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college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my
parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work
out okay.”
He didn’t actually want to leave Reed; he just wanted to quit paying tuition and taking
classes that didn’t interest him. Remarkably, Reed tolerated that. “He had a very inquiring
mind that was enormously attractive,” said the dean of students, Jack Dudman. “He refused
to accept automatically received truths, and he wanted to examine everything himself.”
Dudman allowed Jobs to audit classes and stay with friends in the dorms even after he
stopped paying tuition.
“The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn’t interest
me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting,” he said. Among them was a
calligraphy class that appealed to him after he saw posters on campus that were beautifully
drawn. “I learned about serif and sans serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space
between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was
beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it
fascinating.”
It was yet another example of Jobs consciously positioning himself at the intersection
of the arts and technology. In all of his products, technology would be married to great
design, elegance, human touches, and even romance. He would be in the fore of pushing
friendly graphical user interfaces. The calligraphy course would become iconic in that
regard. “If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have
never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just
copied the Mac, it’s likely that no personal computer would have them.”
In the meantime Jobs eked out a bohemian existence on the fringes of Reed. He went
barefoot most of the time, wearing sandals when it snowed. Elizabeth Holmes made meals
for him, trying to keep up with his obsessive diets. He returned soda bottles for spare
change, continued his treks to the free Sunday dinners at the Hare Krishna temple, and
wore a down jacket in the heatless garage apartment he rented for $20 a month. When he
needed money, he found work at the psychology department lab maintaining the electronic
equipment that was used for animal behavior experiments. Occasionally Chrisann Brennan
would come to visit. Their relationship sputtered along erratically. But mostly he tended to
the stirrings of his own soul and personal quest for enlightenment.
“I came of age at a magical time,” he reflected later. “Our consciousness was raised by
Zen, and also by LSD.” Even later in life he would credit psychedelic drugs for making
him more enlightened. “Taking LSD was 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.”
CHAPTER FOUR
ATARI AND INDIA
Zen and the Art of Game Design
Atari
In February 1974, after eighteen months of hanging around Reed, Jobs decided to move
back to his parents’ home in Los Altos and look for a job. It was not a difficult search. At
peak times during the 1970s, the classified section of the San Jose Mercury carried up to
sixty pages of technology help-wanted ads. One of those caught Jobs’s eye. “Have fun,
make money,” it said. That day Jobs walked into the lobby of the video game manufacturer
Atari and told the personnel director, who was startled by his unkempt hair and attire, that
he wouldn’t leave until they gave him a job.
Atari’s founder was a burly entrepreneur named Nolan Bushnell, who was a charismatic
visionary with a nice touch of showmanship in him—in other words, another role model
waiting to be emulated. After he became famous, he liked driving around in a Rolls,
smoking dope, and holding staff meetings in a hot tub. As Friedland had done and as Jobs
would learn to do, he was able to turn charm into a cunning force, to cajole and intimidate
and distort reality with the power of his personality. His chief engineer was Al Alcorn,
beefy and jovial and a bit more grounded, the house grown-up trying to implement the
vision and curb the enthusiasms of Bushnell. Their big hit thus far was a video game called
Pong, in which two players tried to volley a blip on a screen with two movable lines that
acted as paddles. (If you’re under thirty, ask your parents.)
When Jobs arrived in the Atari lobby wearing sandals and demanding a job, Alcorn was
the one who was summoned. “I was told, ‘We’ve got a hippie kid in the lobby. He says he’s
not going to leave until we hire him. Should we call the cops or let him in?’ I said bring
him on in!”
Jobs thus became one of the first fifty employees at Atari, working as a technician for
$5 an hour. “In retrospect, it was weird to hire a dropout from Reed,” Alcorn recalled. “But
I saw something in him. He was very intelligent, enthusiastic, excited about tech.” Alcorn
assigned him to work with a straitlaced engineer named Don Lang. The next day Lang
complained, “This guy’s a goddamn hippie with b.o. Why did you do this to me? And he’s
impossible to deal with.” Jobs clung to the belief that his fruit-heavy vegetarian diet would
prevent not just mucus but also body odor, even if he didn’t use deodorant or shower
regularly. It was a flawed theory.
Lang and others wanted to let Jobs go, but Bushnell worked out a solution. “The smell
and behavior wasn’t an issue with me,” he said. “Steve was prickly, but I kind of liked him.
So I asked him to go on the night shift. It was a way to save him.” Jobs would come in after
Lang and others had left and work through most of the night. Even thus isolated, he became
known for his brashness. On those occasions when he happened to interact with others, he
was prone to informing them that they were “dumb shits.” In retrospect, he stands by that
judgment. “The only reason I shone was that everyone else was so bad,” Jobs recalled.
Despite his arrogance (or perhaps because of it) he was able to charm Atari’s boss. “He
was more philosophical than the other people I worked with,” Bushnell recalled. “We used
to discuss free will versus determinism. I tended to believe that things were much more
determined, that we were programmed. If we had perfect information, we could predict
people’s actions. Steve felt the opposite.” That outlook accorded with his faith in the power
of the will to bend reality.
