Steve Jobs: The Barefoot Dropout Who Demanded Total Control

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Steve Jobs does not fit the usual picture of a tech chief executive. Put up for a closed adoption in 1955 and raised by a machinist who gave him a corner of the garage workbench, he grew up in Cupertino, dropped out of Reed College after one semester, and stayed on campus anyway, sleeping on floors, eating free meals at a Hare Krishna temple, and auditing a calligraphy class. He traveled to India, studied Zen, and considered becoming a monk.

This episode follows the tension between that seeker and the man who wanted control over everything he touched. It covers the Atari bonus he hid from his engineer friend, the illegal blue box that taught him two kids could outwit a giant phone network, and the company he co-founded in 1976. Then come the ouster of 1985, the exile years at NeXT and Pixar, and the 1997 return, when he cut a failing product line down to four machines and went on to remake the music player and the phone.

The calligraphy class he audited after dropping out is why he later insisted that computer fonts be beautiful and proportionally spaced.
At Atari he was promised a bonus for reducing the chips in the game Breakout. His friend did the engineering, and he lied about the size of the payout.
The blue box produced a 2600 hertz tone that tricked the telephone network into handing over its trunk lines, allowing free long distance calls.
He recruited a Pepsi executive by asking whether he wanted to sell sweetened water for the rest of his life or change the world. By 1985 the board had sided with that executive and pushed the founder out.
NeXT never sold in volume, but its modular software became the foundation of his old company's products after it bought the startup and brought him back.

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