Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs was born on February 25, 1955. He was soon adopted by Paul and Clara Jobs of Mountain View, CA. Steve wasn't happy at school in Mountain View so the family moved to Palo Alto, CA. Steve attended Homestead High School. His electronics teacher recalled that he was "something of a loner" and "always had a different way of looking at things". [www.apple-history.com] After school, Steve attended lectures at Hewlett Packard Electronics firm in Palo Alto, CA. There he was hired as a summer employee. Another employee at Hewlett-Packard was Steven Wozniak, a recent drop-out from the University of California, Berkeley. "Woz" was an engineering whiz with a passion for inventing electric gadgets. He worked on perfecting an illegal gadget called "blue Box" that allowed them to get free long distance calls from pay phones. Jobs helped "Woz" to sell a number of "blue boxes". In 1972 Steve graduated from high school and registered at Reed College in Portland, Oregon. After dropping out of Reed after one semester he hung around the campus for a year taking classes in philosophy and immersing himself in the counter culture. In 1974, Steve Jobs took a job as a video game designer at Atari, Inc., a pioneer in electronic arcade recreation. After a few months he saved enough money to go to India where he traveled in search of spiritual enlightenment with Dan Kottke, a friend from Reed College. In the autumn of 1974, Jobs returned to California and started attending meetings of "Woz's" "Homebrew Computer Club". Woz like most of the clubs members, was happy with the creation of electronics. Steve wasn't nearly the engineer as Woz and persuaded him to start work on a home computer. Woz and Jobs designed the Apple I in Steve's bedroom and built the first prototype in Steve's parents garage. Apple I was a hit. Steve sold his Volkswagen microbus and Woz sold his Hewlett-Packard scientific calculator to make enough money to build more