Jobs helped improve some of the games by pushing the chips to produce fun designs,
and Bushnell’s inspiring willingness to play by his own rules rubbed off on him. In
addition, he intuitively appreciated the simplicity of Atari’s games. They came with no
manual and needed to be uncomplicated enough that a stoned freshman could figure them
out. The only instructions for Atari’s Star Trek game were “1. Insert quarter. 2. Avoid
Klingons.”
Not all of his coworkers shunned Jobs. He became friends with Ron Wayne, a
draftsman at Atari, who had earlier started a company that built slot machines. It
subsequently failed, but Jobs became fascinated with the idea that it was possible to start
your own company. “Ron was an amazing guy,” said Jobs. “He started companies. I had
never met anybody like that.” He proposed to Wayne that they go into business together;
Jobs said he could borrow $50,000, and they could design and market a slot machine. But
Wayne had already been burned in business, so he declined. “I said that was the quickest
way to lose $50,000,” Wayne recalled, “but I admired the fact that he had a burning drive to
start his own business.”
One weekend Jobs was visiting Wayne at his apartment, engaging as they often did in
philosophical discussions, when Wayne said that there was something he needed to tell
him. “Yeah, I think I know what it is,” Jobs replied. “I think you like men.” Wayne said
yes. “It was my first encounter with someone who I knew was gay,” Jobs recalled. “He
planted the right perspective of it for me.” Jobs grilled him: “When you see a beautiful
woman, what do you feel?” Wayne replied, “It’s like when you look at a beautiful horse.
You can appreciate it, but you don’t want to sleep with it. You appreciate beauty for what it
is.” Wayne said that it is a testament to Jobs that he felt like revealing this to him. “Nobody
at Atari knew, and I could count on my toes and fingers the number of people I told in my
whole life. But I guess it just felt right to tell him, that he would understand, and it didn’t
have any effect on our relationship.”
India
One reason Jobs was eager to make some money in early 1974 was that Robert
Friedland, who had gone to India the summer before, was urging him to take his own
spiritual journey there. Friedland had studied in India with Neem Karoli Baba (Maharaj-ji),
who had been the guru to much of the sixties hippie movement. Jobs decided he should do
the same, and he recruited Daniel Kottke to go with him. Jobs was not motivated by mere
adventure. “For me it was a serious search,” he said. “I’d been turned on to the idea of
enlightenment and trying to figure out who I was and how I fit into things.” Kottke adds
that Jobs’s quest seemed driven partly by not knowing his birth parents. “There was a hole
in him, and he was trying to fill it.”
When Jobs told the folks at Atari that he was quitting to go search for a guru in India,
the jovial Alcorn was amused. “He comes in and stares at me and declares, ‘I’m going to
find my guru,’ and I say, ‘No shit, that’s super. Write me!’ And he says he wants me to help
pay, and I tell him, ‘Bullshit!’” Then Alcorn had an idea. Atari was making kits and
shipping them to Munich, where they were built into finished machines and distributed by a
wholesaler in Turin. But there was a problem: Because the games were designed for the
American rate of sixty frames per second, there were frustrating interference problems in
Europe, where the rate was fifty frames per second. Alcorn sketched out a fix with Jobs and
then offered to pay for him to go to Europe to implement it. “It’s got to be cheaper to get to
India from there,” he said. Jobs agreed. So Alcorn sent him on his way with the
exhortation, “Say hi to your guru for me.”
Jobs spent a few days in Munich, where he solved the interference problem, but in the
process he flummoxed the dark-suited German managers. They complained to Alcorn that
he dressed and smelled like a bum and behaved rudely. “I said, ‘Did he solve the problem?’
And they said, ‘Yeah.’ I said, ‘If you got any more problems, you just call me, I got more
guys just like him!’ They said, ‘No, no we’ll take care of it next time.’” For his part, Jobs
was upset that the Germans kept trying to feed him meat and potatoes. “They don’t even
have a word for vegetarian,” he complained (incorrectly) in a phone call to Alcorn.
He had a better time when he took the train to see the distributor in Turin, where the
Italian pastas and his host’s camaraderie were more simpatico. “I had a wonderful couple of
weeks in Turin, which is this charged-up industrial town,” he recalled. “The distributor
took me every night to dinner at this place where there were only eight tables and no menu.
You’d just tell them what you wanted, and they made it. One of the tables was on reserve
for the chairman of Fiat. It was really super.” He next went to Lugano, Switzerland, where
he stayed with Friedland’s uncle, and from there took a flight to India.
When he got off the plane in New Delhi, he felt waves of heat rising from the tarmac,
even though it was only April. He had been given the name of a hotel, but it was full, so he
went to one his taxi driver insisted was good. “I’m sure he was getting some baksheesh,
because he took me to this complete dive.” Jobs asked the owner whether the water was
filtered and foolishly believed the answer. “I got dysentery pretty fast. I was sick, really
sick, a really high fever. I dropped from 160 pounds to 120 in about a week.”
