Steve Jobs

1955–2011 COMPUTER PROGRAMMER AND INVENTOR UNITED STATES

More than anyone else of his time, [Steve Jobs] made products that were completely innovative, combining the power of poetry and processors.

—WALTER ISAACSON, BIOGRAPHER

Steve felt a tingling sensation come over his body as he stared at the object in front of him. The sleek plastic panels swept around the corners of the machine, the keyboard featured four sets of keys, and the screen spanned just a few inches. And it only weighed about forty pounds—the Hewlett-Packard 9100A was by far the smallest computer Steve had ever seen! “It was a beauty of a thing,” he said. “I fell in love with it.”

That was back before Steve Jobs became one of the most famous computer programmers in the world. Back then, Steve was just a thirteen-year-old kid in the Hewlett-Packard Explorers Club, which taught kids to be excited about electronics. “They would get an engineer from one of the labs to come and talk about what he was working on,” Steve said about the Explorers Club. That particular night, Steve had asked a laser engineer to show him one of the labs, and there it was: the 9100A, the first desktop computer. Before then, computers were so big, they took up entire rooms. By the time Steve died in 2011, computers were so small, they fit in a coat pocket.

In 1970, 175,000 children were adopted in America, setting a record that still holds today.

Steve Jobs was born in San Francisco, California, to Joanne Schieble, a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin. But Joanne was in a tough situation. She loved Steve’s father, Abdulfattah “John” Jandali, but her father was a strict Catholic, and when she got pregnant, he threatened to cut her out of the family if she married Abdulfattah, a Muslim. So Joanne decided not to marry Adbdulfattah, and she went to San Francisco to have her baby, where she would put him up for adoption. She left it up to the agency to choose the adoptive family, but she was adamant that the parents be college graduates. With that demand, the adoption agency selected a family, and everyone waited anxiously for the birth.

But when Steve was born, the family decided they would rather have a daughter than a son. Steve was without a family! The agency quickly chose another husband and wife—a mechanic and a bookkeeper, neither of whom had a college degree—and sent Steve home with them. When Joanne found out, she was furious, but Steve was already settling in to his new home. What could she do? She finally gave up the fight, but she did make Paul and Clara Jobs—Steve’s new parents—sign a pledge to save money to send Steve to college.

Steve’s parents took this oath to support his education seriously. Although they did not make a lot of money, they saved every bit they could and sent him to the best schools they could afford. When Steve was in middle school, his parents even sold their house to buy one they could barely afford in a nicer neighborhood—that way Steve could attend the better school. During much of Steve’s childhood, his dad would buy cars for cheap, fix them up, and then sell them for more. “My college fund came from my dad paying $50 for a . . . beat-up car that didn’t run, working on it for a few weeks, and selling it for $250.” Steve would later show that same entrepreneurial spirit when he would buy used circuit boards at a flea market and sell them to the local electronics store to make a profit.

Steve didn’t take his education quite as seriously as his parents or his birth mother, though. He felt bored in class and often focused his attention on pranking his classmates and teachers. One of these jokes involved making Bring Your Pet to School Day posters to hang all over the school. This led to a chaotic—but probably humorous—day of dogs chasing cats through the halls. Steve’s parents and teachers agreed that he needed a more challenging environment to keep him focused on learning. He skipped fifth grade and went straight to middle school.

At that time, the technology industry in California was booming. Hewlett-Packard, the NASA Ames Research Center, and the Lockheed Missiles and Space Division were just a few of the companies producing new electronics all the time, and they were on all sides of the Jobs family. When their neighbor Larry Lang, an engineer for Hewlett-Packard, noticed Steve’s aptitude for electronics and invited him to HP’s Explorers Club, Steve jumped at the chance.

In the 1970s, the microprocessor, used in computers, was hugely in demand. Because silicon is used in making microprocessors and because most of them were manufactured in the Santa Clara Valley, this region of California was quickly nicknamed Silicon Valley.

