Life did not always go smoothly for Steve Jobs, from his uneasy passage into the world to dropping out of college and being cast out of the company he built from nothing – not to mention the ill health that plagued his final years. Throughout it all, he proved himself to have the mentality of a survivor. He was eternally adaptable, emerging from every low to make his way towards a new high.

Always have a plan

When he dropped out at Reed after just one semester, Jobs was a young man without a plan. Yet he came to regard it as one of the pivotal moments in his life because it forced him to find a way to get by. Staying in Oregon, he slept on friends’ floors until he had exhausted their hospitality and recycled soda bottles as a means of earning a few cents. To keep his head above water, he also got a fairly unglamorous job looking after equipment used in experiments by the college’s psychology department. But he found selling ‘blue boxes’ to be a far more lucrative trade.

Jobs had started in the ‘blue box’ business a year earlier, in 1971. It was a joint enterprise with Woz and earned the two of them a healthy amount. There was just one drawback: what they were doing was illegal. ‘Blue boxes’ were developed by hackers to allow people to hijack telephone lines and make free phone calls. Woz and Jobs had read about it in a magazine and, ever ingenious, set about building their own version. As a prank, they even used the system to call the office of the Pope and almost made it through to the man himself by pretending they were Henry Kissinger.

After some tweaking and careful sourcing of parts, the dastardly duo were able to produce a box for $40 and sell it for $300. With such profit margins on offer, it was little wonder Jobs was tempted back into the business. Another unforeseen result of this shady episode was that Jobs and Woz were for many years the acceptable faces of Silicon Valley to some hackers. It has been speculated that the ties they built at this time with the likes of John Draper – who went by the sobriquet ‘Captain Crunch’ and was considered the brains behind the ‘blue box’ – kept Apple off many hackers’ hit lists for a long time.

While this nefarious behaviour cannot be condoned, it does show Jobs’ determination to make the best of a bad situation and his willingness to graft. Having managed to find a way to stay around the college despite no longer being part of its official student body, he made good use of his time there. He had caught the eye of the Dean, who was impressed by Jobs’ evident curiosity and intellectual sparkiness, and was permitted to attend a few classes – such as the calligraphy course – as an interested onlooker.

Stick to your guns

Jobs displayed similar tenaciousness to get one of his earliest jobs back in Silicon Valley. Atari was a youthful company producing arcade games such as the tennis-based ‘Pong’ and Jobs wanted to work there to build up his kitty for his proposed trip to India. Fuelled by this determination, he turned up at the Atari offices and simply refused to leave until they had given him a post – a particular achievement given that Jobs did not present himself as a sharp-suited global CEO-in-the-making, but was instead in the midst of his unkempt and malodorous phase! In the end, he even managed to get Atari to contribute to his Indian travel costs: the company paid for his flight to Germany on condition that he make a brief stop-off there to troubleshoot some problems at its satellite office.

‘He was a great man with incredible achievements and amazing brilliance. He always seemed to be able to say in very few words what you actually should have been thinking before you thought it.’

LARRY PAGE