a handful of big, bureaucratic technology companies. As it had been since the 1950s, the computer industry in 1975 was dominated by International Business Machines (IBM), which sold more mainframes than all of its other competitors put together. In the 1960s, those also-rans were called “the Seven Dwarfs,” but during the 1970s, both General Electric and RCA gave up, leaving a stubborn group of manufacturers referred to as the “BUNCH”—an acronym for Burroughs, Univac, NCR, Control Data Corporation, and Honeywell. Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) dominated an upcoming segment of somewhat cheaper and less-powerful “minicomputers” used by smaller businesses, and by departments within larger corporations. There was one outlier at each end of the cost spectrum. At the high end, Cray Research, founded in 1972, sold so-called supercomputers used primarily for scientific research and mathematical modeling. These were the most expensive computers of all, costing well north of $3 million. On the cheap end of the scale was Wang, which was founded in the early 1970s and made a task-specific machine known as a “word processor.” It was the closest thing to a “personal” computer that existed, since it was designed for a single person to use in the preparation of written reports and correspondence. The computer industry then was primarily an eastern establishment. IBM was headquartered in the bucolic suburbs north of New York City; DEC and Wang were based in Boston. Burroughs was headquartered in Detroit, Univac in Philadelphia, NCR in Dayton, Ohio, and Cray, Honeywell, and Control Data all hailed from Minneapolis. The only notable early computer maker in Silicon Valley was Hewlett-Packard, but its primary business was making scientific test and measurement instruments and calculators.

  This industry bore little resemblance to today’s entrepreneurial, innovative, and rapidly iterative tech world. It was a stodgy enterprise most similar to the capital equipment business. Its universe of potential customers could be counted in the hundreds, and these were companies with deep pockets whose demands focused more on performance and reliability than on price. No surprise, then, that the industry had become cloistered and a little complacent.

  Out in California a significant number of the people who would have a hand in flipping that industry on its head started meeting regularly as a hobbyist group called the Homebrew Computer Club. Their first get-together occurred shortly after the publication of the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics, which featured a cover story about the Altair 8800 “microcomputer.” Gordon French, a Silicon Valley engineer, hosted the gathering in his garage to show off an Altair unit that French and a buddy had assembled from the $495 kit sold by Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS). It was an inscrutable-looking device, about the size of a stereo component amplifier, its face sporting two horizontal arrays of toggle switches and a lot of blinking red lights. The clunky thing couldn’t do too much, but it demonstrated the feasibility of having a computer to yourself, one that you could program twenty-four hours a day if you wanted to, without having to wait in line or punch any cards. Bill Gates read the article, and shortly thereafter famously dropped out of Harvard to start a little outfit called Micro-soft to design software programming languages for the Altair.

  Woz knew the MITS machine wasn’t all that much more advanced than the Cream Soda Computer he’d created four years earlier, in 1971, when he had to use much less sophisticated components. Spurred by a geek’s natural competitive instincts, he roughed out some new designs for what he k
new would be a better microcomputer, one that would be easier to program, control, and manipulate. Flipping toggle switches and counting flashing lights was like using flag semaphore and Morse code, he thought. Why not input commands and data values more directly with a typewriter keyboard? And why not have the computer project your typing and results onto an attached television monitor? And for that matter, why not plug in a cassette tape recorder to store programs and data? The Altair had none of these features that would make computing far less intimidating and far more approachable. This was the challenge Woz decided to tackle. In the back of his mind he hoped that his employer, HP, might want to manufacture a version of his concept.

  Enter Steve Jobs, the budding opportunist and junior impresario. He didn’t think Woz needed HP. He thought he and Woz could develop a business of their own. Steve knew that Woz was so uniquely talented that any computer he would design would be cheap, usable, and easy to program—so much so that the other hobbyists at Homebrew might want one, too. So during the fall and winter of 1975 and early 1976, as Woz perfected his design, Jobs started to conjure how they might pool their resources to purchase the components they needed to make a working prototype. Every couple of weeks, they would take the latest working version of the computer to the Homebrew meetings, to show off a new feature or two to the toughest audience in town. Steve persuaded Woz that they could make the club members their customers by selling them the schematics, and perhaps even printed circuit boards. Club members could then buy the chips and other components themselves, and assemble them into the guts of their very own working microcomputer. To raise the cash to pay a mutual friend to draw a “reference design” for the circuit boards, Steve sold his treasured Volkswagen minibus, and Woz unloaded his precious HP-65 programmable calculator. After spending $1,000 on designing the board and contracting to have a few dozen made, Jobs and Wozniak made their money back and then some by selling them to fellow Homebrew members for $50 apiece, netting them a nifty $30 for each circuit board.