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Overview
Easily one of the most influential innovators of the twentieth and twenty-first century, Steve Jobs fundamentally shaped the way in which we communicate and, even more broadly, live our lives.
In this information-packed graphic biography, Steve Jobs’ remarkable talent and genius are explored through bold design and original graphics. Kevin Lynch explores Jobs’ journey from savvy salesman, to his rivalry and market competition with Bill Gates, to his shift toward radical innovations in later life. This technological innovator led a fascinating, astounding and ultimately too short life that irreversibly impacted our world.
Steve Jobs: A Biographic Portrait is a visual celebration and comprehensive study of “The Maverick” and his work; and a must-have for any fan of Apple products.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781781318706 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Quarto Publishing Group USA |
| Publication date: | 07/27/2022 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 272 |
| File size: | 10 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
To put a ding in the universe
It may have just been a relatively short forty-five-minute drive away from their previous home, but the change from city surroundings was keenly felt. The move to their new cookie-cutter estate house was the final piece in the puzzle for Paul and Clara Jobs, achieving their dream of becoming a stereotypical 1950s American family – something that had once seemed very much out of reach.
The working-class couple married in 1946, but an ectopic pregnancy had ended Clara's hopes of being able to bear children.
The pair were given the opportunity to adopt Steve just a few days after his birth on 24 February 1955. They would go on to further expand the Jobs family three years later when they adopted once again – this time a girl they would name Patty.
Steve had been given up by his birth mother, a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin named Joanna Schieble. A German-Swiss Catholic, Schieble had fallen in love with Abdulfattah Jandali, a Muslim PhD candidate studying political science from Syria who was the son of a self-made millionaire oil magnate. The relationship dismayed Schieble's strict Christian conservative father – unwilling to upset him as he had become terminally ill, and mindful of the prevailing negative attitudes towards unwed mothers at that time, Schieble moved to San Francisco. She separated from Jandali who remained in Wisconsin and reluctantly decided to give up her baby on condition that the adoptive parents be Catholic and college educated.
Neither of the prospective parents were graduates, a detail that prompted Schieble to initially refuse to sign over her child to them. After weeks of negotiating via the doctor, Paul and Clara agreed to guarantee that they would provide a savings account which would eventually fund the boy's college education. It was a significant commitment at that time for a working-class family on a modest income and one that was enough to convince Schieble to relent.
How seriously the Jobs had taken the pledge of ensuring their son's education was illustrated early on when it was time for him to begin elementary school. While looking after her two children as a stay at home mum, Clara had taught Steve to read by the age of just three. This meant by the time he started Monta Loma Elementary he was already far advanced beyond his peers.
While he may not have had the academic background necessary to satisfy Schieble's discerning standards, Paul Jobs also played a full role in encouraging his son's curiosity to learn. Crucially, his love and knowledge of mechanics and craftsmanship would go on to prove a significant influence on his son's later life.
As an adult, Steve would describe his adopted father as a 'genius with his hands', crediting Paul's attention to detail for his own interest in good design and stating that the only thing he wished to pass on to his own children was 'to try to be as good a father to them as my father was to me'.
Paul Jobs had become an engine mechanic after dropping out of high school before signing up to the Coast Guard at the age of nineteen and serving during the Second World War. Thanks to a number of minor misdemeanours he never rose above the low rank of seaman, and he eventually left the guard around the time he married Clara to become a blue-collar machinist. His love and knowledge of automobiles would go on to lead to jobs as a 'repo-man' – retrieving cars from customers unable to make their payments. Paul would top up his income by restoring and selling old cars in his spare time, meaning the family garage was continually in use and a place of fascination for his inquisitive son. Hoping to feed his interest, Paul set aside some space for his young apprentice.
'He had a workbench out in his garage,' Steve recalled once during an interview. 'When I was about five or six, he sectioned off a little piece of it and said, "Steve, this is your workbench now." And he gave me some of his smaller tools and showed me how to use a hammer and saw and how to build things. It really was very good for me. He spent a lot of time with me ... teaching me how to build things, how to take things apart, put things back together.' While his father was no expert in the field, the sessions in the garage helping him to rebuild cars as well as household repair projects also exposed Steve to electronics.
The Jobs had landed in Mountain View in 1960 during a period when many young families were flocking to the area. The relocation of Paul's repossession work had prompted their move, but many of the new inhabitants in and around the Santa Clara Valley were engineers, chemists, programmers and physicists who were flooding to the region's booming semiconductor, telecommunications and electronics industries.
Just a mile or two from the Jobs's new home, Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory had become the first company to develop silicon semiconductor devices towards the end of the 1950s. This advancement would prove a major breakthrough for computing but the triumph would be short lived for the company's founder, Nobel Prize–winning physicist William Shockley. His heavy-handed management style brought about a near mutiny of the young, brilliant engineers he had brought to the company. The talented group would soon leave to set up Fairchild Semiconductor, a company that would in turn later birth chip giants such as Intel and AMD.
