had to give up Steve due to being too young at  the time and not wanting to get married. Having  

a child out of wedlock had a strong stigma in the  50's, so Steve was adopted by Paul and Clara Jobs. 

In 1961 the family moved to Mountain View,  California. This area, just south of Palo  

Alto, California, was becoming the hub for  electronics such as radios, televisions,  

stereos, and computers. At that time people  started to refer to the area as "Silicon Valley." 

Paul Jobs was a machinist  and fixed cars as a hobby.  

Jobs remembers his father as being  very skilled at working with his hands.  

Paul built a workbench in his garage for his  son to "pass along his love of mechanics”. 

Steve often found it difficult in making  friends his own age and struggled to function  

in a traditional classroom. He resisted authority  figures, frequently misbehaved and was suspended a  

few times. Jobs later said himself he was “pretty  bored in school and had turned into a little  

terror..” He regularly played pranks on others  at Monta Loma Elementary school in Mountain View. 

Although Jobs credited his fourth  grade teacher with turning him around:  

"It took her about a month to get hip to my  situation. She bribed me into learning. She would  

say, 'I really want you to finish this workbook.  I'll give you five bucks if you finish it.'  

That kindled a passion in me for learning! I  learned more that year than I think I learned in  

any other year in school. They wanted me to skip  the next two years in grade school and go straight  

to junior high to learn a foreign language, but  my parents very wisely wouldn't let it happen.” 

Jobs did skip the fifth grade and transferred  to the 6th grade at Crittenden Middle  

School in Mountain View. However, this  transition led to Jobs being bullied,  

he then gave his parents an ultimatum, take him  out of Crittenden or he would drop out of school.  

His parents used all their savings in 1967 to  buy a new house which would allow Jobs to change  

schools. Their new house on Crist Drive in  Los Altos, California would later become a  

key figure in Apple's history. Whilst Jobs  started studying at Cupertino Junior High. 

A fellow electronics hobbyist, Bill Fernandez,  from Cupertino Junior High, became his first  

friend. Fernandez later commented that "for some  reason the kids in the eighth grade didn't like  

Steve because they thought he was odd. I was  one of his few friends." Fernandez eventually  

introduced Jobs to electronics whiz Steve Wozniak,  who lived across the street from Fernandez. 

As a child, Jobs preferred doing things by  himself. He swam competitively but was not  

interested in team sports or other group  activities. He spent a lot of time working  

in the garage workshop of a neighbour who worked  at Hewlett-Packard, an electronics manufacturer. 

Jobs also enrolled in the Hewlett-Packard Explorer  Club where he saw engineers demonstrate new  

products, and he saw his first computer at the age  of twelve. He was impressed and knew immediately  

that he wanted to work with computers. While in high school Jobs attended lectures  

at the Hewlett-Packard plant. On one occasion  he boldly asked William Hewlett, the president,  

for some parts he needed to complete for  a class project. Hewlett was impressed,  

he gave Jobs the parts and offered him a  summer internship at Hewlett-Packard. Jobs said  

“He didn't know me at all, but he ended  up giving me some parts and he got me a  

job that summer working at Hewlett-Packard on  the line, assembling frequency counters...well,  

assembling may be too strong. I was putting  in screws. It didn't matter; I was in heaven.” 

The location of the Los Altos home meant that  Jobs would be able to attend nearby Homestead High  

School, which had strong ties to Silicon Valley.  He began his first year there in late 1968.  

During mid-1970, Steve went through a period of  change, he said "I got stoned for the first time;  

I discovered Shakespeare, Dylan Thomas, and all  that classic stuff. I read Moby Dick and went back  

as a junior taking creative writing classes."  From that point, Jobs developed two different  

circles of friends, those involved in electronics  and engineering and those interested in art and  

literature. These dual interests were particularly  reflected during Jobs's senior year as his best  

friends were Wozniak and his first girlfriend,  the artistic Homestead junior Chrisann Brennan. 

He was described by a Homestead classmate as  "kind of a brain and kind of a hippie ... but  

he never fit into either group. He was smart  enough to be a nerd, but wasn't nerdy. And he  

was too intellectual for the hippies, who just  wanted to get wasted all the time. He was kind  

of an outsider. In high school everything  revolved around what group you were in.  

and if you weren't in a carefully defined group,  you weren't anybody. He was an individual,  

in a world where individuality was suspect."  Paul and Clara Jobs had made a pledge when they  

adopted Steve that they would send him  to college. So they had worked hard and  

saved dutifully for his college fund, which was  modest but adequate by the time he graduated.  

