Steve Jobs was born in San Francisco, California in 1955. 

He was adopted by Paul and Clara Jobs of Mountain View, California, who gave him the name, Steven Paul Jobs. Paul and Clara Jobs adopted another daughter later on and named her Patti Jobs.

Mona Simpson ( his sister ) 

Steve Jobs biological father was a Syrian graduate student by the name of Abdulfattah Jandali who later became a political science professor, his biological mother was an American graduate student by the name of Joanne Simpson who went on to become a speech therapist, she later married and gave birth to, and also raising Steve Job’s biological sister, who is the novelist Mona Simpson.

Steve Jobs attended Cupertino Junior High School and Homestead High School in Cupertino, California. At that time, Hewlett-Packard Company in Palo Alto, California, was conducting after school lectures for high school students and Steve Jobs was a frequent student. Jobs was soon hired to work in Hewlett-Packard and it was there as a summer employee that he got to know Steve Wozniak.

Steve Wozniak

Jobs graduated from high school in 1972 and enrolled in Reed College in Portland Oregon. He dropped out after only one semester but continued to pursue auditing classes at Reed College. Jobs was particularly interested in calligraphy and typography, so much as returning Coke bottles for food money, getting free meals at the local Hare Krishna temple and sleeping on the floor in friends’ rooms, just so that he can complete the lessons. Steve Jobs later stated in a commentary that “If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would never have had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts.”

Steve Jobs - The Early Years

Jobs returned to California in the autumn of 1974 and together with Steve Wozniak, they began to attend meetings of a Homebrew Computer Club. During that time, Atari was the most well known manufacturer of popular video games and Jobs was hired as a technician there. Jobs intention then was to save enough money so that he can travel to India in pursuit of spiritual enlightenment. Jobs had his wish fulfilled and traveled to India with another Reed College friend, Daniel Kottke, who later became the first Apple employee.

Jobs came back to California as a Buddhist with a shaven head and donning traditional Indian clothing. It was during this stage in his extraordinary life that he experimented with psychedelics, relating back to his LSD experiences, Jobs said “one of the two or three most important things [he had] done in [his] life”. Jobs also stated that those around him could not contemplate, understand and relate to his thinking as well as his countercultural roots. It is also Jobs different perspective of life and his radical thinking that has made him the visionary and icon that he is.

Steve Jobs subsequently returned to his previous job as a technician at Atari and was then assigned the task of creating a circuit board and prototype for the video game Breakout, where a player would control a horizontally moving platform to block a ball to deplete a wall of bricks without missing the ball on its rebound. Jobs was then offered a payment of US$750 for this project and if he was able to eliminate an extra chip from the design, an additional US$100 will be given for every chip removed. Jobs promised to complete the Breakout prototype within four days.

Jobs knew that his friend, Steve Wozniak, who was then an employee with Hewlett-Packard, was capable of removing the number of chips from his design and thus invited him to work on the hardware design and making a deal with Wozniak to split the bonus evenly between them. Much to the amazement of Atari, Wozniak was able to reduce the number of chips by 50, after working on the design for four days straight without sleep. However, this design was so complex that it was impossible to manufacture on the assembly line during that time. At the time, Jobs told Wozniak that Atari had given them US$750, thus paying Wozniak US$375 as his share.

and more to come ....