Thoughts differently. Steve Jobs. The one who thought differently About the book by K. Sekachev “Steve Jobs. The one who thought differently

I met Steve Jobs in 2006. Well, of course, not with him personally, with his product - my parents gave me an iPod player for a decade. Frankly, at that time I didn’t even think about who invented such a magnificent and convenient thing. But I was incredibly proud of the gift, because now I had a whole record library in my pocket, which any DJ could envy. Plus a huge number of photos and much more.

Later, I also learned about an outstanding inventor who turned the computer into an accessible and understandable thing for the average person. You have no idea how surprised I was when I found out that the father of the Macintosh - the inventor of the "mouse" - is alive and is still working on new devices. After all, I naively then believed that people used the “mouse” and the computer back in the time of Peter I. I could not even think that I was living at the same time as the man who changed the world.

How quickly this world is changing! Some five years have passed, and Apple still fascinates and fascinates us with new products, for the novelties of which, literally, queues line up in all countries.

I think that in the future, many books and studies will be written about Steve Jobs, discussions about his phenomenon and unusualness. But already now we can say that Steve's main success was that he did not follow the lead of the consumer. Jobs offered his vision of the IT industry and introduced his own, special computer aesthetics into our consciousness. The epitaph for this person can be his own statement: “Keep thinking differently!” This is where the secret of apple magic lies. Steve did not want to think and act like everyone else! He thought and acted differently.

When such people leave, you understand that this is not just the death of one person. The era is gone. This is an irreparable loss for all mankind. Without any doubt, Steve's apple grows on the same branch as Newton's apple. Naive competitors believe that with the departure of Jobs from Apple, you can relax and take a break. No matter how. This is the strength of a great manager, that he set such a movement for his ideas and innovations, which will bear fruit for a long time to come.

Steve Jobs famously said: “We eat food that other people grow. We wear clothes that other people have made. We speak languages that were invented by other people. I think the time has come for us to become useful to humanity.” Steve's apple is already ripe to naturally fall on the head of the new Newton. Who is he? This is, of course, a man from our generation. And I appeal to my peers: guys, take an example from Steve, think differently, surprise yourself and humanity, thanks to Jobs, we have all the tools to expand our horizons and raise the level of intelligence. But soon there won't be enough iPhones or iPads. What's in return? Who will surprise the world? Dare!

But Steve warns: “There is only one way to do great work, and that is to love her. If you don't get there, wait. Don't get down to business."

Today, Apple's stores and offices have been turned into commemorative temples by fans. We mourn with them.

However, I do not believe that Jobs is gone. I turn on my iPad and say, "Hey Steve!"

Karen Blumenthal

Steve Jobs. The Man Who Thought Different

Karen Blumenthal

Steve Jobs: The Man Who Thought Different

Introduction. Three stories

On a warm June afternoon in 2005, for the first time in his life, Steve Jobs walked to a graduation meeting as a guest of honor. The billionaire, founder and head of Apple Computer was invited to the event day not as another swaggering nonentity from the computer business. At the age of fifty, Steve, who once deliberately quit university, has become a real star in the world of high technologies, a living legend and an idol for millions of people around the world.

In his early twenties, he, along with a friend, created and showed the world a computer that fit on the table and at the same time suitable for work. With the sleek bauble-like iPod and the environment called iTunes built around it, allowing the listener to instantly access the widest range of songs, Steve revolutionized the industry and influenced the musical tastes of an entire generation. He founded and promoted Pixar, which created wonderful animated films based on computer technology - Toy Story, Cars, Finding Nemo - giving birth to a new class of characters that had not previously existed in cinema.

Although Steve was neither an engineer nor a person completely immersed in the near-computer world, over and over again he managed to come up with devices that immediately and firmly enter the everyday life of a person, and all because, inventing them, he always thought about us - about you and about me - about the people who will use them. The students who listened to him that day did not know that even more amazing new products, including the iPhone, were already in development, and that with their advent, all the potential accumulated by decades of computer technology development would fit in a palm-sized device. Steve, the father of four, was often compared to the great inventors of the past - Thomas Edison and automobile magnate Henry Ford. These figures are united by one quality - they gave the world new technologies available to ordinary people and radically influenced the everyday life of Americans, transforming it.

