Tastemaker and Taskmaster
An adopted Reed dropout who rated LSD among the most important things he did, took the Mac from Jef Raskin, denied his daughter Lisa, lost Apple and came back to put a computer in your pocket.
Entrepreneur & Product Editor
From a garage workbench and a calligraphy classroom to the Macintosh, Pixar and the computer in your pocket, Jobs kept asking how technology could feel more human. His gift for recognising a whole experience depended on extraordinary collaborators—and could make working beside him exhilarating and difficult.
Born in San Francisco and adopted by Paul and Clara Jobs, Steve grew up among the engineers and orchards of Silicon Valley. Paul gave him a corner of his garage workbench and taught him to take things apart and build them again. Electronics was something neighbours practised, not a distant industrial mystery.
At Reed College he left the degree course but continued attending classes that interested him, including calligraphy. He later connected its lessons in letterforms and spacing to the Macintosh’s typography. Work at Atari and a journey to India brought engineering, spiritual inquiry and counterculture into the same young life. He also took LSD, and later told the New York Times reporter John Markoff that doing so “was one of the two or three most important things I have done in my life.”
In 1976 he founded Apple with Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne. Wozniak designed the Apple I; Jobs arranged an order for assembled boards from the Byte Shop, turning a hobbyists’ invention into something a customer could buy. The partnership joined technical ingenuity to an instinct for giving an idea a public life.
Apple II carried the company beyond its first circle of enthusiasts. Jobs’s next great fixation was the Macintosh, a project begun by Jef Raskin whose leadership he took over in 1981. The graphical systems he had seen at Xerox PARC suggested that a computer could be approached through pictures, windows and a mouse, rather than memorised commands.
In 1978 his girlfriend Chrisann Brennan gave birth to their daughter, Lisa. Jobs denied he was the father, swore in a court filing that he was “sterile and infertile” and refused to pay child support; a blood test the following year put the probability of his paternity at 94.1 per cent, and a court ordered him to pay. As late as 1983 he told Time that “28% of the male population of the United States could be the father.” He acknowledged Lisa years later, and she came to live with him.
Making that promise tangible took Burrell Smith’s hardware, Susan Kare’s icons, Bill Atkinson’s graphics, Andy Hertzfeld’s system software, Joanna Hoffman’s product work and many others. Hertzfeld recalls Jobs taking the team to a Louis Comfort Tiffany exhibition and having them sign the inside of the Mac’s case: a manufactured object could still bear its makers’ pride.
The Macintosh shipped in 1984. Its clarity concealed years of experiments, arguments and punishing deadlines. Hertzfeld’s accounts capture both the group’s irreverent excitement and Jobs’s habit of insisting on schedules his engineers knew were unrealistic. After a struggle with Apple’s leadership, Jobs left in 1985; the company he had helped build was continuing without him.
Jobs began again with NeXT in 1985, pursuing another tightly integrated computer. The striking black machines did not establish a large hardware business, and NeXT eventually concentrated on software. In his 1995 Smithsonian interview, Jobs admitted that he had repeated Apple’s formula while the market changed around him. Taste alone had not made the company work.
In 1986 he bought the computer-graphics group from Lucasfilm that became Pixar. Ed Catmull, John Lasseter and their colleagues were developing the tools and storytelling craft that would make Toy Story possible. Jobs sustained the company financially and helped build its business; the film’s 1995 arrival was the achievement of a studio, with Lasseter directing.
These apparent detours became central to his later life. Pixar found its future in feature animation, while Apple’s decision to buy NeXT brought Jobs back in 1997. NeXT’s software became the foundation of Mac OS X. The years outside Apple had produced both a second creative institution and a route home.
Toy StoryPixar’s first feature proves the studio’s technical research could serve character and story; John Lasseter directed a large collective production.Explore filmAt a struggling Apple, Jobs made choosing what to stop an essential part of design. He described a simple product plan: consumer and professional computers, each in desktop and portable form. Concentrating the teams meant abandoning other projects and cutting jobs; the celebrated simplicity had an institutional cost.
The iMac gave that renewal a visible face. Jobs found a close design partner in Jony Ive, while Tim Cook helped rebuild the operations behind the products. With iPod in 2001 and the iTunes Music Store in 2003, the object, library, purchasing system and everyday ritual became one experience. A person could carry a music collection without administering the machinery behind it.
His 2005 Stanford address gives this period a more intimate voice. Looking back on leaving college, losing Apple and facing mortality, Jobs tried to make sense of the uneven path. The speech is moving partly because the route looks coherent only in retrospect: the return was never guaranteed.
“You’ve got to find what you love”Jobs revisits calligraphy, his departure from Apple and mortality in three personal stories, recorded before the iPhone years.Read the addressAt the 2007 iPhone unveiling, Jobs made the interaction itself the demonstration: scroll a list, touch a photograph, enlarge a web page with your fingers. Apple’s teams had brought a phone, music player and internet browser into a device whose screen could change with the task. The iPad followed in 2010 with a larger surface for reading, watching and making.
The achievement also carried a tension that runs through his career. Controlling the hardware, software and services could make the experience remarkably coherent; it also gave Apple considerable authority over what that experience allowed. The same editorial instinct that removed friction could set boundaries for everyone using the platform.
Jobs resigned as CEO in August 2011, with Cook succeeding him, and died on 5 October. Make Something Wonderful, published in 2023, preserves a restless voice across speeches, interviews and correspondence. Its posthumous selection belongs to the Steve Jobs Archive; beside it, the team histories restore the many hands behind the objects he introduced.
2023 · Steve Jobs in his own words
Speeches, interviews and correspondence · Edited by Leslie BerlinRead free2005 · Stanford commencement address
Three stories about work, loss and mortalityRead the address1983 · International Design Conference in Aspen
Jobs on computers, design and the objects people live withExplore the archive
Bill AtkinsonThe Macintosh shaped through an intense designer–engineer collaboration
Alan KayThe personal computer imagined as a medium for everyone
George LucasPixar emerged from the meeting of story, tools and patient institution-building
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