Once he got healthy enough to move, he decided that he needed to get out of Delhi. So
he headed to the town of Haridwar, in western India near the source of the Ganges, which
was having a festival known as the Kumbh Mela. More than ten million people poured into
a town that usually contained fewer than 100,000 residents. “There were holy men all
around. Tents with this teacher and that teacher. There were people riding elephants, you
name it. I was there for a few days, but I decided that I needed to get out of there too.”
He went by train and bus to a village near Nainital in the foothills of the Himalayas.
That was where Neem Karoli Baba lived, or had lived. By the time Jobs got there, he was
no longer alive, at least in the same incarnation. Jobs rented a room with a mattress on the
floor from a family who helped him recuperate by feeding him vegetarian meals. “There
was a copy there of Autobiography of a Yogi in English that a previous traveler had left,
and I read it several times because there was not a lot to do, and I walked around from
village to village and recovered from my dysentery.” Among those who were part of the
community there was Larry Brilliant, an epidemiologist who was working to eradicate
smallpox and who later ran Google’s philanthropic arm and the Skoll Foundation. He
became Jobs’s lifelong friend.
At one point Jobs was told of a young Hindu holy man who was holding a gathering of
his followers at the Himalayan estate of a wealthy businessman. “It was a chance to meet a
spiritual being and hang out with his followers, but it was also a chance to have a good
meal. I could smell the food as we got near, and I was very hungry.” As Jobs was eating,
the holy man—who was not much older than Jobs—picked him out of the crowd, pointed
at him, and began laughing maniacally. “He came running over and grabbed me and made a
tooting sound and said, ‘You are just like a baby,’” recalled Jobs. “I was not relishing this
attention.” Taking Jobs by the hand, he led him out of the worshipful crowd and walked
him up to a hill, where there was a well and a small pond. “We sit down and he pulls out
this straight razor. I’m thinking he’s a nutcase and begin to worry. Then he pulls out a bar
of soap—I had long hair at the time—and he lathered up my hair and shaved my head. He
told me that he was saving my health.”
Daniel Kottke arrived in India at the beginning of the summer, and Jobs went back to
New Delhi to meet him. They wandered, mainly by bus, rather aimlessly. By this point Jobs
was no longer trying to find a guru who could impart wisdom, but instead was seeking
enlightenment through ascetic experience, deprivation, and simplicity. He was not able to
achieve inner calm. Kottke remembers him getting into a furious shouting match with a
Hindu woman in a village marketplace who, Jobs alleged, had been watering down the
milk she was selling them.
Yet Jobs could also be generous. When they got to the town of Manali, Kottke’s
sleeping bag was stolen with his traveler’s checks in it. “Steve covered my food expenses
and bus ticket back to Delhi,” Kottke recalled. He also gave Kottke the rest of his own
money, $100, to tide him over.
During his seven months in India, he had written to his parents only sporadically,
getting mail at the American Express office in New Delhi when he passed through, and so
they were somewhat surprised when they got a call from the Oakland airport asking them
to pick him up. They immediately drove up from Los Altos. “My head had been shaved, I
was wearing Indian cotton robes, and my skin had turned a deep, chocolate brown-red from
the sun,” he recalled. “So I’m sitting there and my parents walked past me about five times
and finally my mother came up and said ‘Steve?’ and I said ‘Hi!’”
They took him back home, where he continued trying to find himself. It was a pursuit
with many paths toward enlightenment. In the mornings and evenings he would meditate
and study Zen, and in between he would drop in to audit physics or engineering courses at
Stanford.
The Search
Jobs’s interest in Eastern spirituality, Hinduism, Zen Buddhism, and the search for
enlightenment was not merely the passing phase of a nineteen-year-old. Throughout his life
he would seek to follow many of the basic precepts of Eastern religions, such as the
emphasis on experiential prajñā, wisdom or cognitive understanding that is intuitively
experienced through concentration of the mind. Years later, sitting in his Palo Alto garden,
he reflected on the lasting influence of his trip to India:
Coming back to America was, for me, much more of a cultural shock than going to
India. The people in the Indian countryside don’t use their intellect like we do, they use
their intuition instead, and their intuition is far more developed than in 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.
Western rational thought is not an innate human characteristic; it is learned and is the
great achievement of Western civilization. In the villages of India, they never learned it.
They learned something else, which is in some ways just as valuable but in other ways is
not. That’s the power of intuition and experiential wisdom.
Coming back after seven months in Indian villages, I saw the craziness of the Western
world as well as its capacity for rational thought. If you just sit and observe, you will see
how restless your mind is. If you try to calm it, it only makes it worse, but over time it does
calm, and when it does, there’s room to hear more subtle things—that’s when your intuition
starts to blossom and you start to see things more clearly and be in the present more. Your
mind just slows down, and you see a tremendous expanse in the moment. You see so much
more than you could see before. It’s a discipline; you have to practice it.