However Jobs, becoming ever more wilful minded,  did not make it easy. At first he toyed with not  

going to college at all. “I think I might have  headed to New York if I didn't go to college,”  



When his parents pushed him to go to college, he  responded in a passive-aggressive way. He did not  

consider state schools, such as Berkeley, where  Steve Wozniak was, despite that they were more  

affordable. Nor did he look at Stanford, just up  the road and likely to offer a scholarship. “The  

kids who went to Stanford, they already  knew what they wanted to do,” he said.  

“They
weren't really artistic. I wanted something  that was more artistic and interesting.” 

Instead he insisted on applying only to  Reed College, a private liberal arts school  

in Portland, Oregon, that was one of the most  expensive in the nation. He was visiting Steve  

Wozniak at Berkeley when his father called to  say an acceptance letter had arrived from Reed,  

he tried to talk Steve out of going there.  So did his mother. It was more than they  

could afford but similarly their son responded  with an ultimatum: If he couldn't go to Reed,  

he wouldn't go anywhere. They relented, as usual. Reed was known for its free-spirited hippie  

lifestyle, which combined somewhat uneasily  with its rigorous academic standards. Steve  

enrolled at Reed to study Physics and Philosophy.  Chirssan Brennan remained involved with Jobs while  

he was at Reed. However Steve soon decided to  drop out of Reed College. He liked being at  

Reed however he didn't enjoy having to attend the  required classes. Jobs continued to attend classes  

he enjoyed like calligraphy. During that time the  relationship between Jobs and Brennan broke down. 

In a 2005 commencement speech at Stanford  University, Jobs stated that during this period,  

he slept on the floor in friends' dorm  rooms, returned Coke bottles for food money,  

and got weekly free meals at the local Hare  Krishna temple. In that same speech,  

Jobs said: "If I had never dropped in on  that single calligraphy course in college,  

the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or  proportionally spaced fonts.” 

In 1972 Wozniak had designed a low-cost  digital "blue box" to generate the  

necessary tones to manipulate the telephone  network, allowing free long-distance calls.  

Jobs decided that they could make money  selling it. The two stopped making the  

boxes after they were nearly caught by the  police.  Despite giving up on the venture,  

they reportedly made about $6000 selling the blue  boxes. Jobs said that if not for the blue boxes,  

there would have been no Apple. And that they  could take on large companies and beat them. 

In mid-1973, when Jobs was 18 he moved back  to the San Francisco area and began renting  

his own apartment. Brennan and Jobs relationship  was complicated by this stage. Jobs hitchhiked  

and worked around the West Coast and Brennan  would occasionally join him. Brennan wrote  

this in her dairy, "little by little, Steve and I  separated. But we were never able to fully let go.  

We never talked about breaking up or going our  separate ways and we didn't have that conversation  

where one person says it's over." They continued  to grow apart, but Jobs would still seek her out,  

and visit her while she was working in a  health food store or as a live-in babysitter.  

In 1973, Steve Wozniak designed his own version of  the classic video game Pong. After finishing it,  

Wozniak gave the board to Jobs, who then took the  game down to Atari in Los Gatos. Atari thought  

that Jobs had built it and gave him a job as  a technician. 

Later Atari's co-founder said  

"The truth is that very few companies would hire  Steve, even today. Why? Because he was an outlier.  

To most potential employers, he'd just seem like  a jerk in bad clothing. Steve was difficult but  

valuable. He was very often the smartest guy in  the room, and he would let people know that." 

By early 1974, Jobs was living what Brennan  describes as a "simple life" in a Los Gatos cabin,  

working at Atari and saving money for his  impending trip to India.  One of his friends  

had been to India and he was urging jobs  to take his spiritual journey there too.  

He ended up reaching the foothills of Himaya  after days of traveling by train and bus.  

That's where he was supposed to see Neem Karoli  Baba but by the time Jobs got there he had  

passed away. Despite the setback, Jobs still spent  seven months in India exploring his spirituality. 

He said, “The people in the Indian countryside  don't use their intellect like we do,  

they use their intuition and their intuition  is more developed than the rest of the world.  