Hewlett-Packard began in a garage in Palo Alto as far back as the late 1930s and its presence now loomed large over the valley, with the company boasting a 9,000-strong workforce making its technical instruments by the start of the 1960s. Meanwhile Stanford Industrial Park had opened, with the local university leasing portions of its land to companies such as Eastman Kodak, General Electric and Lockheed Corporation, cleverly linking the flourishing tech industry with academic talent from the valley.
The city's population had more than doubled during the preceding decade, with the fruit orchards that had previously characterised the town cleared to make way for highways, new schools and large bases for the host of new tech startups that would shape the area's future. The rapidly changing environment around their home made the Santa Clara Valley area particularly conducive for a young student like Steve to develop an interest in computers.
'It was really the most wonderful place in the world to grow up. There was a man who moved in down the street, maybe about six or seven houses down the block who was new in the neighbourhood with his wife, and it turned out that he was an engineer at Hewlett-Packard and a ham radio operator and really into electronics. What he did to get to know the kids in the block was rather a strange thing: he put out a carbon microphone and a battery and a speaker on his driveway where you could talk into the microphone and your voice would be amplified by the speaker. Kind of strange thing when you move into a neighborhood but that's what he did.'
It would be more than ten years before journalist Don Hoefler would coin the term 'Silicon Valley' in a 1971 newspaper article when describing the region, but at the time of the Jobs family's arrival in town, most residents of Santa Clara Valley would have already been acutely aware that the world's epicentre for technology was already emerging on their doorstep.
CHAPTER 2Creativity is just connecting things
He was around the age of six or seven when the loaded question was put to him by a young girl who lived across the street.
'Lightning bolts went off in my head,' Jobs vividly recalled some five decades later. 'I remember running into the house, crying. And my parents said, "No, you have to understand." They were very serious and looked me straight in the eye. They said, "We specifically picked you out." Both of my parents said that and repeated it slowly for me. And they put an emphasis on every word in that sentence.'
While it was often levelled at Jobs that some of his quick-tempered behaviour in later life could be explained by a sense of abandonment as a child, Jobs was always quick to dismiss the idea, saying his awareness of his adoption had made him feel more independent, while the love given to him by Paul and Clara allayed any feelings of rejection.
'I've always felt special. My parents made me feel special.' Hyperactive, and often temperamental, parenting their uniquely inquisitive adopted son was not without its challenges. He would often wake early in the morning looking for stimulus, resulting in him being bought a rocking horse and a record player with some Little Richard LPs for him to entertain himself with during those early rises.
Young Steve would also be no stranger to the local hospital, with a dash to the emergency room required on one occasion after he ingested a bottle of ant poison, while his curiosity to discover what would happen if he jammed a hair clip into an electric socket resulted in him being treated for painful burns to the hand.
Keen to fulfil the pledge they had made to his birth mother, Paul and Clara nurtured and indulged their son and did everything they could to ensure he remained set on an academic path. While unquestionably something of a handful, Steve was also exceptionally clever, a fact that both his parents and Steve were acutely aware of at an early point.
Markedly ahead of his peers, he was often unchallenged during lessons at Monta Loma Elementary, causing concern for Paul and Clara when the boredom inevitably turned to mischief-making and a refusal to do the undemanding work he had been set.
Prank-playing would become a feature of Jobs's youth, a trait of his that would first come to the fore as early as the third grade. Finding a likeminded sidekick in his classmate Rick Farentino, on one occasion they left a teacher traumatised after setting explosives off under her desk, while on another they caused chaos by switching the locks on other pupils' bikes after somehow managing to get them to reveal the combinations.
Such high jinks would often result in Steve being sent home, but while Paul Jobs would be firm with his son over his behaviour, he would direct the blame towards the school, asking his teachers to acknowledge that his son was special and that they needed to keep him interested and occupied.
By the fourth grade Steve was separated into another class from Rick, and fell under the wing of Imogene 'Teddy' Hill – the first teacher to truly recognise how bright he was. In later life Jobs would describe her as a saint. 'I learned more from her than any other teacher, and if it hadn't been for her I'm sure I would have gone to jail,' he would acknowledge.
While others saw him as a troublemaker, she worked hard to keep him motivated, initially through the use of bribes, with Teddy offering lollipops and the incentive of a $5 prize if he completed his math workbooks. Eventually the inducements were no longer necessary, with Steve just eager to please his tutor, and he began to flourish.
Encouraged by the progress he had made, Teddy had Steve tested towards the end of fourth grade. The results arrived back with Steve scoring at high school sophomore level, prompting the school to advise he skip two years and go straight into seventh grade. Cautiously Paul and Clara agreed for him to be pushed up a single grade.
While both his teachers and parents saw the move as necessary, the change for Steve was not a smooth one. The leap in grades meant moving to Crittenden Middle, a tough school that had created local headlines for gang fights and the burning of a rival school's bus following a defeat in a wrestling match. Younger, awkward and seemingly wirier than everyone else, he was regularly bullied.
