Chapter 2: “I Didn’t Want to Be a Businessman”

This chapter explains Jobs’s idiosyncratic early attitudes toward being a business executive and drew many of its details from books and magazine articles about the early days of Apple Computer Inc., informal reminiscences of Jobs himself during one of our many meetings, and the recollections of other people who worked with him at that time. Of particular value were the reminiscences and personal archives of Regis McKenna, who generously shared his collection of notes, drawings, advertising copy, annual reports, and correspondence from this period. We also relied upon our interviews with him in the summer of 2012, and upon his book Real Time: Preparing for the Age of the Never Satisfied Customer. In all, we interviewed him at length on three occasions in 2012 and 2013.

Other books we consulted were Wozniak and Smith’s iWoz; Moritz’s The Little Kingdom; Swimming Across: A Memoir, by Andrew S. Grove; Andy Grove: The Life and Times of an American, by Richard S. Tedlow; The Chip: How Two Americans Invented the Microchip and Launched a Revolution, by T. R. Reid; and The Man Behind the Microchip: Robert Noyce and the Invention of Silicon Valley, by Leslie Berlin. We also quoted at length from “Digitization,” an article in the Talk of the Town department of The New Yorker magazine that was published on November 14, 1977. And we also culled information from the 1980 SEC prospectus for Apple Computer’s initial public offering.

Chapter 3: Breakthrough and Breakdown

This chapter describes the circumstances that led to Steve Jobs being stripped of executive authority and eventually quitting under pressure from the board of directors. Once again we synthesized information from many different sources, from books to our own interviews and government filings, such as annual reports, and Jobs’s own episodic reminiscences during our many meetings over the years after we first met in 1986. The narrative of the sequence of events leading to Jobs’s demotion in April 1985 and the ultimate conflict with Apple’s board that led to his resignation also benefitted from many recent interviews of people who were there at the time, as well as published reports from the time of the event.

Aside from snippets from my own encounters with Jobs, most of the direct quotations in this chapter were drawn from interviews with Susan Barnes on July 24, 2012; Lee Clow on October 14, 2013; Regis McKenna on July 31, 2012; Bill Gates on June 15, 2012; Mike Slade on July 23, 2012; and Jean-Louis Gassée on October 17, 2012.

We also relied on passages from the following books: Gates, by Stephen Manes and Paul Andrews; Odyssey: Pepsi to Apple, A Journey of Adventure, Ideas, and the Future, by John Sculley; The Bite in the Apple: A Memoir of My Life with Steve Jobs, by Chrisann Brennan; Apple Confidential 2.0: The Definitive History of the World’s Most Colorful Company, by Owen W. Linzmayer; Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age, by Michael A. Hiltzik; and Insanely Great: The Life and Times of Macintosh, the Computer That Changed Everything, by Steven Levy; as well as Moritz’s The Little Kingdom, and Wozniak and Smith’s iWoz.

Other journalistic sources included “The Fall of Steve” by Bro Uttal, published in Fortune on August 5, 1985; and the PBS television documentary The Entrepreneurs, broadcast in 1986. The Golden Gate Weather website, http://ggweather.com/sjc/daily_records.html#September, provided the precise weather data for the day of Jobs’s visit to the Garden of Allah. And statistical data on unit sales were drawn from Apple Computer’s annual reports from 1980 to 1984.

Chapter 4: What’s Next?

This chapter marks the beginning of my frequent meetings with Jobs, first as a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, and later as Fortune’s Silicon Valley writer. Ironically, I didn’t write all that many stories about Steve or his two pet entrepreneurial projects, NeXT and Pixar, for the first three years because neither company was publicly held and hence neither was a high priority for the Journal. After moving to Fortune in 1989, however, I made it a point to write about Steve with much greater frequency, and tried to cultivate what was becoming a closer personal relationship. Much of what is described in this chapter is drawn from my own notes and interview transcripts and recollections of events. Lengthy recent interviews with Jobs’s colleagues at that time provided valuable background for the chapter.

Aside from snippets from my own encounters with Jobs, most of the direct quotations in this chapter were drawn from interviews with Dan’l Lewin on July 26, 2012; Susan Barnes on July 24, 2012; Avie Tevanian on November 12, 2012; and Jon Rubinstein on July 25, 2012. We also benefitted from lengthy email correspondence with Allison Thomas on January 20, 2014.

We relied for some additional general background about NeXT on two books: Randall Stross’s Steve Jobs and the NeXT Big Thing; and Owen W. Linzmayer’s Apple Confidential 2.0.

The descriptions of the rapid growth of Sun Microsystems and the competitive landscape for computer workstations were drawn from reporting for my own stories in Fortune from 1998 to 2004 (see bibliography). The narrative details of the introduction of the NeXTcube is drawn primarily from my own experience at the event and my reporting for a Wall Street Journal front-page story that followed it on October 13, 1988, titled “Next Project: Apple Era Behind Him, Steve Jobs Tries Again, Using a New System.”

Statistics about the relative capacities of hard drives and the transistor counts of semiconductors were drawn from two primary sources: For our descriptions of semiconductor transistor densities we relied upon Pat Gelsinger’s article “Moore’s Law—The Genius Lives On,” which appeared in the Solid State Circuits newsletter, July 13, 2007; and our data on trends in hard drive densities came from Chip Walter’s “Kryder’s Law,” which appeared in Scientific American’s July 25, 2005, issue.

Other magazine articles we found helpful were a Newsweek story from October 24, 1988, by John Schwartz, titled “Steve Jobs Comes Back,” and we refer at length to a magazine article by Joe Nocera from the December 1986 issue of Esquire titled “The Second Coming of Steven Jobs.” We also refer again to the PBS television documentary The Entrepreneurs broadcast in 1986.

Online resources for this chapter include the digital archive of the National Mining Hall of Fame, Leadville, Colorado, http://www.mininghalloffame.org/inductee/jackling; Philip Elmer-DeWitt, “Inside Steve’s Teardown Mansion,” April 27, 2009, Fortune.com, http://fortune.com/2009/04/27/inside-steve-jobs-tear-down-mansion/; and http://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/browse-edgar?company=sun+microsystems&owner=exclude&action=get company for financial information about Sun Microsystems gleaned from the company’s SEC filings.

Chapter 5: A Side Bet

This chapter describes the origin of Jobs’s purchase of what eventually came to be called Pixar. Once again, this chapter draws primarily from my own extensive previous reporting for stories that appeared in Fortune from 1989 to 2006 (see bibliography). We also benefitted from recent interviews with Ed Catmull and from Catmull’s recently published book about his experiences at Pixar, Creativity Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration. For verification of some of the historical facts we also relied upon Karen Paik’s book To Infinity and Beyond: The Story of Pixar Animation Studios.

Aside from snippets from my own encounters with Jobs, most of the direct quotations in this chapter were drawn from interviews with Susan Barnes on July 24, 2012; Ed Catmull on January 16, 2014; John Lasseter on May 8, 2014; Bob Iger on May 14, 2014; and Laurene Powell Jobs on October 25, 2013.