The Beginning: 1955-1985
The high school loner who figured out what the world wanted from technology
The video is close to 35 years old and the picture isn’t great, but it’s obvious Steve Jobs is nervous. He won’t sit still. As the makeup and sound guys in the television studio do the final preparations before the cameras go on, there’s the long-haired nerd—he must be 23, 24—swiveling around in his chair, wearing a jacket and tie and a pair of square wire-frame glasses. He hasn’t done much media, that’s clear to the talent handlers, who try to get him to relax a little with small talk. Jobs isn’t paying attention.
“God! Look at that!” he says, squinting at a monitor and running his hand through his hair, which looks washed for a change. “Look, I’m on television!”
“You’re on TV in New York, too,” says one of the handlers. This studio is probably in San Francisco, though the particulars are lost to history.
“No, no.” Jobs leans forward, and watches another studio person brush his sleeve. “Am I really? Are you serious? God! I was just in New York last week!” More swivels and small talk. Jobs looks up at the lights, hand-combs his hair again, and tells the people fussing around him that he’s ready to throw up. “I’m not joking,” he says. Sip of water. A producer announces he’s ready to roll. Jobs swivels. Forced smile. Hand through hair. “God!”
Knowing what Steve Jobs would become, it’s endearing to watch him babble with stage fright. He had already started a tiny company that is drawing crowds of hobbyists at computer fairs, but he’s decades away from the showman whose product unveilings will become cultural milestones. The music business now comes in two eras: pre-iPod and post-iPod. Same with mobile and the iPhone, and if history holds, the iPad will mark an epochal split in personal computing. Jobs would claim that he never invented those things; he discovered them. They were always there, someone just needed to “connect the dots,” to put the parts together into a whole no one else seemed to see.
The video fuzzes out and cuts before the interview with the anchor in New York. Jobs probably did fine. Even then, he seemed able to convince anyone of anything. If charm didn’t work, he’d threaten, weep, whatever worked. The engineers and local high school kids he’d talked into working for him could attest to that. The force of will, the uncompromising aesthetic, the mean streak—he already had a reputation in Silicon Valley. But other people had those traits. Connecting the dots into a persona that can create a $350 billion empire out of technological desires the world never knew it had—that required something exceptional.
Jobs was born Feb. 24, 1955, in San Francisco to a pair of unwed graduate students, Joanne Carole Schieble and a Syrian immigrant named Abdulfattah Jandali. They put him up for adoption when he was an infant, and he was taken in by Clara and Paul Jobs, who raised their son in a ranch house on Crist Drive in Los Altos, about three miles from where Apple eventually would put its headquarters.
Young Steve wasn’t easy. He stuck a bobby pin into a wall outlet and had to be taken to a hospital after tasting ant poison. When he was old enough to go to school, his teachers—the ones who bored him, anyway—found him obnoxious and disruptive, when he wasn’t inattentive. In the classroom, he’d set off little bombs and let loose snakes. “I was pretty bored in school,” he told Playboy in 1985, “and I turned into a little terror.”
His classmates mostly thought he was “really strange,” as Mark Wozniak, the younger brother of his future partner Steve Wozniak, once put it. Jobs himself would later tell an interviewer, “I wasn’t a jock. I was a loner for the most part.” One foggy day, a gym teacher had the class do laps on a track. When Jobs reached the far end, obscured from the teacher’s view by the fog, he sat down and watched his classmates puff by. He rejoined the pack the next lap. “He had figured out how he could get away with half the work and still get credit for the whole thing,” a classmate, Bruce Courture, told Jeffrey S. Young in the 1988 Jobs biography The Journey Is the Reward.
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