About Steve Jobs His Early Years

Steve Jobs Childhood

Growing up in San Francisco, Steve job was a curious and strong-willed child, a challenging one to
rear. Curious of electrical socket, he inserted a hairpin into an electrical socket, burned his hand and
ended up in emergency room. He swallowed ant poison, sending him another trip to the hospital to
have his stomach pumped and cleansed. To keep him busy (and stayed out of troubles), his parents
bought him rocking house, a record player and to some Little Richard records. He was such a difficult
toddler that his mother once confided that she wondered if she had made a mistake adopting him.
Then, when he was five years old, his father moved to Palo Alto to work in a finance company
collecting bad debt. In his free time, he fixed up used cars and sold them for a profit, to save some
money for Steves future college education. As his father worked on the used car, he would show
Steve how to take things apart and put things back together. His fathers careful craftsmanship and
commitment to the finest details gave Steve a deep impression. He stressed the importance of doing
things right. He told Steve, When youre a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, youre
not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever
see it. Youll know its there, so youre going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. That was
a lesson Jobs would apply insistently to all new Apple products. He said, To sleep well at night, the
quality of the product has to be carried all the way through.

Steve Jobs Teenage Years

When he was in seventh grade, he was bullied in school. He was so miserable that his parents
decided to move to Los Altos. There, he found other boys who shared his interest, and their
friendship eventually changed his life.
Growing up in the Santa Clara Valley, a place where engineers and tinkerers took things apart and
study, a place where science and technology evolves, Steves childhood was filled with rapid
innovation in the world of electronics, the science and technology of controlling the invisible flow of
electricity to make things work.
Since he was in grade school, his father brought him electronic gadgets to feed his growing passion
in field of electronics. Steve also found mentors in his old neighbourhood, and friends who shared
the same interests. A Hewlett-Packard Company engineer named Larry Lang, intrigued Jobs with an
old-fashioned carbon microphone set up in his driveway that didnt need an electronic amplifier.
Lang introduced the boy to Heathkits, a conglomeration of electronic parts and detailed instructions
that let hobbyists build radio and other gadgets. Steve was intrigued by how to put things together;
the kits helped him to explore, learn and understand how things worked and gave him tremendous
level of self-confidence in what he could build. He could look at a television set and said, I havent
built one of those, but I could.

An example of Heathkit model (a Radio) can be viewed from this website :
Going Vintage with Heathkit

Jobs and School
Steve never likes school. He found school so dull and dreadful that he and his buddy were
troublemakers, causing havoc that got them sent home from school. To scare his teacher, he let a
snake loose in the classroom and created a small explosion under her chair. Later, he was lucky
enough to be rescued by his fourth grade teacher, Imogene Hill, who moved him to the right path.
Jobs family was having financial problem at that time. She offered Jobs a great bargain: if he could
finish a Math workbook on his own and get at least 80% right, she would give him five dollars and a
giant lollipop. He took the challenge. His admiration and respect for Mrs. Hill then grew so great that
he didnt need any bribes anymore to do well in his studies. Jobs called her one of the saints in my
life. He was a bright student, who tested and scored so high that school officials recommended he
skip a few grades. His parents agreed to let him skip just one. However, despite an excellent reader,
he has great difficulty motivating himself or seeing the purpose of studying.

Steve Wozniak

During his junior year, Steve Jobs was introduced to Steve Wozniak by his friend Bill Fernandez. Bill
was helping Wozniak building a small computer in Wozniaks garage. They called it Cream Soda
Computer since they consumed so many bottles of cream soda while building it. Composed of spare
parts they scrounged up, the computer had only enough memory to hold 256 typed characters or
about a sentence. Still it could run a program.
Wozniak, who was five years older than Jobs and four years ahead of him in school, had been a star
student in school. While Jobs and Fernandez were deeply interested in electronics, Wozniak was
obsessed with it. He would collect manuals that explained how minicomputers were made. For fun,
he then tried to sketch out designs that would allow them to build with fewer parts.
Despite the age difference, Jobs and Wozniak clicked from the start. Jobs admired Wozniak who
knows more about electronics than him, felt that his maturity and Wozniaks immaturity just about
matched. They began hanging out together.

Jobs and College

When Steve was born, his biological mother, Joanne Schieble, agreed to let Clara and Paul Jobs
adopt him on condition that they promised her to send Steve to college. Clara and Paul took their
promise seriously and they saved money over the years, though not much with the little income they
got. Steve didnt see it that way. He was not interested in the many campuses in his area, though he
could easily get a scholarship there. He thought that those universities were too staid for him and
they are more suitable for those who know what they want to do in their lives.
After visiting a friend in Reed College, a small, private, liberal arts school in Portland, Oregon, he
decided this was the only college he wanted to go. If he couldnt go there, he didnt want to go
anywhere. His parents gave in, even though they could not afford to pay.
To Steves disappointment, Reed had demanding academic standards and required its freshman to
go through a serious reading list in the first semester. When Wozniak came to visit, he complained
bitterly, They are making me take all these courses.
Steve would have nothing of it. He signed up for a dance class, mostly to meet girls. He pursued his
own reading list of books about Zen Buddhism, spirituality, and consciousness-raising. He practiced
meditation and read a book called Diet for a Small Planet. He became committed vegetarian. He
took psychedelic drug called LSD. He said, There was constant flow of intellectual questioning about
the truth of life.
Steves grades werent good. Jobs parents were not happy that they were paying all that tuition for
his son to enjoy a hippie lifestyle. At the end of his first semester, he decided to drop out of Reed.
Despite sleeping on the floor of friends room, collecting soft drink bottles for the nickel deposit to
buy food, he enjoyed the freewheeling college time. He was free to explore whatever he found
intriguing, and to his surprise, some of it paid off many years later.
Among other things, he dropped into a calligraphy class where he was exposed to elegant hand
lettering. The class taught him about various fonts serif and san serif type, and how they are
spaced.
He was not clear of his mission in the future at that time, but he was waiting for the right crusade.
Whatever it was, he needed to prove himself to the world.