Along with numerous victories, Jobs was destined to suffer a series of defeats that had a wide public resonance. At the age of thirty, he was effectively suspended from his job at Apple. The reason was intransigence and what other members of the team considered a craving for destructive actions. Out of work, Jobs founded a new computer company, which was unsuccessful, and millions of dollars invested by investors were wasted. Steve was moody, often shouting at associates, reporters and competitors. Sometimes, if the situation was not in his favor, he could even burst into tears. Jobs could easily take advantage of other people's ideas, passing them off as his own. He could be charming and unbearably caustic, sensitive and unceremonious.

Some episodes of his life are like a fairy tale or scenes from a science fiction movie: take, for example, the promise made by his adoptive parents, his romantic interests, the losses that followed grandiose victories, and fabulous wealth. But there were also periods of complete disorder and wretchedness in his life, which reduced the idol to the level of an ordinary and even low person. Sometimes during such periods, Steve did things that are not customary to talk about in a decent society. He was loved and hated, he was admired and considered a finished man. People who knew him used only the strongest epithets in relation to Jobs: visionary, showman, artist, tyrant, genius, nonentity.

Under the robe, worn before the performance, jeans and sandals were hidden - Steve's usual clothes. He went to the microphone and spoke as he always did: convincingly and passionately. In a short speech given to 23,000 students, their friends, and parents, Jobs spoke about the most intimate, not hiding even extremely personal experiences.

“Today I will tell you three stories from my life,” he said.

No more and no less. Just three stories that tell about an amazing fate and can serve as an example for young people who are preparing to enter adulthood. To understand what kind of person Steve Jobs was and what he became, we'll start with the first of these stories.

Part one. "Journey is the reward"

Steve Jobs (left) grimacing while posing for the camera with seventh grade friends

The first story told to the students is from a time when Steve's life was like a jigsaw puzzle where numbered dots must be connected with lines to form a human figure or face. It all started with an unusual vow.

Joanna Shible was only twenty-three and a student at the University of Wisconsin when she found out she was pregnant. Her boyfriend, a graduate student of Syrian origin, categorically did not suit Joanna's father as a son-in-law, and the social norms of the fifties did not allow the birth of a child outside the family. To avoid becoming a victim of sanctimonious morality, Joanna moved to San Francisco and went to a doctor who was involved in the lives of single mothers and found adoptive parents for unwanted children.

At first, the lawyer and his wife wanted to adopt the baby, but by February 24, 1955, the day the child was born, they changed their minds.

Clara and Paul Jobs, an unremarkable couple of young people with incomplete higher education from San Francisco, have long dreamed of a child. When the doctor called them in the middle of the night, they immediately made a decision and, having adopted a newborn, named him Stephen Paul.

However, an indispensable condition for obtaining permission to adopt Joanna Shible just considered that the adoptive parents had a higher education. In the process of paperwork, it turned out that neither Paul nor Clara had it. Joanna was pissed off by this circumstance, and finally all the formalities were settled only a few months later, and even then only after the future adoptive parents, in the words of Steve himself, "vowed to send me to college."

Promising to provide the child with a bright future, the Jobs couple began to live the family life that the couple had long dreamed of. Two years later, they had another adopted child, a girl named Patty. Little Steve turned out to be a curious child and not alien to experiments. Once he stuck a hairpin in an electrical outlet, burned his hand and won a trip to the hospital in an ambulance. Another time, not satisfied with what he had achieved, he tasted poison against ants and again ended up in the hospital for gastric lavage. So that the restless Stevie, who woke up earlier than others, could do something, his parents bought him a rocking horse, a record player and several records of Little Richard. Steve was such an obnoxious baby that, according to his mother, she repeatedly wondered if they had done the right thing by adopting him.

Patti Jobs in tenth grade. Photo from a school album, 1972.

