Steve Jobs: A Biographic Portrait

By Kevin Lynch

A visual guide to the life and works of the world-changing entrepreneur told through text, photos, and original graphics.

Easily one of the most influential innovators of the twentieth and twenty-first century, Steve Jobs fundamentally shaped the way in which we communicate and, even more broadly, live our lives.

In this information-packed graphic biography, Steve Jobs’ remarkable talent and genius are explored through bold design and original graphics. Kevin Lynch explores Jobs’ journey from savvy salesman, to his rivalry and market competition with Bill Gates, to his shift toward radical innovations in later life. This technological innovator led a fascinating, astounding and ultimately too short life that irreversibly impacted our world.

Steve Jobs: A Biographic Portrait is a visual celebration and comprehensive study of “The Maverick” and his work; and a must-have for any fan of Apple products.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Nov 6, 2018
• ISBN: 9781781318706

Kevin Lynch

Kevin Lynch received his BSE in Electrical Engineering from Princeton University and his PhD in Robotics from Carnegie Mellon University, and he is currently Professor and Department Chair of the Mechanical Engineering Department at Northwestern University. He has been teaching mechatronics at Northwestern for over 15 years, and he has been awarded Northwestern’s highest teaching awards. He publishes and lectures widely on his research in robotics. He is a Fellow of the IEEE.

Book preview

Steve Jobs: A Biographic Portrait

Steve Jobs

A Biographic Portrait

Kevin Lynch

Contents

1   To put a ding in the universe

2   Creativity is just connecting things

3   Here’s to the crazy ones

4   OK, let’s get started

5   A bicycle for the mind

6   Simple can be harder than complex

7   Inventing tomorrow

8   Just make it great

9   Insanely great

10   The times they are a changin’

11   How to think differently

12   Why one home run is much better than two doubles

13   Stay hungry

14   Life’s change agent

15   The lightness of being a beginner again

16   Something’s transmitted

17   One more thing

Prologue

On 7 June 2011, four months before he passed away, Steve Jobs made what was to be his final public appearance. Standing before the Cupertino City Council he would present Apple’s plans for a new corporate headquarters within the district.

Just a day earlier, he’d given an assured performance delivering his final keynote during Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, a swansong which saw him unveil iCloud, the company’s new cloud storage service.

Belying the graveness of his now rapidly declining condition, the strident presentation had managed to convince a number of tech commentators to ignore his skeletal appearance and wrongly infer in their write-ups that Jobs was on his way back to good health.

Speaking in front of the twelve-strong committee the next day, Jobs initially cut a starkly different figure under the harsh lighting of the council chamber. Out of breath, his opening pleasantries were delivered in a voice underpinned with uncharacteristic hesitancy.

But as he began to detail how the huge complex would resolve Apple’s long-standing issue of housing its soaring workforce numbers, Jobs began to find his footing. Palpably enthused, up went the tempo as he described the planned construction project which had already earned the grandiose nickname of ‘The Mothership’.

Where had his new energy come from?

Maybe it was the need to get across his vision for what was ultimately his last big project – the final time he would fulfil his seemingly innate burning need to build something great – an urge that had been a running feature throughout his working life. More likely it was the excitement in relaying the news to those present that his grand plan had finally come together to keep Apple within Cupertino – a short, ten-minute drive from the garage in Mountain View where he had cofounded the company thirty-five years earlier with Steve Wozniak.

There had been an impasse for some time as Apple struggled to find land within the city sufficient to build an HQ capable of housing 12,000 members of staff. But then a property became available which had particular emotional significance to Jobs, poignantly offering the opportunity to bring his life full circle during one of its final acts.

The land beneath the proposed site was once owned by Hewlett-Packard, a company that had sparked the technological revolution in the area during the late 1930s and, crucially, had given him an early glimpse of the world of computers as a young teen.

‘So we’ve got a plan that lets us stay in Cupertino. We went out and we bought some land and this land is kind of special, to me,’ Jobs explained during the council meeting.

‘When I was thirteen, Hewlett and Packard were my idols – and I called up Bill Hewlett, ‘cause he lived in Palo Alto and there were no unlisted numbers in the phone book. And he picked up the phone and I talked to him and I asked him if he’d give me some spare parts for something I was building called a frequency counter. And he did, but in addition to that, he gave me something way more important – he gave me a job that summer.

‘A summer job at Hewlett-Packard, right here in Santa Clara, right here off 280, the division that built frequency counters.

‘And I was in heaven.’