Zen has been a deep influence in my life ever since. At one point I was thinking about
going to Japan and trying to get into the Eihei-ji monastery, but my spiritual advisor urged
me to stay here. He said there is nothing over there that isn’t here, and he was correct. I
learned the truth of the Zen saying that if you are willing to travel around the world to meet
a teacher, one will appear next door.
Jobs did in fact find a teacher right in his own neighborhood. Shunryu Suzuki, who
wrote Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind and ran the San Francisco Zen Center, used to come to
Los Altos every Wednesday evening to lecture and meditate with a small group of
followers. After a while he asked his assistant, Kobun Chino Otogawa, to open a full-time
center there. Jobs became a faithful follower, along with his occasional girlfriend, Chrisann
Brennan, and Daniel Kottke and Elizabeth Holmes. He also began to go by himself on
retreats to the Tassajara Zen Center, a monastery near Carmel where Kobun also taught.
Kottke found Kobun amusing. “His English was atrocious,” he recalled. “He would
speak in a kind of haiku, with poetic, suggestive phrases. We would sit and listen to him,
and half the time we had no idea what he was going on about. I took the whole thing as a
kind of lighthearted interlude.” Holmes was more into the scene. “We would go to Kobun’s
meditations, sit on zafu cushions, and he would sit on a dais,” she said. “We learned how to
tune out distractions. It was a magical thing. One evening we were meditating with Kobun
when it was raining, and he taught us how to use ambient sounds to bring us back to focus
on our meditation.”
As for Jobs, his devotion was intense. “He became really serious and self-important and
just generally unbearable,” according to Kottke. He began meeting with Kobun almost
daily, and every few months they went on retreats together to meditate. “I ended up
spending as much time as I could with him,” Jobs recalled. “He had a wife who was a nurse
at Stanford and two kids. She worked the night shift, so I would go over and hang out with
him in the evenings. She would get home about midnight and shoo me away.” They
sometimes discussed whether Jobs should devote himself fully to spiritual pursuits, but
Kobun counseled otherwise. He assured Jobs that he could keep in touch with his spiritual
side while working in a business. The relationship turned out to be lasting and deep;
seventeen years later Kobun would perform Jobs’s wedding ceremony.
Jobs’s compulsive search for self-awareness also led him to undergo primal scream
therapy, which had recently been developed and popularized by a Los Angeles
psychotherapist named Arthur Janov. It was based on the Freudian theory that
psychological problems are caused by the repressed pains of childhood; Janov argued that
they could be resolved by re-suffering these primal moments while fully expressing the
pain—sometimes in screams. To Jobs, this seemed preferable to talk therapy because it
involved intuitive feeling and emotional action rather than just rational analyzing. “This
was not something to think about,” he later said. “This was something to do: to close your
eyes, hold your breath, jump in, and come out the other end more insightful.”
A group of Janov’s adherents ran a program called the Oregon Feeling Center in an old
hotel in Eugene that was managed by Jobs’s Reed College guru Robert Friedland, whose
All One Farm commune was nearby. In late 1974, Jobs signed up for a twelve-week course
of therapy there costing $1,000. “Steve and I were both into personal growth, so I wanted
to go with him,” Kottke recounted, “but I couldn’t afford it.”
Jobs confided to close friends that he was driven by the pain he was feeling about being
put up for adoption and not knowing about his birth parents. “Steve had a very profound
desire to know his physical parents so he could better know himself,” Friedland later said.
He had learned from Paul and Clara Jobs that his birth parents had both been graduate
students at a university and that his father might be Syrian. He had even thought about
hiring a private investigator, but he decided not to do so for the time being. “I didn’t want
to hurt my parents,” he recalled, referring to Paul and Clara.
“He was struggling with the fact that he had been adopted,” according to Elizabeth
Holmes. “He felt that it was an issue that he needed to get hold of emotionally.” Jobs
admitted as much to her. “This is something that is bothering me, and I need to focus on it,”
he said. He was even more open with Greg Calhoun. “He was doing a lot of soul-searching
about being adopted, and he talked about it with me a lot,” Calhoun recalled. “The primal
scream and the mucusless diets, he was trying to cleanse himself and get deeper into his
frustration about his birth. He told me he was deeply angry about the fact that he had been
given up.”
John Lennon had undergone the same primal scream therapy in 1970, and in December
of that year he released the song “Mother” with the Plastic Ono Band. It dealt with
Lennon’s own feelings about a father who had abandoned him and a mother who had been
killed when he was a teenager. The refrain includes the haunting chant “Mama don’t go,
Daddy come home.” Jobs used to play the song often.