When Steve was five years old, his father, Paul, was transferred to Palo Alto, a small town forty-five minutes south of San Francisco. Serving during the Second World War in the Coast Guard, Paul, having retired from the service, worked first as a mechanic, then as a salesman for used cars, and by the time he moved, as a collector, collecting overdue debts. In his spare time, he repaired cars and resold them. The profits made were set aside for Steve's future college education.

The land south of San Francisco at that time was practically uninhabited and used for peach and plum plantations. The family bought a house in Mountain View, and Paul set up a workshop in the garage. Giving his son part of the room, he said, "Steve, here's your workbench." He taught Steve how to use a hammer and gave him a set of tools. Years later, Jobs recalled that his father "spent a lot of time with him ... taught him how to make things, take apart, and then reassemble different mechanisms."

The skill of his father and the ability to pay attention to the smallest details made a deep impression on the boy. “Father has golden hands. He can fix anything. In his hands, any mechanism begins to work. He can take a thing apart and then put it back together,” Jobs said in an interview in 1985. The father brought up in the boy a categorical rejection of hack work. For example, he said: “If you are a carpenter and have received an order for a beautiful chest of drawers, you cannot use plywood in the back, although it will not be visible when the cabinet is placed against the wall. You will know what the back wall is made of, so if you want to live with the feeling that you did everything right, use a beautiful wooden board instead of plywood.

Current page: 1 (total book has 16 pages) [accessible reading excerpt: 9 pages]

Karen Blumenthal
Steve Jobs. The Man Who Thought Different

Karen Blumenthal

Steve Jobs: The Man Who Thought Different

Introduction. Three stories

In his early twenties, he, along with a friend, created and showed the world a computer that fit on the table and at the same time suitable for work. With the sleek bauble-like iPod and the environment called iTunes built around it, allowing the listener to instantly access the widest range of songs, Steve revolutionized the industry and influenced the musical tastes of an entire generation. He founded and propelled the Pixar company, which created wonderful animated films based on computer technology - Toy Story, Cars, Finding Nemo - giving rise to a new class of characters that had never existed in cinema before.

Although Steve was neither an engineer nor a person completely immersed in the near-computer world, over and over again he managed to come up with devices that immediately and firmly enter the everyday life of a person, and all because, inventing them, he always thought about us - about you and about me - about the people who will use them. The students who listened to him that day did not know that even more amazing new products, including the iPhone, were already in development, and that with their advent, all the potential accumulated by decades of computer technology development would fit in a palm-sized device. Steve, a father of four, has often been compared to the great inventors of the past, Thomas Edison and automobile tycoon Henry Ford. These figures are united by one quality - they gave the world new technologies that are available to ordinary people and radically influenced the everyday life of Americans, transforming it.

Jeans and sandals, Steve's usual attire, were hidden under the robe, worn before the performance. He went to the microphone and spoke as he always did: convincingly and passionately. In a short speech given to 23,000 students, their friends, and parents, Jobs spoke about the most intimate, not hiding even extremely personal experiences.

“Today I will tell you three stories from my life,” he said.

Part one. "Journey is the reward"

Steve Jobs (left) grimacing while posing for the camera with seventh grade friends

1. Beginnings

At first, the lawyer and his wife wanted to adopt the baby, but by February 24, 1955, the day the child was born, they changed their minds.

Patti Jobs in tenth grade. Photo from a school album, 1972.

For compliance with this commandment, Jobs checked all the products that Apple produced. “In order to sleep peacefully, our devices must meet the highest quality criteria and be aesthetically pleasing,” Steve said.

Clara also contributed to the development of her son, working as a nanny in the families of neighbors and friends, so that the boy had the opportunity to swim. Since Steve was an inquisitive and intelligent child, she taught him to read before school, so that in the first grade he could give odds to other students.

Unfortunately, for Steve, the ability to read turned out to be a kind of problem. “There were only two things in my life that I wanted to do,” he recalled of his school years: “to read, because I loved books, and to run outside to catch butterflies.” But he did not want to obey the rules at all. He categorically did not like the school routine, and soon he felt that he was bored in the classroom. Even then, Steve understood that he was different from other children.