His recollections of how that summer job had fuelled his interest in electronics and technology made it clear for anyone at the council meeting that the Apple Park project was also serving as a means for Jobs to pay something back. It was a chance for him to leave a final mark on the southern portion of the Bay Area that had shaped his life. He was raised in its free-wheeling culture of experimentation and innovation, its spirit and energy coursing through his veins.

Steve Jobs was a true son of Silicon Valley. The ultimate example.

Chapter One

To put a ding in the universe

1

Steven Paul Jobs was five years old when his family moved from his birthplace of San Francisco to the idyllic suburb of Mountain View, California.

It may have just been a relatively short forty-five-minute drive away from their previous home, but the change from city surroundings was keenly felt. The move to their new cookie-cutter estate house was the final piece in the puzzle for Paul and Clara Jobs, achieving their dream of becoming a stereotypical 1950s American family – something that had once seemed very much out of reach.

The working-class couple married in 1946, but an ectopic pregnancy had ended Clara’s hopes of being able to bear children.

The pair were given the opportunity to adopt Steve just a few days after his birth on 24 February 1955. They would go on to further expand the Jobs family three years later when they adopted once again – this time a girl they would name Patty.

Steve had been given up by his birth mother, a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin named Joanna Schieble. A German-Swiss Catholic, Schieble had fallen in love with Abdulfattah Jandali, a Muslim PhD candidate studying political science from Syria who was the son of a self-made millionaire oil magnate. The relationship dismayed Schieble’s strict Christian conservative father – unwilling to upset him as he had become terminally ill, and mindful of the prevailing negative attitudes towards unwed mothers at that time, Schieble moved to San Francisco. She separated from Jandali who remained in Wisconsin and reluctantly decided to give up her baby on condition that the adoptive parents be Catholic and college educated.

Neither of the prospective parents were graduates, a detail that prompted Schieble to initially refuse to sign over her child to them. After weeks of negotiating via the doctor, Paul and Clara agreed to guarantee that they would provide a savings account which would eventually fund the boy’s college education. It was a significant commitment at that time for a working-class family on a modest income and one that was enough to convince Schieble to relent.

How seriously the Jobs had taken the pledge of ensuring their son’s education was illustrated early on when it was time for him to begin elementary school. While looking after her two children as a stay at home mum, Clara had taught Steve to read by the age of just three. This meant by the time he started Monta Loma Elementary he was already far advanced beyond his peers.

While he may not have had the academic background necessary to satisfy Schieble’s discerning standards, Paul Jobs also played a full role in encouraging his son’s curiosity to learn. Crucially, his love and knowledge of mechanics and craftsmanship would go on to prove a significant influence on his son’s later life.

As an adult, Steve would describe his adopted father as a ‘genius with his hands’, crediting Paul’s attention to detail for his own interest in good design and stating that the only thing he wished to pass on to his own children was ‘to try to be as good a father to them as my father was to me’.

Paul Jobs had become an engine mechanic after dropping out of high school before signing up to the Coast Guard at the age of nineteen and serving during the Second World War. Thanks to a number of minor misdemeanours he never rose above the low rank of seaman, and he eventually left the guard around the time he married Clara to become a blue-collar machinist. His love and knowledge of automobiles would go on to lead to jobs as a ‘repo-man’ – retrieving cars from customers unable to make their payments. Paul would top up his income by restoring and selling old cars in his spare time, meaning the family garage was continually in use and a place of fascination for his inquisitive son. Hoping to feed his interest, Paul set aside some space for his young apprentice.

‘He had a workbench out in his garage,’ Steve recalled once during an interview. ‘When I was about five or six, he sectioned off a little piece of it and said, Steve, this is your workbench now. And he gave me some of his smaller tools and showed me how to use a hammer and saw and how to build things. It really was very good for me. He spent a lot of time with me… teaching me how to build things, how to take things apart, put things back together.’ While his father was no expert in the field, the sessions in the garage helping him to rebuild cars as well as household repair projects also exposed Steve to electronics.

The Jobs had landed in Mountain View in 1960 during a period when many young families were flocking to the area. The relocation of Paul’s repossession work had prompted their move, but many of the new inhabitants in and around the Santa Clara Valley were engineers, chemists, programmers and physicists who were flooding to the region’s booming semiconductor, telecommunications and electronics industries.

Just a mile or two from the Jobs’s new home, Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory had become the first company to develop silicon semiconductor devices towards the end of the 1950s. This advancement would prove a major breakthrough for computing but the triumph would be short lived for the company’s founder, Nobel Prize–winning physicist William Shockley. His heavy-handed management style brought about a near mutiny of the young, brilliant engineers he had brought to the company. The talented group would soon leave to set up Fairchild Semiconductor, a company that would in turn later birth chip giants such as Intel and AMD.