Jobs later said that Janov’s teachings did not prove very useful. “He offered a ready-
made, buttoned-down answer which turned out to be far too oversimplistic. It became
obvious that it was not going to yield any great insight.” But Holmes contended that it
made him more confident: “After he did it, he was in a different place. He had a very
abrasive personality, but there was a peace about him for a while. His confidence improved
and his feelings of inadequacy were reduced.”
Jobs came to believe that he could impart that feeling of confidence to others and thus
push them to do things they hadn’t thought possible. Holmes had broken up with Kottke
and joined a religious cult in San Francisco that expected her to sever ties with all past
friends. But Jobs rejected that injunction. He arrived at the cult house in his Ford Ranchero
one day and announced that he was driving up to Friedland’s apple farm and she was to
come. Even more brazenly, he said she would have to drive part of the way, even though
she didn’t know how to use the stick shift. “Once we got on the open road, he made me get
behind the wheel, and he shifted the car until we got up to 55 miles per hour,” she recalled.
“Then he puts on a tape of Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks, lays his head in my lap, and goes
to sleep. He had the attitude that he could do anything, and therefore so can you. He put his
life in my hands. So that made me do something I didn’t think I could do.”
It was the brighter side of what would become known as his reality distortion field. “If
you trust him, you can do things,” Holmes said. “If he’s decided that something should
happen, then he’s just going to make it happen.”
Breakout
One day in early 1975 Al Alcorn was sitting in his office at Atari when Ron Wayne
burst in. “Hey, Stevie is back!” he shouted.
“Wow, bring him on in,” Alcorn replied.
Jobs shuffled in barefoot, wearing a saffron robe and carrying a copy of Be Here Now,
which he handed to Alcorn and insisted he read. “Can I have my job back?” he asked.
“He looked like a Hare Krishna guy, but it was great to see him,” Alcorn recalled. “So I
said, sure!”
Once again, for the sake of harmony, Jobs worked mostly at night. Wozniak, who was
living in an apartment nearby and working at HP, would come by after dinner to hang out
and play the video games. He had become addicted to Pong at a Sunnyvale bowling alley,
and he was able to build a version that he hooked up to his home TV set.
One day in the late summer of 1975, Nolan Bushnell, defying the prevailing wisdom
that paddle games were over, decided to develop a single-player version of Pong; instead of
competing against an opponent, the player would volley the ball into a wall that lost a brick
whenever it was hit. He called Jobs into his office, sketched it out on his little blackboard,
and asked him to design it. There would be a bonus, Bushnell told him, for every chip
fewer than fifty that he used. Bushnell knew that Jobs was not a great engineer, but he
assumed, correctly, that he would recruit Wozniak, who was always hanging around. “I
looked at it as a two-for-one thing,” Bushnell recalled. “Woz was a better engineer.”
Wozniak was thrilled when Jobs asked him to help and proposed splitting the fee. “This
was the most wonderful offer in my life, to actually design a game that people would use,”
he recalled. Jobs said it had to be done in four days and with the fewest chips possible.
What he hid from Wozniak was that the deadline was one that Jobs had imposed, because
he needed to get to the All One Farm to help prepare for the apple harvest. He also didn’t
mention that there was a bonus tied to keeping down the number of chips.
“A game like this might take most engineers a few months,” Wozniak recalled. “I
thought that there was no way I could do it, but Steve made me sure that I could.” So he
stayed up four nights in a row and did it. During the day at HP, Wozniak would sketch out
his design on paper. Then, after a fast-food meal, he would go right to Atari and stay all
night. As Wozniak churned out the design, Jobs sat on a bench to his left implementing it
by wire-wrapping the chips onto a breadboard. “While Steve was breadboarding, I spent
time playing my favorite game ever, which was the auto racing game Gran Trak 10,”
Wozniak said.
Astonishingly, they were able to get the job done in four days, and Wozniak used only
forty-five chips. Recollections differ, but by most accounts Jobs simply gave Wozniak half
of the base fee and not the bonus Bushnell paid for saving five chips. It would be another
ten years before Wozniak discovered (by being shown the tale in a book on the history of
Atari titled Zap) that Jobs had been paid this bonus. “I think that Steve needed the money,
and he just didn’t tell me the truth,” Wozniak later said. When he talks about it now, there
are long pauses, and he admits that it causes him pain. “I wish he had just been honest. If
he had told me he needed the money, he should have known I would have just given it to
him. He was a friend. You help your friends.” To Wozniak, it showed a fundamental
difference in their characters. “Ethics always mattered to me, and I still don’t understand
why he would’ve gotten paid one thing and told me he’d gotten paid another,” he said.
“But, you know, people are different.”
When Jobs learned this story was published, he called Wozniak to deny it. “He told me
that he didn’t remember doing it, and that if he did something like that he would remember
it, so he probably didn’t do it,” Wozniak recalled. When I asked Jobs directly, he became
unusually quiet and hesitant. “I don’t know where that allegation comes from,” he said. “I
gave him half the money I ever got. That’s how I’ve always been with Woz. I mean, Woz
stopped working in 1978. He never did one ounce of work after 1978. And yet he got
exactly the same shares of Apple stock that I did.”