When he was six or seven, he told a girl who lived in a house across the street that his parents had adopted him. "And what does it mean? the neighbor asked. "That your real parents didn't want you?"

This innocent question was a bombshell for Steve. For the first time, he felt fear, which had never happened to him before. The boy ran home crying. His parents rushed to comfort him and did everything to make him feel his value again. “They took it very seriously,” Steve said. “We chose you because you are you,” my parents said, looking me straight in the eyes.

The father and mother really considered the boy special - unusually intelligent and possessing outstanding willpower. Colleagues and friends later noted that his ability to pull others along with him and his desire to control everything are rooted in Steve's deep-seated consciousness that his real parents abandoned him. However, he himself saw it differently. “Knowing that I was an adopted son made me an independent person,” he told his biographer, “but I never considered myself an abandoned child. My parents did everything to instill in me a sense of self-worth.”

However, some teachers called him a difficult child, not wanting to admit that Steve simply does not fit into the usual framework. Jobs found Monta Loma Elementary to be such a nasty and boring place that he and a friend thought nastiness was the only decent thing to do there. Many children came to school on bicycles, leaving them in a special parking lot. While in third grade, Jobs and a friend bribed most of their classmates to find combinations of combination locks on the chains with which their bicycles were chained. One fine day, friends, having gone down during recess, changed all the locks. “Only at ten o’clock in the evening did they manage to sort out and free all the bikes,” Jobs recalled.

However, the most sophisticated nasty things were intended for teachers. One day, Steve and a friend released a snake in class. Another time, a small explosion was made under the teacher's chair. “She had a nervous tic from us,” he later said.

A couple of times Steve was sent home for bad behavior, but he did not remember being punished by his parents for this. Moreover, his father always defended him, telling teachers: "If you do not know how to interest a child, it is your fault."

In the fourth grade, Steve was saved from further transformation into a young * seshogay * gan by a talented teacher, Imogen "Teddy" Hill, who paid a lot of attention to him while the Jobs family was going through a difficult period. Paul, impressed by the success of a neighbor who was making good money selling real estate, took an evening course and received a license and the right to

engage in real estate activities. Unfortunately, he chose the wrong time to develop a new field - the demand for houses just dropped sharply.

One day, Mrs. Hill asked the guys: “What in the Universe do you not understand?” The young Jobs replied, "I don't understand how my father got so poor so quickly." Clara had to take a part-time job with a local company in the payroll department, and the family managed to get a new loan to pay for the house, but the money was extremely tight for a year or so.

A few weeks after Jobs appeared in her classes, Mrs. Hill understood and appreciated the unusual student. She offered Steve a good deal: if he solved all the math workbook problems and the results were at least 80 percent correct, she would give him five dollars and a huge lollipop.

“I looked at her, wanting to say something like, “Lady, are you out of your mind?” Jobs recalled. But he accepted the challenge. It wasn't long before he had such respect and admiration for Mrs. Hill that he no longer had to bribe his teacher.

She shared these feelings of a talented student and made him gifts that helped the guy, overwhelmed by a thirst for activity, to develop. For example, one day, Jobs received a kit from Mrs. Hill that included items needed to grind lenses and build a homemade camera.

But despite the friendship between teacher and student, young Jobs remained a difficult child. Years later, Mrs. Hill amused Steve's co-workers by showing them a picture of his class taken on Hawaii Day. Jobs stands in the middle, wearing a Hawaiian shirt. However, in order to understand what made Steve's colleagues so amused in this photo, you need to know the backstory: before shooting, it turned out that Jobs did not have a Hawaiian, but he managed to convince one of his classmates to give him his.

Mrs. Hill managed to awaken Steve's interest in classes, and his academic performance increased dramatically. The results of Jobs' regular tests turned out to be so high that the director advised the boy to miss not one school year, but two whole years. However, the parents allowed Steve to move only one class forward.

In high school, the academic workload skyrocketed, and Steve still wanted to chase butterflies. A sixth grade testimonial said that Jobs "reads unbelievably much" but "can't always bring himself to read books from the school curriculum." It also states that Steve "sometimes has problems with discipline."

