then there was Steve Jobs serendipitous,rich, early formative life of 21 years!:
From Wikipedia
" Early life and education Steven Paul Jobs was born in San Francisco on February 24, 1955 to two university students, Joanne Carole Schieble of Swiss Catholic descent and Syrian-born Abdulfattah "John" Jandali ( Arabic: ????????? ??????), who were both unmarried at the time. [34] Jandali, who was teaching in Wisconsin when Steve was born, said he had no choice but to put the baby up for adoption because his girlfriend's family objected to their relationship. [35]
The baby was adopted at birth by Paul Reinhold Jobs (1922–1993) and Clara Jobs (1924–1986), an Armenian American [3] whose maiden name was Hagopian. [36] According to Steve Jobs's commencement address at Stanford, Schieble wanted Jobs to be adopted only by a college-graduate couple. Schieble learned that Clara Jobs didn't graduate from college and Paul Jobs only attended high school, but signed final adoption papers after they promised her that the child would definitely be encouraged and supported to attend college. Later, when asked about his "adoptive parents," Jobs replied emphatically that Paul and Clara Jobs "were my parents." [37] He stated in his authorized biography that they "were my parents 1,000%." [38] Unknown to him, his biological parents would subsequently marry (December 1955), have a second child, novelist Mona Simpson, in 1957, and divorce in 1962. [38]
The Jobs family moved from San Francisco to Mountain View, California when Steve was five years old. [1] [2] The parents later adopted a daughter, Patti. Paul was a machinist for a company that made lasers, and taught his son rudimentary electronics and how to work with his hands. [1] The father showed Steve how to work on electronics in the family garage, demonstrating to his son how to take apart and rebuild electronics such as radios and televisions. As a result, Steve became interested in and developed a hobby of technical tinkering. [39]
Clara was an accountant [37] who taught him to read before he went to school. [1] Clara Jobs had been a payroll clerk for Varian Associates, one of the first high-tech firms in what became known as Silicon Valley. [40]
Jobs's youth was riddled with frustrations over formal schooling. At Monta Loma Elementary school in Mountain View, he was a prankster whose fourth-grade teacher needed to bribe him to study. Jobs tested so well, however, that administrators wanted to skip him ahead to high school—a proposal his parents declined. [41]
Jobs then attended Cupertino Junior High and Homestead High School in Cupertino, California. [2] At Homestead, Jobs became friends with Bill Fernandez, a neighbor who shared the same interests in electronics. Fernandez introduced Jobs to another, older computer whiz kid, Steve Wozniak (also known as "Woz"). In 1969 Woz started building a little computer board with Fernandez that they named "The Cream Soda Computer", which they showed to Jobs; he seemed really interested. [42]
Following high school graduation in 1972, Jobs enrolled at Reed College in Portland, Oregon. Reed was an expensive college which Paul and Clara could ill afford. They were spending much of their life savings on their son's higher education. [42] Jobs dropped out of college after six months and spent the next 18 months dropping in on creative classes, including a course on calligraphy. [43] He continued auditing classes at Reed while sleeping on the floor in friends' dorm rooms, returning Coke bottles for food money, and getting weekly free meals at the local Hare Krishna temple. [44] Jobs later 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." [44]
Early career
Homebrew Computer Club Newsletter, September 1976
In 1974, Jobs took a job as a technician at Atari, Inc. in Los Gatos, California. [45] He traveled to India in mid-1974 [46] to visit Neem Karoli Baba [47] at his Kainchi Ashram with a Reed College friend (and, later, an early Apple employee), Daniel Kottke, in search of spiritual enlightenment. When they got to the Neem Karoli ashram, it was almost deserted as Neem Karoli Baba had died in September 1973. [45] Then they made a long trek up a dry riverbed to an ashram of Hariakhan Baba. In India, they spent a lot of time on bus rides from Delhi to Uttar Pradesh and back, then up to Himachal Pradesh and back. [45]
After staying for seven months, Jobs left India [48] and returned to the US ahead of Daniel Kottke. [45] Jobs had changed his appearance; his head was shaved and he wore traditional Indian clothing. [49] [50] During this time, Jobs experimented with psychedelics, later calling his LSD experiences "one of the two or three most important things [he had] done in [his] life". [51] [52] He also became a serious practitioner of Zen Buddhism, engaged in lengthy meditation retreats at the Tassajara Zen Mountain Center, the oldest Soto Zen monastery in the US. [53] He considered taking up monastic residence at Eihei-ji in Japan, and maintained a lifelong appreciation for Zen. [54] Jobs would later say that people around him who did not share his countercultural roots could not fully relate to his thinking. [51]
Jobs then returned to Atari, and was assigned to create a circuit board for the arcade video game Breakout. According to Atari co-founder Nolan Bushnell, Atari offered $100 for each chip that was eliminated in the machine. Jobs had little specialized knowledge of circuit board design and made a deal with Wozniak to split the fee evenly between them if Wozniak could minimize the number of chips. Much to the amazement of Atari engineers, Wozniak reduced the number of chips by 50, a design so tight that it was impossible to reproduce on an assembly line.[ further explanation needed] According to Wozniak, Jobs told him that Atari gave them only $700 (instead of the offered $5,000), and that Wozniak's share was thus $350. [55] Wozniak did not learn about the actual bonus until ten years later, but said that if Jobs had told him about it and had said he needed the money, Wozniak would have given it to him. [56]
In the early 1970s, Jobs and Wozniak were drawn to technology like a magnet. 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 clandestine sales of the illegal "blue boxes" went well, and perhaps planted the seed in Jobs's mind that electronics could be fun and profitable. [57]
Jobs began attending meetings of the Homebrew Computer Club with Wozniak in 1975. [2] He greatly admired Edwin H. Land, the inventor of instant photography and founder of Polaroid Corporation, and would explicitly model his own career after that of Land's. [58] [59]
In 1976, Jobs and Wozniak formed their own business, which they named "Apple Computer Company" in remembrance of a happy summer Jobs had spent picking apples. At first they started off selling circuit boards. [60]
Career |