Is it possible that memories are muddled and that Jobs did not, in fact, shortchange
Wozniak? “There’s a chance that my memory is all wrong and messed up,” Wozniak told
me, but after a pause he reconsidered. “But no. I remember the details of this one, the $350
check.” He confirmed his memory with Nolan Bushnell and Al Alcorn. “I remember
talking about the bonus money to Woz, and he was upset,” Bushnell said. “I said yes, there
was a bonus for each chip they saved, and he just shook his head and then clucked his
tongue.”
Whatever the truth, Wozniak later insisted that it was not worth rehashing. Jobs is a
complex person, he said, and being manipulative is just the darker facet of the traits that
make him successful. Wozniak would never have been that way, but as he points out, he
also could never have built Apple. “I would rather let it pass,” he said when I pressed the
point. “It’s not something I want to judge Steve by.”
The Atari experience helped shape Jobs’s approach to business and design. He
appreciated the user-friendliness of Atari’s insert-quarter-avoid-Klingons games. “That
simplicity rubbed off on him and made him a very focused product person,” said Ron
Wayne. Jobs also absorbed some of Bushnell’s take-no-prisoners attitude. “Nolan wouldn’t
take no for an answer,” according to Alcorn, “and this was Steve’s first impression of how
things got done. Nolan was never abusive, like Steve sometimes is. But he had the same
driven attitude. It made me cringe, but dammit, it got things done. In that way Nolan was a
mentor for Jobs.”
Bushnell agreed. “There is something indefinable in an entrepreneur, and I saw that in
Steve,” he said. “He was interested not just in engineering, but also the business aspects. I
taught him that if you act like you can do something, then it will work. I told him, ‘Pretend
to be completely in control and people will assume that you are.’”
CHAPTER FIVE
THE APPLE I
Turn On, Boot Up, Jack In . . .
Daniel Kottke and Jobs with the Apple I at the Atlantic City computer fair, 1976
错误！超链接引用无效。
In San Francisco and the Santa Clara Valley during the late 1960s, various cultural currents
flowed together. There was the technology revolution that began with the growth of
military contractors and soon included electronics firms, microchip makers, video game
designers, and computer companies. There was a hacker subculture—filled with wireheads,
phreakers, cyberpunks, hobbyists, and just plain geeks—that included engineers who didn’t
conform to the HP mold and their kids who weren’t attuned to the wavelengths of the
subdivisions. There were quasi-academic groups doing studies on the effects of LSD;
participants included Doug Engelbart of the Augmentation Research Center in Palo Alto,
who later helped develop the computer mouse and graphical user interfaces, and Ken
Kesey, who celebrated the drug with music-and-light shows featuring a house band that
became the Grateful Dead. There was the hippie movement, born out of the Bay Area’s
beat generation, and the rebellious political activists, born out of the Free Speech
Movement at Berkeley. Overlaid on it all were various self-fulfillment movements pursuing
paths to personal enlightenment: Zen and Hinduism, meditation and yoga, primal scream
and sensory deprivation, Esalen and est.
This fusion of flower power and processor power, enlightenment and technology, was
embodied by Steve Jobs as he meditated in the mornings, audited physics classes at
Stanford, worked nights at Atari, and dreamed of starting his own business. “There was just
something going on here,” he said, looking back at the time and place. “The best music
came from here—the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Joan Baez, Janis Joplin—and so
did the integrated circuit, and things like the Whole Earth Catalog.”
Initially the technologists and the hippies did not interface well. Many in the
counterculture saw computers as ominous and Orwellian, the province of the Pentagon and
the power structure. In The Myth of the Machine, the historian Lewis Mumford warned that
computers were sucking away our freedom and destroying “life-enhancing values.” An
injunction on punch cards of the period—“Do not fold, spindle or mutilate”—became an
ironic phrase of the antiwar Left.
But by the early 1970s a shift was under way. “Computing went from being dismissed as
a tool of bureaucratic control to being embraced as a symbol of individual expression and
liberation,” John Markoff wrote in his study of the counterculture’s convergence with the
computer industry, What the Dormouse Said. It was an ethos lyrically expressed in Richard
Brautigan’s 1967 poem, “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace,” and the
cyberdelic fusion was certified when Timothy Leary declared that personal computers had
become the new LSD and years later revised his famous mantra to proclaim, “Turn on, boot
up, jack in.” The musician Bono, who later became a friend of Jobs, often discussed with
him why those immersed in the rock-drugs-rebel counterculture of the Bay Area ended up
helping to create the personal computer industry. “The people who invented the twenty-first
century were pot-smoking, sandal-wearing hippies from the West Coast like Steve, because
they saw differently,” he said. “The hierarchical systems of the East Coast, England,
Germany, and Japan do not encourage this different thinking. The sixties produced an
anarchic mind-set that is great for imagining a world not yet in existence.”