In the seventh grade, Jobs found himself surrounded by cocky teenagers. Fights were commonplace. Some classmates did not like the skinny boy, who was also a year younger than the rest. Jobs had a hard time, and in the middle of the year he issued an ultimatum to his parents. Later, the father recalled: “He said:“ If you send me to this school again, I just won’t go. ” Parents took their son's problems seriously. “We decided, since everything turned out this way, it’s better to move to another place,” Paul said.

And so they did. Using the modest funds available, they bought a three-bedroom house in the city of Los Altos, famous for its excellent - and quiet - schools. There, they reasoned, their talented son would be able to concentrate on his studies. However, it was the mid-sixties, a time of rapid change, and soon Jobs began to be interested in very different things.

2. Woz

"But times - they change."

Bob Dylan

The new school turned out to be much better than the old one, and Jobs found among his classmates guys with the same interests as his. It was here that he made friends with people who managed to influence his attitude to life.

He was also lucky that he was born and raised in the Santa Clara Valley, where a huge number of engineers and tinkers lived, who awakened in his soul a passion for electronics, which was a new and rapidly developing business in those days.

Realizing that his son did not share his interest in car engines and other mechanisms, Paul, even when Steve was in elementary school, began to bring him faulty electronic devices to take apart in the garage and study them. It turned out that the man who became a kind of mentor for Steve lives next door to the Jobs family - Larry Lang, an engineer who worked at Hewlett-Packard. Larry intrigued Steve by installing an old-fashioned carbon microphone in the driveway leading to the garage door that didn't require an electronic power amplifier. Lang introduced the boy to the products of Heathkits, which sold kits of components supplied with detailed instructions, from which a person who was fond of electronics could assemble one or another device, for example, a radio receiver.

“Sold as a set of parts, such a device actually cost even more than the finished one,” Jobs recalled. However, it didn't matter. Steve was fascinated by the process itself: by assembling the device himself, he learned how it works. In addition, it became clear to him that much can be done on his own. “Electronic devices were no longer a mystery to me,” Steve later said. - After practicing with the kits, I looked, for example, at the TV (and) thought: “Yes, I didn’t put together this thing. But I could do the same. There is a kit in the Heathkits catalog from which you can assemble a TV. A couple of appliances I already done, so I would have coped with it.” Thanks to the sets I I realized that by studying and experimenting, one can understand the principle of operation of the most complex mechanisms and devices.

The family moved again, but Jobs kept in touch with Lang, who later helped Steve become a member of Hewlett-Packard's "Explorer's Club." Jobs and other schoolchildren were able to come to the company canteen on Tuesday evenings and listen to the engineers talk about work. During one of these visits, Jobs saw a desktop computer for the first time in his life. In the sixties, computers already existed, of course, but they were mostly huge - the size of the processor units ranged from a box the size of a refrigerator to an entire room, which, moreover, needed additional cooling to keep the equipment from overheating. In 1968, Hewlett-Packard created the 9100A, the first desktop programmable calculator, and it was marketed as a "personal computer" with "ten times the power of other scientific and engineering computers."

“It was a hefty box that weighed probably twenty kilograms,” Jobs recalled, “but it was beautiful. I fell in love with him immediately."

While trying to build his own electronic counting frequency counter that measures the number of pulses from an internal crystal oscillator, Jobs ran into a shortage of parts. Without wasting time thinking, he found the number of Hewlett-Packard founder Bill Hewlett in the telephone directory and called him at home. I must say that Hewlett not only answered the call, but also spoke with Jobs for twenty minutes. By the time the conversation ended, Jobs had secured Bill's promise to provide him with the parts he was looking for and received an offer to work for the company during the holidays. He spent the summers on the HP assembly line, assembling frequency counter cases for science labs and factories.

“I was in seventh heaven,” Steve recalled.

