Who Was Steve Jobs? (2 page)

In 1954, Joanne Schieble was a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin. She fell in love with a teaching assistant. He was from Syria. And his name was Abdulfattah Jandali. They were young and had no money. So when Joanne learned she was going to have a baby, they decided to put the baby up for adoption.

Paul and Clara Jobs wanted a child very much. They adopted the couple’s baby and named him Steven Paul Jobs. He was born on February 24, 1955. Three years after Steve was born, the Jobses adopted a little girl, Patti. Steve liked his little sister. But they didn’t have much in common.

The family lived in Mountain View, California. It was a beautiful area full of fruit trees. People called it the Valley of Heart’s Delight. But Mountain View was changing. New companies were coming to the area. The companies were trying to develop new electronic equipment. Eventually, the area became known by a different name: Silicon Valley.

Steve loved to help his father work on cars. Paul even made him his own little workbench when Steve was five. He showed him how to use a hammer and saw. Paul was a mechanical whiz, and he passed on his love of gadgets to his son. A neighbor gave Steve his first Heathkit—Steve made radio transistors with it.

In 1968, when he was thirteen, Steve discovered a part was missing from one of his kits. The kit was made by Hewlett-Packard, a big company in Silicon Valley that developed and made parts for computers. Steve got a phone book and looked up the number of Bill Hewlett. He was one of the founders of the company. Steve called him to complain. By the time they got off the phone, Hewlett had offered Steve a summer job and promised him a bagful of machine parts. What was Steve’s answer?

Yes, of course!

Steve also joined Hewlett-Packard’s Explorer Club. It offered lectures to kids interested in electronics. At one lecture, Steve saw a computer for the first time.

At school, Steve hung around with other kids who loved electronics. He also had a girlfriend, Chrisann Brennan. Through the kids in his
computer club, Steve met Steve Wozniak who was several years older. “Woz” had an amazing talent for making things. He was going to a local college and designing computers as a hobby.

When Steve graduated from high school in 1972, he enrolled at Reed College in Oregon. There was only one problem: Steve couldn’t pay for college. So Steve went to the dean of Reed. He asked if he could live in the dorms and sit in on classes for free. Steve wouldn’t ever get a degree, but he would learn about subjects he was interested in.

Why would the dean agree to that?

Like Bill Hewlett at Hewlett-Packard, the dean was impressed by Steve. And he did say yes. Within a week, Steve was attending classes. He
studied eastern religions and calligraphy, which was the art of fine handwriting. It wasn’t an easy life. Steve slept on the floor of his friends’ rooms. He collected Coke bottles for spending money. And he depended on local charities for food.

Steve stayed at Reed for eighteen months. He’d had enough of college life. He wanted to go to India. To get money for the trip, he took a job at Atari. It made some of the very first computer games. His friend Woz was already working there. By summer, Steve had saved enough to go to India. After the trip, he came back to Atari.

Personal computers in 1976—if you saw them at all—looked like airplane cockpits full of switches and lights. Woz had created a circuit board for an easy-to-use personal computer. A person could type in a command, Woz explained to Steve, and the computer would follow the command on a TV screen in front of the person.

Woz thought of it as a neat project. Steve thought it could be more than that. He thought they should leave Atari and start a whole new company.