For one of his Explorers Club projects, fifteen-year-old Steve decided to build a frequency counter, a device that measures electronic signals. He didn’t have all the parts he needed, though. But instead of going to the nearest electronics store to buy them, he called up the CEO of Hewlett-Packard, Bill Hewlett himself. Some might say Steve Jobs was a little out of the ordinary—and gutsy. Surprisingly, Bill was pleased to hear from the young electronics enthusiast and talked with him for twenty minutes. He agreed to get the parts for Steve, and then he offered Steve a job at Hewlett-Packard!

Steve worked the HP assembly line building frequency counters, but he soon learned that he would rather hang out with the engineers than with the other assembly line workers. Every morning at ten, the engineers had coffee and doughnuts one floor above the assembly line, so Steve went upstairs and had a doughnut with a roomful of engineers. It didn’t matter that none of the other assembly line workers went up there; Steve bent social norms when he thought it was the best thing to do.

When Steve was a junior in high school, he met Steve Wozniak, who was a few years older and shared interests in building electronics and playing pranks. One prank they played combined both these interests. They built a device that emitted television signals so that when they were watching TV with a group of people, they could control how fuzzy or clear the picture came in on the screen. When the picture got fuzzy, someone would get up to adjust the antenna, and just then, Steve and Steve would make the picture seem clear. When the person would sit back down, they’d adjust the signal again so their friends were jumping up and down all night long!

Have you ever typed on a typewriter? The letters are all the same size, and you don’t have any options for how they look. In the 1980s, computer programmers started designing new fonts, like Times New Roman and Torino. You could also stylize the fonts—make them almost as big as you wanted and even italicize or bold them. Now thousands of fonts are available, each with its own artistic appeal.

The two Steves became great friends. And they would go on to develop one of the most successful technology companies in the world: Apple.

After high school, Steve didn’t really want to go to college. But his parents had been saving his whole life to fulfill their promise to his birth mother. Steve finally decided to go to Reed College in Portland, Oregon. He’d heard there were a lot of forward thinkers there, and he imagined being able to take whatever classes he was interested in, whenever he felt like it. To his surprise, even such a progressive school had strict academic requirements, and he did not like the classes the school had enrolled him in.

Fortunately, the dean (like the principal) at the college noticed Steve’s potential and decided to allow a special circumstance: Steve could audit classes. Auditing college courses means taking classes for a discount rate, but he wouldn’t get credit toward an associate’s or bachelor’s degree. That was fine with Steve. He didn’t even know what he wanted to do professionally yet—how could he pick what he wanted his degree to be in?

Pixar was started by George Lucas, of Star Wars fame. Steve Jobs bought it in 1986 for $10 million, and Disney bought it in 2006 for $7.4 billion. What an investment!

One of the classes Steve audited was calligraphy, the art of drawing fancy letters for writing. It may not seem like calligraphy has anything to do with computers, but this actually helped Steve a lot when he was working at Apple. In calligraphy class, he learned about letter shapes, which helped him design computer fonts!

When Steve was nineteen, he moved back to California where he took a job at Atari, one of the first video game companies, and started brainstorming with Steve Wozniak again. Just two years later, the two Steves decided to go into business. The Apple I was released in 1976, and they made $774,000 from its sales. Then the Apple II made them $139 million and attracted plenty of public attention. The next logical step was to let the public buy stock in the company, but that meant the company was owned by the public now, not by Steve and Steve anymore.

In the 1980s, Apple suffered from low sales and less than ideal products. There was a lot of tension between Steve Jobs and the board of directors, so Steve left Apple in 1985. He went on to create NeXT, Inc. and to buy an animation studio that would boom in the ’90s and 2000s as Pixar Animation Studios.

In 1997, after twelve years away, Steve returned to Apple with a new vision. He wanted to implement a new management team, adjust stock options, and develop new products that would put Apple back at the front of the electronics world. And it worked. The iMac, iPod, iPhone, and iPad have earned Apple billions of dollars, and Apple has been rated number one in America’s Most Admired Companies.

In 2003, Steve was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. He underwent surgery for the tumor, but by 2011, the cancer had spread to his bones. He was fifty-six years old when he died.

HOW WILL YOU ROCK THE WORLD?

I will rock the world by being an engineer that designs computers, because I know a lot about computers and have experienced putting a computer together with my dad. I’m also very good at math and figuring things out—like problem solving and coming up with creative solutions.

JEFFREY ALLEN HASKELL AGE 11