Entrepreneurs like Bill Hewlett have made the Santa Clara Valley a magnet for engineers and technicians from across the country. In addition to Hewlett-Packard's Palo Alto office, technically gifted people could look to work for Lockheed Corporation's Sunnyvale rocket division, the local NASA research center, and San Jose-based Fairchild Semiconductor, which made analog integrated circuits. In addition, the largest universities that trained the best technical specialists were nearby - Stanford University in Palo Alto and, just to the north, the University of California at Berkeley.

Steve's childhood coincided with a period of rapid development in electronics, a field where the achievements of science and technology serve a common cause - the transformation of electricity into the driving force of devices of all kinds. In the late 1940s, John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and William Shockley, three scientists at AT&T's Bell Labs division, invented the transistor, a small electronic component that amplifies and converts an electrical signal. The transistor was made on the basis of a semiconductor material that is neither a conductor nor a dielectric and conducts current in one direction. After some time, silicon, which was used to create transistors, practically replaced other materials. Miniature single-crystal elements built on its basis are widely known as semiconductors, or chips.

Transistors began to equip almost all devices that were previously created on the basis of less reliable and bulky vacuum tubes. Having become the most important component, the transistor, which is modest in size, prompted engineers and scientists to create miniature devices: transistor radios, televisions that fit on a cabinet shelf, calculators the size of a palm, and, finally, desktop computers.

As companies like Hewlett-Packard grew, they gradually expanded their product range, producing not only semiconductors themselves, but also devices based on them, with ever greater functionality. Feeling the trend, ambitious people organized their own companies that entered the market with innovative solutions. Jobs later recalled, “It was like ripe dandelions in a field. As soon as the wind blew, the fluff scattered in all directions.

So much importance was attached to the creation of chips and circuits based on them that new people and companies constantly entered the rapidly developing industry. Fruit orchards were bulldozed and the land turned into settlements for those who wanted to live closer to their place of work. The population of San Jose doubled between 1960 and 1970, and the number of people living in nearby Cupertino quadrupled. Soon this place became known to the whole world under the name of Silicon, or Silicon Valley.

When Steve entered the eleventh grade, his father got a job at a company that made lasers for medical and electronic devices. The boy was interested in this, and he made his own laser in the garage from parts obtained by hook or by crook or brought from work by his father. Sometimes Steve presented his projects at school.

Bill Fernandez, a classmate of Steve's who shared his interests, became his best friend and was involved in science projects, helping to prepare them for screenings. For several years, the boys invariably went on long walks in the evenings, discussing everything they were interested in, both serious and not so, from relationships with girls to the Vietnam War and from drugs to religion along the way. (Many years passed, and Steve, as before, when he needed to think about a serious problem, went for a walk, thinking along the way.)

At thirteen, after arguing with a pastor over a magazine article about starving African children, Jobs stopped attending the Lutheran church he had attended since childhood. “Does the Lord know about this and what will happen to these children?” he asked the pastor. The pastor agreed with the first statement and said that "yes, the Lord knows about it," after which Jobs decided that he could not love such a God.

Nevertheless, even after this incident, he and Fernandez discussed religion for hours. “We were both interested in the spiritual side of life. We asked ourselves the traditional questions: who are we? Why do we exist? What does all of this mean? Fernanes recalled. “Steve spoke for the most part ... Every day there was some important issue that worried him to the core, or some new idea came to his mind, and during walks he could discuss it for hours without stopping for a second.”

Steve moved to high school in 1968, and this year is considered to be one of the most turbulent in modern American history. The Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., who called for the fight against racial discrimination by any means other than violence, was killed in April. A couple of months later, Robert Kennedy, a presidential candidate, was shot dead while delivering a campaign speech. Public outcry against the Vietnam War reached its zenith and escalated into a real riot during the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.

At the same time, a curious social phenomenon arose. In 1967, Time magazine ran an editorial titled "Hippies" about a social movement made up mostly of white, well-educated young people from middle-class families. Hippies deliberately “marginalized,” dropping out of school, refusing to pursue a career, and searching for love, peace, and inspiration, including through the use of hallucinogenic drugs like marijuana and LSD. The name of the movement comes from the word hip or hipster, a term used by their predecessors, the beatniks. Hippies wore bright colors, let their hair grow long, and listened to acid rock bands. 1
Acid rock (English) - "acid music". The name comes from the slang name for LSD - "acid".