One person who encouraged the denizens of the counterculture to make common cause
with the hackers was Stewart Brand. A puckish visionary who generated fun and ideas over
many decades, Brand was a participant in one of the early sixties LSD studies in Palo Alto.
He joined with his fellow subject Ken Kesey to produce the acid-celebrating Trips Festival,
appeared in the opening scene of Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, and worked
with Doug Engelbart to create a seminal sound-and-light presentation of new technologies
called the Mother of All Demos. “Most of our generation scorned computers as the
embodiment of centralized control,” Brand later noted. “But a tiny contingent—later called
hackers—embraced computers and set about transforming them into tools of liberation.
That turned out to be the true royal road to the future.”
Brand ran the Whole Earth Truck Store, which began as a roving truck that sold useful
tools and educational materials, and in 1968 he decided to extend its reach with the Whole
Earth Catalog. On its first cover was the famous picture of Earth taken from space; its
subtitle was “Access to Tools.” The underlying philosophy was that technology could be
our friend. Brand wrote on the first page of the first edition, “A realm of intimate, personal
power is developing—power of the individual to conduct his own education, find his own
inspiration, shape his own environment, and share his adventure with whoever is interested.
Tools that aid this process are sought and promoted by the Whole Earth Catalog.”
Buckminster Fuller followed with a poem that began: “I see God in the instruments and
mechanisms that work reliably.”
Jobs became a Whole Earth fan. He was particularly taken by the final issue, which came
out in 1971, when he was still in high school, and he brought it with him to college and
then to the All One Farm. “On the back cover of their final issue” Jobs recalled, “was a
photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking
on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: ‘Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.’”
Brand sees Jobs as one of the purest embodiments of the cultural mix that the catalog
sought to celebrate. “Steve is right at the nexus of the counterculture and technology,” he
said. “He got the notion of tools for human use.”
Brand’s catalog was published with the help of the Portola Institute, a foundation
dedicated to the fledgling field of computer education. The foundation also helped launch
the People’s Computer Company, which was not a company at all but a newsletter and
organization with the motto “Computer power to the people.” There were occasional
Wednesday-night potluck dinners, and two of the regulars, Gordon French and Fred Moore,
decided to create a more formal club where news about personal electronics could be
shared.
They were energized by the arrival of the January 1975 issue of Popular Mechanics,
which had on its cover the first personal computer kit, the Altair. The Altair wasn’t much—
just a $495 pile of parts that had to be soldered to a board that would then do little—but for
hobbyists and hackers it heralded the dawn of a new era. Bill Gates and Paul Allen read the
magazine and started working on a version of BASIC, an easy-to-use programming
language, for the Altair. It also caught the attention of Jobs and Wozniak. And when an
Altair kit arrived at the People’s Computer Company, it became the centerpiece for the first
meeting of the club that French and Moore had decided to launch.
错误！超链接引用无效。
The group became known as the Homebrew Computer Club, and it encapsulated the Whole
Earth fusion between the counterculture and technology. It would become to the personal
computer era something akin to what the Turk’s Head coffeehouse was to the age of Dr.
Johnson, a place where ideas were exchanged and disseminated. Moore wrote the flyer for
the first meeting, held on March 5, 1975, in French’s Menlo Park garage: “Are you
building your own computer? Terminal, TV, typewriter?” it asked. “If so, you might like to
come to a gathering of people with like-minded interests.”
Allen Baum spotted the flyer on the HP bulletin board and called Wozniak, who agreed
to go with him. “That night turned out to be one of the most important nights of my life,”
Wozniak recalled. About thirty other people showed up, spilling out of French’s open
garage door, and they took turns describing their interests. Wozniak, who later admitted to
being extremely nervous, said he liked “video games, pay movies for hotels, scientific
calculator design, and TV terminal design,” according to the minutes prepared by Moore.
There was a demonstration of the new Altair, but more important to Wozniak was seeing
the specification sheet for a microprocessor.
As he thought about the microprocessor—a chip that had an entire central processing
unit on it—he had an insight. He had been designing a terminal, with a keyboard and
monitor, that would connect to a distant minicomputer. Using a microprocessor, he could
put some of the capacity of the minicomputer inside the terminal itself, so it could become
a small stand-alone computer on a desktop. It was an enduring idea: keyboard, screen, and
computer all in one integrated personal package. “This whole vision of a personal computer
just popped into my head,” he said. “That night, I started to sketch out on paper what would
later become known as the Apple I.”
At first he planned to use the same microprocessor that was in the Altair, an Intel 8080.
But each of those “cost almost more than my monthly rent,” so he looked for an alternative.
He found one in the Motorola 6800, which a friend at HP was able to get for $40 apiece.
Then he discovered a chip made by MOS Technologies that was electronically the same but
cost only $20. It would make his machine affordable, but it would carry a long-term cost.