Hewlett-Packard began in a garage in Palo Alto as far back as the late 1930s and its presence now loomed large over the valley, with the company boasting a 9,000-strong workforce making its technical instruments by the start of the 1960s. Meanwhile Stanford Industrial Park had opened, with the local university leasing portions of its land to companies such as Eastman Kodak, General Electric and Lockheed Corporation, cleverly linking the flourishing tech industry with academic talent from the valley.

The city’s population had more than doubled during the preceding decade, with the fruit orchards that had previously characterised the town cleared to make way for highways, new schools and large bases for the host of new tech startups that would shape the area’s future. The rapidly changing environment around their home made the Santa Clara Valley area particularly conducive for a young student like Steve to develop an interest in computers.

‘It was really the most wonderful place in the world to grow up. There was a man who moved in down the street, maybe about six or seven houses down the block who was new in the neighbourhood with his wife, and it turned out that he was an engineer at Hewlett-Packard and a ham radio operator and really into electronics. What he did to get to know the kids in the block was rather a strange thing: he put out a carbon microphone and a battery and a speaker on his driveway where you could talk into the microphone and your voice would be amplified by the speaker. Kind of strange thing when you move into a neighborhood but that’s what he did.’

It would be more than ten years before journalist Don Hoefler would coin the term ‘Silicon Valley’ in a 1971 newspaper article when describing the region, but at the time of the Jobs family’s arrival in town, most residents of Santa Clara Valley would have already been acutely aware that the world’s epicentre for technology was already emerging on their doorstep.

Key Figures

Paul & Clara Jobs

Adoptive parents. Paul was a machinist for a firm that made lasers in what became Silicon Valley, in Northern California. Clara was the daughter of Armenian immigrants and worked as an accountant.

Steve Wozniak

Electronics genius who founded Apple with Steve Jobs. Single-handedly developed its launch computer, the Apple I, in 1976.

Chrisann Brennan

Jobs’s high school girlfriend. On and off, often turbulent relationship which didn’t improve following the birth of their daughter Lisa.

Dan Kottke

Steve’s college friend and travel companion on visit to India. Went on to become one of Apple’s first employees.

Mike Markkula

Apple’s first major investor and employee number three.

Mike Scott

Apple’s first CEO. Brought in by Mike Markkula as Jobs and Wozniak were considered too young and inexperienced to manage a company.

John Sculley

Brought in from Pepsi to take over as Apple CEO in 1983. Was at the helm when Jobs was kicked out of the company two years later.

Mona Simpson

Acclaimed author and biological sister of Steve Jobs. Born in 1957, two years after Steve Jobs had been born and adopted and their parents had married. Did not meet her brother until 1986. After being reunited they became very close.

John Lasseter

CGI animation pioneer and cofounder and CEO of Pixar.

Laurene Powell

American business executive. Married Steve Jobs in 1991. Together they had three children.

Kobun Chino

Sōtō Zen master. Became Jobs’s spiritual teacher and presided over his wedding to Laurene.

Jony Ive

British industrial designer. Has headed up Apple’s design team since 1986. Was a major figure in the company’s resurgence.

Tim Cook

Originally hired by Jobs in 1998 as Apple’s chief operating officer. Eventually took over from Jobs as CEO in August 2011.

Silicon Valley

How the epicentre of tech came to be

1

1939

William Hewlett and Dave Packard establish Hewlett-Packard in Palo Alto, with the company initially making oscilloscopes.

2

1956

William Shockley, one of the inventors of the transistor, opens Shockley Semiconductor Labs in Mountain View, California. Employs many graduates from nearby Stanford University and becomes the first company to make transistors out of silicon.

3

1957

Eight former Shockley employees partner with investor and inventor Sherman Fairchild to create Fairchild Semiconductor. Specialising in the manufacturing of transistors, it goes on to make computer components for the Apollo program.

4

1968

Chemist Gordon Moore and physicist Robert Noyce leave Fairchild to found their own company in Santa Clara called Intel. In the years that follow, other former Fairchild employees will go on to found key tech firms such as AMD, Nvidia, and venture fund Kleiner Perkins.

5

1969

Stanford Research Institute becomes one of the four nodes of ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network), a government research project that becomes the technical foundation of the Internet.

6

1970

Xerox opens its pioneering PARC lab in Palo Alto. Prototypes developed for a mouse, and a groundbreaking graphical user interface observed by Steve Jobs during a tour of PARC at the end of the decade go on to inspire key features of the Apple Lisa.

Chapter Two

Creativity is just connecting things

2

‘So does that mean your real parents didn’t want you?’ The young Steve Jobs had always known that he was