After a year of being put upon, Steve gave his parents an ultimatum. An early display of the strong-willed nature that characterised so many pivotal moments in his later life, he refused to go back to Crittenden after finishing sixth grade and pleaded with his parents to send him to a better school. Such a change would require a move to a new school district and a considerable outlay for the already stretched young family. However, with Paul and Clara having misgivings about sending Patty to schools within the Mountain View, area they opted to up sticks a few miles south to Los Altos.
Situated in a reasonably affluent neighbourhood that had emerged from what had previously been plum orchards, the new Jobs family home at 2066 Crist Drive was on a quiet housing estate and had three bedrooms. Crucially, it came with a garage that would allow Paul to continue fixing up old cars, and would later become the base from which Apple Computers would be birthed.
Steve settled well in the area and soon made fast friends with classmate Bill Fernandez at his new school, Cupertino Junior High. The pair would bond over a shared love of electronics and would work together on science fair projects, with Steve hanging out for hours on end after lessons in his new friend's garage to fix and fiddle with electronic gadgets.
Jobs would also spend free time visiting the house of his old neighbour Larry Lang, a Hewlett-Packard engineer who introduced him to Heathkits – do-it-yourself packs for aspiring engineers which let them build their own oscilloscopes, radios and other electronics. It proved a crucial grounding, as he later admitted:
'You looked at a television set and you would think that, "I haven't built one of those but I could. There's one of those in the Heathkit catalogue and I've built two other Heathkits, so I could build that."
'Things became much more clear that they were the results of human creation, not these magical things that just appeared in one's environment and that one had no knowledge of their interiors.'
Encouraged by Lang, Jobs would further his knowledge by joining the local Explorers Club, a small group of kids who would regularly gather in the company cafeteria at Hewlett-Packard's campus in Palo Alto on Tuesday evenings. There they would be given lessons from HP engineers and set electronics projects.
During a tour of a lab as part of one of those evening sessions, Jobs was given a tantalising glimpse into his future when he was allowed to view a new device HP were developing.
'I saw my first desktop computer there. It was called the 9100A, and it was a glorified calculator but also really the first desktop computer. It was huge, maybe forty pounds, but it was a beauty of a thing. I fell in love with it.'
Recalling when Bill Hewlett himself had chatted with him for twenty minutes and given him a summer job on the assembly line at Hewlett-Packard, Jobs said he was, 'assembling frequency counters ... well, assembling may be too strong. I was putting in screws. It didn't matter.'
'I remember my first day on the assembly line at HP,' he reminisced.
'I was expressing my complete enthusiasm and bliss at being there for the summer to my supervisor, a guy named Chris, telling him that my favorite thing in the whole world was electronics. I asked him what his favorite thing to do was and he looked at me and said, "To f---!" I learned a lot that summer.'
The formative experience was followed by another as Jobs and his friend Fernandez entered Homestead High school in the fall of 1968, amid a backdrop of turmoil across the United States. Anti-Vietnam War riots had broken out on campuses across the country, including the nearby Berkeley and San Francisco State. Lyndon Johnson's grip on power as President was slipping, while Martin Luther King Jr and Bobby Kennedy's assassinations within weeks of each other only served to stoke the idealism of the nation's disaffected youth, pushing many towards the Bay Area's emerging counterculture.
The changing cultural landscape unsurprisingly had an influence on the pubescent Jobs, with his hair growing ever longer over the course of his freshman year at Homestead as he tuned in to the nonconformist spirit of the times. Homestead was a stark, sprawling two-storey complex designed by a prison architect that housed 2,000 students. While Jobs struggled to find friends of his own age there, he found like minds in a group of seniors who shared his curiosity in the nascent hippie movement as well as pranks and, crucially, electronics.
Keen to meet others who were into the emerging electronics scene, around this time Bill Fernandez introduced Jobs to another of his friends. His go-to person when his solder and circuit board projects ran into trouble, Steve Wozniak lived down the street from Fernandez. The son of a engineer at Lockheed, he'd won a number of local electronics fairs and was already beginning to develop a reputation as a local technological wizard. Boasting an IQ of 200, by the age of eleven, Wozniak had produced an electronic noughts and crosses game completely designed around the capability of logic circuits. By his late teens he had a deep knowledge of the scientific programming language FORTRAN.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Steve Jobs"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Kevin Lynch.
Excerpted by permission of The Quarto Group.
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Table of Contents
Contents includes:- Jobs' early life, his discovery of electronics and the emerging Silicon Valley
- His work at Atari and how this paved the way to Apple Inc.
- His collaboration with like-minded innovators, Steve Wozniak and Mike Markkula
- The history of Apple computer models and specs
- His resignation from Apple, and infamous competition with Steve Gates and Microsoft
- The beginning of a musical revolution with the invention of the iPod and iTunes
- His final big hit with the invention of the iPad before his resignation due to ill health
- The world's reaction to the loss of a technology genius