Intuition is a very powerful thing,  more powerful than intellect,  

in my opinion. That's had a big impact on my work” 

After staying seven months, Jobs left  India and returned to the US. Jobs  

had changed his appearance; his head was shaved  and he wore traditional Indian clothing. Over this  

time, Jobs experimented with psychedelics, later  calling his experimentation with LSD “a profound  

experience, one of the most important things in  my life. LSD shows you that there's another side  

to the coin, and you can't remember it when  it wears off, but you know it. It reinforced  

my sense of what was important—creating  great things instead of making money,  

putting things back into the stream of history  and of human consciousness as much as I could.” 

Jobs and Brennan both became practitioners of Zen  Buddhism. Jobs was living with his parents again,  

in their backyard tool-shed which he had  converted into a bedroom with a sleeping bag,  

mat, books, a candle, and a meditation pillow. He  considered taking up monastic residence in Japan,  

and maintained a lifelong appreciation for  Zen. Jobs would later say that people around  

him who did not share his countercultural roots  could not fully relate to his thinking. 

Jobs then returned to Atari and was assigned  to create a circuit board for the arcade video  

game Breakout. According to Bushnell, Atari  offered $100 for each TTL chip that was eliminated  

in the machine. Jobs himself had little knowledge  of circuit board design and made a deal with  

Wozniak to split the fee evenly between them if  he could minimize the number of chips. Much to the  

amazement of Atari engineers, Wozniak reduced the  TTL chip count from 96 to 46, a design so tight  

that it was impossible to reproduce on an assembly  line. According to Wozniak, Jobs told him that  

Atari gave them only $700 (instead of the $5,000  paid out), and that Wozniak's share was thus $350.  

It was only later that Wozniak found out about  this to which he said "I cried, I cried quite  

a bit when I read that in a book." It was around this time that Jobs  

and Wozniak attended meetings of  the Homebrew Computer Club in 1975,  

which was a stepping stone to the development  and marketing of the first Apple computer. 

In 1976, Wozniak designed and developed  the Apple I computer and showed it to Jobs,  

who suggested that they sell it. Jobs,  Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne founded Apple  

Computer in the garage of Jobs's  Los Altos home on Crist Drive.

The two Steves attended the Homebrew Computer  Club together; a computer hobbyist group that  

gathered in California's Menlo Park from 1975.  Woz had seen his first MITS Altair there - which  

today looks like little more than a box of lights  and circuit boards. Wozniak was inspired by MITS'  

build-it-yourself approach (the Altair came as a  kit) to make something simpler for the rest of us.

Wozniak went on to produce the first computer  with a typewriter-like keyboard and the ability to  

connect to a regular TV as a screen. It was later  christened the Apple I and was the archetype of  

every modern computer, but Wozniak wasn't  trying to change the world with what he'd made  

- he just wanted to show off how much he'd  managed to do with so little resources.

The two decided on the name "Apple" after Jobs  returned from the All One Farm commune in Oregon  

and told Wozniak about his time spent  in the farm's apple orchard. Neighbours  

on Crist Drive had described Jobs as  an odd individual who would greet his  

clients "with his underwear hanging  out, barefoot and hippie-like."

Jobs approached a local computer store, The  Byte Shop with the Apple I, who said they  

would be interested in the machine, but only if  it came fully assembled. The owner, Paul Terrell,  

went further, saying he would order 50 of the  machines and pay US $500 each on delivery. Jobs  

then took the purchase order that he had been  given from the Byte Shop to Cramer Electronics, a  

national electronic parts distributor, and ordered  the components he needed to assemble the Apple I  

Computer. The local credit manager asked Jobs  how he was going to pay for the parts. Jobs  

explained about his purchase order from the Byte  Shop which was cash on delivery. Jobs persuaded  

Cramer Electronics to give him the parts on credit  and would pay him once he delivered the computers.

Family and friends were roped in to sit at a  kitchen table and help solder the parts, and  

once they'd been tested Jobs drove them over to  Byte Shop. When he unpacked them, Terrell, who had  

ordered finished computers, was surprised by what  he found. Terrell had essentially received only  

the motherboard of the computer. Customers would  have to provide the keyboard, power supply and TV  

to actually use the Apple I. Although Terrell  was upset by this, he still accepted and paid  

for the units. Not to mention giving Jobs an idea  of what the next Apple computer should be like.  

After the Apple I's success, the business was in  need of investment. They had used a variety of  

methods, including selling various prized items  like Wozniak's HP scientific calculator and  

Jobs' VW bus. Jobs started looking for cash,  but banks were reluctant to lend him money;