Intel’s chips ended up becoming the industry standard, which would haunt Apple when its
computers were incompatible with it.
After work each day, Wozniak would go home for a TV dinner and then return to HP to
moonlight on his computer. He spread out the parts in his cubicle, figured out their
placement, and soldered them onto his motherboard. Then he began writing the software
that would get the microprocessor to display images on the screen. Because he could not
afford to pay for computer time, he wrote the code by hand. After a couple of months he
was ready to test it. “I typed a few keys on the keyboard and I was shocked! The letters
were displayed on the screen.” It was Sunday, June 29, 1975, a milestone for the personal
computer. “It was the first time in history,” Wozniak later said, “anyone had typed a
character on a keyboard and seen it show up on their own computer’s screen right in front
of them.”
Jobs was impressed. He peppered Wozniak with questions: Could the computer ever be
networked? Was it possible to add a disk for memory storage? He also began to help Woz
get components. Particularly important were the dynamic random-access memory chips.
Jobs made a few calls and was able to score some from Intel for free. “Steve is just that sort
of person,” said Wozniak. “I mean, he knew how to talk to a sales representative. I could
never have done that. I’m too shy.”
Jobs began to accompany Wozniak to Homebrew meetings, carrying the TV monitor and
helping to set things up. The meetings now attracted more than one hundred enthusiasts and
had been moved to the auditorium of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. Presiding
with a pointer and a free-form manner was Lee Felsenstein, another embodiment of the
merger between the world of computing and the counterculture. He was an engineering
school dropout, a participant in the Free Speech Movement, and an antiwar activist. He had
written for the alternative newspaper Berkeley Barb and then gone back to being a
computer engineer.
Woz was usually too shy to talk in the meetings, but people would gather around his
machine afterward, and he would proudly show off his progress. Moore had tried to instill
in the Homebrew an ethos of swapping and sharing rather than commerce. “The theme of
the club,” Woz said, “was ‘Give to help others.’” It was an expression of the hacker ethic
that information should be free and all authority mistrusted. “I designed the Apple I
because I wanted to give it away for free to other people,” said Wozniak.
This was not an outlook that Bill Gates embraced. After he and Paul Allen had
completed their BASIC interpreter for the Altair, Gates was appalled that members of the
Homebrew were making copies of it and sharing it without paying him. So he wrote what
would become a famous letter to the club: “As the majority of hobbyists must be aware,
most of you steal your software. Is this fair? . . . One thing you do is prevent good software
from being written. Who can afford to do professional work for nothing? . . . I would
appreciate letters from anyone who wants to pay up.”
Steve Jobs, similarly, did not embrace the notion that Wozniak’s creations, be it a Blue
Box or a computer, wanted to be free. So he convinced Wozniak to stop giving away copies
of his schematics. Most people didn’t have time to build it themselves anyway, Jobs
argued. “Why don’t we build and sell printed circuit boards to them?” It was an example of
their symbiosis. “Every time I’d design something great, Steve would find a way to make
money for us,” said Wozniak. Wozniak admitted that he would have never thought of doing
that on his own. “It never crossed my mind to sell computers. It was Steve who said, ‘Let’s
hold them in the air and sell a few.’”
Jobs worked out a plan to pay a guy he knew at Atari to draw the circuit boards and then
print up fifty or so. That would cost about $1,000, plus the fee to the designer. They could
sell them for $40 apiece and perhaps clear a profit of $700. Wozniak was dubious that they
could sell them all. “I didn’t see how we would make our money back,” he recalled. He
was already in trouble with his landlord for bouncing checks and now had to pay each
month in cash.
Jobs knew how to appeal to Wozniak. He didn’t argue that they were sure to make
money, but instead that they would have a fun adventure. “Even if we lose our money,
we’ll have a company,” said Jobs as they were driving in his Volkswagen bus. “For once in
our lives, we’ll have a company.” This was enticing to Wozniak, even more than any
prospect of getting rich. He recalled, “I was excited to think about us like that. To be two
best friends starting a company. Wow. I knew right then that I’d do it. How could I not?”
In order to raise the money they needed, Wozniak sold his HP 65 calculator for $500,
though the buyer ended up stiffing him for half of that. For his part, Jobs sold his
Volkswagen bus for $1,500. But the person who bought it came to find him two weeks later
and said the engine had broken down, and Jobs agreed to pay for half of the repairs.
Despite these little setbacks, they now had, with their own small savings thrown in, about
$1,300 in working capital, the design for a product, and a plan. They would start their own
computer company.
错误！超链接引用无效。
Now that they had decided to start a business, they needed a name. Jobs had gone for
another visit to the All One Farm, where he had been pruning the Gravenstein apple trees,
and Wozniak picked him up at the airport. On the ride down to Los Altos, they bandied
around options. They considered some typical tech words, such as Matrix, and some
neologisms, such as Executek, and some straightforward boring names, like Personal
Computers Inc. The deadline for deciding was the next day, when Jobs wanted to start
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