Like the Jefferson Airplane or the Grateful Dead. The epicenter of the movement was the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood in San Francisco, located very close to Palo Alto.

At Homestead School, where Jobs studied, young people were instilled with moral values traditional for the American hinterland, with which the views adopted among the hippies contrasted sharply. The school, consisting of several typical one- and two-story buildings, was somewhat reminiscent of a prison. In 1972, there were about five hundred students in the school, and only two or three of them were black, and a few more were Asian. According to strict school regulations, boys were not allowed to let their hair fall below their ears. It was also forbidden to wear jeans to school, so boys wore trousers and girls wore dresses or skirts. The length of the skirts was also regulated: they had to be at least seven centimeters below the knee.

To classmates, Jobs probably seemed unfriendly, nervous, and arrogant - sometimes even excessively. However, he was considered a capable guy, to whom study was easy. Professor Carlton Ho, a former classmate of Steve's and the head drummer of the school band, and now a specialist in the design and construction of civil facilities, recalled how he and Jobs annoyed the math teacher by studying Edmund Scientific catalogs during his lesson, animatedly discussing their contents.

In eleventh grade, Jobs' friend Bill Fernandez began spending evenings in the garage of a neighbor named Steve Wozniak, helping him build a small computer. Wozniak was almost five years older than Jobs and therefore graduated four years early. At Homestead School, he was remembered as one of the best students in mathematics, physics and electronics. Although the family as a whole could not afford expensive education, his parents allowed him to study for a year at the University of Colorado in Boulder. However, Wozniak, or Woz, as his friends called him, during his studies was most interested in the possibilities of huge university computers and stayed up until late at night playing bridge. By the end of the year, it turned out that he had not been promoted to the next course, and Woz returned home, where he studied computer science at a local college for another year.

Steve Jobs in 11th grade. Photo from a school album, 1971

Then Wozniak, assuming that he could be drafted into the army and sent to Vietnam, and also needing money for further education, took a year off and got a job as a programmer. (At that time, young people were drafted into the army at the age of twenty according to certain rules, reminiscent of a lottery. Depending on how much time had passed after the twentieth birthday, the young man was assigned a personal number, and in the future, he would be called up this year or not, it depended on luck. Since Wozniak got a number with many characters, he could hardly be forced to serve.)

Jobs and Fernandez were fond of electronics, and Wozniak was a man who was downright obsessed with it. For several years, he collected literature on the developments associated with the creation of a small copy of "mainframes" - huge computers that took up an entire room - studied the components that made up desktop computers and how they interact with each other. For fun, Woz created circuit diagrams for building a computer with fewer components.

The device built by Wozniak and Fernandez in the garage was extremely primitive. The friends did not have money for expensive parts, and the computer was assembled from what they managed to get. The amount of memory was so small that only 256 characters could fit in it - about one phrase. Wozniak knew how to write small programs that could be entered into a computer using punched cards. For example, according to one of them, the device emitted a sound signal with an interval of three seconds. According to another, it performed a mathematical function, displaying the result using light bulbs on the front panel. There was no keyboard and monitor, and the limited amount of memory did not allow using a computer even for the simplest arithmetic calculations. And yet he could run the programs. Friends called it "Cream Soda" because it was the drink they constantly used while sitting in the garage. (Shortly, the device suffered an untimely death - as a result of a power surge, the computer burned out, releasing a cloud of fetid smoke into the air.)

Steve Jobs. The one who thought differently

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Title: Steve Jobs. The one who thought differently

About the book by K. Sekachev “Steve Jobs. The one who thought differently

Jobs is interesting not only as an entrepreneur who conquered the market year after year, but also as an incredibly eccentric and controversial personality. For him, there was no middle ground, it was either "very bad" or "very good." He was one of those few people who could never sit idle, from him there was an inexhaustible stream of curiosity and creative enthusiasm. He conquered with his unblinking gaze, he hypnotized thousands of halls, he manipulated people so skillfully that they often did not understand that they were doing something against their will.

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