He joined the Explorers Club, a group of fifteen kids who met regularly on Hewlett-Packard’s campus in Palo Alto to work on electronics projects and get lessons from HP engineers. This is where Steve was first exposed to computers. It’s also what gave him the outlandish notion to reach out and establish a minor, but fascinating, connection with one of the two men who famously created HP, the first Silicon Valley dynamo out of a garage. When he was fourteen years old, he called up Bill Hewlett at his Palo Alto home to ask personally for some hard-to-find electronic components for an Explorers Club project. He got them, in part, because he already could spin a good tale. In many ways, Steve was a prototypical adolescent geek. But he also was a curious student of the humanities, beguiled by the words of Shakespeare, Melville, and Bob Dylan. Glib and persuasive with his parents, he applied the same skills when dealing with friends, teachers, mentors, and eventually the rich and powerful; Steve innately understood from an early age that the right words and stories could help him win the attention he needed to get what he wanted.
STEVE WAS NOT really a star in this local crowd of budding technologists. But in 1969 a friend named Bill Fernandez introduced him to someone who was: Stephen Wozniak. Stephen Wozniak from nearby Sunnyvale. The son of a Lockheed engineer, “Woz” was an engineering genius. Steve, it turned out, was a great enabler of genius. This would turn out to be the first great collaboration of his career.
Nerdy and shy, Woz was five years older yet far less assertive than Steve. Like Steve, he had learned about electronics from his father and from other neighborhood dads. But he had immersed himself much more deeply into the subject, in school and out, and had even created a rudimentary calculator, made of transistors, resisters, and diodes, when he was just entering his teens. In 1971, before the single-chip microprocessor had been commercialized, Woz designed a circuit board loaded with chips and electronic components that he called the “Cream Soda Computer,” since that was his favorite sugary soft drink at the time. Woz turned himself into an extraordinarily talented hardware designer whose uncanny electronic engineering instincts were coupled with a great software programmer’s imagination—he could see shortcuts both in circuits and in software that others simply couldn’t envision.
Steve didn’t have Woz’s innate talent, but he did have a native hunger to put really cool stuff into the hands of as many people as possible. This unique trait fundamentally separated him from other hobbyists messing around with computers. From the start, he had the natural inclination to be an impresario, to convince people to pursue a goal that often only he could see, and then to coordinate and push them toward the creation of that goal. The first sign of that came in 1972, when he and Woz started in on an unlikely commercial collaboration.
With Steve’s help, Woz developed the first digital “blue box”—a machine that could mimic the tones used by telephone company switches to connect specific phones anywhere in the world. A prankster could hold one of these clever (and illegal) battery-powered gadgets up to the mouthpiece of any telephone and fool Ma Bell’s switching systems into making long-distance or even international calls for free.
Woz would have been happy to just build the circuit and share it—as would be his inclination later with the circuit board that formed the heart and soul of the Apple 1 computer. Steve, however, proposed that they try to make some money by selling completely assembled machines. So while Woz polished his circuit design, Steve pulled together the necessary materials and priced the finished boxes. He and Woz netted some $6,000 selling the illegal devices at $150 a pop, mostly to college students. The two boys would wander dormitory hallways, knocking on doors and asking the occupants if this was George’s room—a fictional George who supposedly was an expert phone phreak. If the discussion prompted interest, they’d demonstrate what the blue box could do, and sometimes make a sale. But business was spotty, and when they went further afield the venture foundered—the boys closed up shop after one supposed customer pulled a gun on Steve. Still, it wasn’t bad for a first effort.
IT MAY SEEM strange to include Steve’s spiritual life as one of the source materials of his career. But as a young man, Steve, with great sincerity, sought a deeper reality, a plane of consciousness beneath the surface. He pursued it with psychedelic drugs, and he pursued it with religious exploration. This spiritual sensibility contributed greatly to the unusual breadth of his intellectual peripheral vision, which eventually led him to see possibilities—ranging from great new products to radically reinvented business models—that escaped most others.
Just as Silicon Valley was the environment that birthed and nurtured Steve’s technological optimism, the 1960s was the decade that fueled an inquisitive teen’s natural impulse to search for deeper truths. Like so many other young people of the time, Steve embraced the questioning and yearning of the counterculture movement. He was a baby boomer who experimented with drugs, drank deeply of the insurgent lyrics of musicians like Dylan, the Beatles, the Grateful Dead, the Band, and Janis Joplin—even the radical, more abstract sonic musings of Miles Davis—and delved into the works of people he considered philosopher kings, spiritual thinkers like Suzuki Roshi, Ram Dass, and Paramahansa Yogananda. The messages of the time were clear: question everything, especially authority; experiment; hit the road; be fearless; and work to create a better world.
Steve’s own grand quest began immediately after graduating from Cupertino’s Homestead High School, when he headed off to Reed College in Portland, Oregon. It didn’t take long before the headstrong freshman was only attending the classes that fascinated him, and after just one semester, he abruptly dropped out, without even telling his parents. He spent a second semester auditing classes, including one calligraphy course that he would cite in later years as the inspiration for the Macintosh’s ability to produce a diverse panoply of typographical fonts. He also delved more deeply into Asian philosophy and mysticism, and dropped acid with greater frequency, at times almost as a spiritual sacrament.
The next summer, after returning, flat broke, to live with his parents again in Cupertino, he spent considerable time commuting back and forth to work at an Oregon apple orchard that doubled as a sort of commune. Eventually he landed a job back home as a technician at Atari, the video game company started by Nolan Bushnell, the inventor of Pong. He proved adept at repairing game machines that had gone on the fritz, and was able to convince Bushnell to let him fix some coin-operated kiosks in Germany, as part of a deal to pay his way to India, where he would join his pal Robert Friedland, the charismatic owner of that Oregon orchard.
It was all part of a romantic search for a way of life that had real meaning, at a time when the culture smiled on such quests. “You’ve got to keep Steve in the context of the time,” says Larry Brilliant. “What were we all looking for? There was a generational split then, a split that was far deeper than the left-right split we have now, or the fundamentalist-secular split. And even though Steve had wonderfully supportive adoptive parents, he would get letters from Robert Friedland and other people who were in India, who had gone there seeking peace and believed they’d found something. That was what Steve was looking for.”
Steve ostensibly went to India hoping to meet Neem Karoli Baba, known as Maharaj-ji, the famous guru who was an inspiration to Brilliant, Friedman, and other seekers. But Maharaj-ji died shortly before Steve’s arrival, to his lasting disappointment. Steve’s time in India was splintered, as unfocused as the searches of many young people seeking a broader vision than the one they were handed as children. He went to a religious festival attended by ten million other pilgrims. He wore flowing cotton robes, ate strange foods, and had his head shaved by a mysterious guru. He got dysentery. For the first time he read Yogananda’s Autobiography of a Yogi, a book that he would return to several times throughout his life, and that would be given to everyone who attended the reception following Steve’s memorial service at Stanford University’s Memorial Church on October 16, 2011.