It was Steve’s nature to be out of synch with this kind of groupthink. He was a singular free-thinker whose ideas would often run against the conventional wisdom of any community in which he operated. He and the Homebrewers were cut from different cloth. Their spirited debates often bored him. While a few had broader business ambitions and eventually founded microcomputer companies of their own, most were obsessively focused on electronic intricacies, like determining the most efficient way to link memory chips to microprocessors, or imagining how you might use a cheap computer to play games like the ones they played on mainframes back in school. Steve liked knowing enough to be conversant about electronics and computer design, and later in his life he would boast about his own supposed skill as a programmer. But even in 1975, he didn’t fundamentally or passionately care about the intricacies of computers in and of themselves. Instead, he was obsessed by what might happen when this powerful technology got into the hands of many, many people.

Through the years, Steve would be the beneficiary of a fair amount of luck, some of it outrageously good, and of course some of it mortally bad. Pixar’s Ed Catmull likes to say that since you can’t control the luck itself, which is bound to come your way for better and for worse, what matters is your state of preparedness to deal with it. Steve had a kind of hyperawareness of his surroundings that allowed him to leap at opportunities that presented themselves. So when Paul Terrell, the owner of the Byte Shop computer store in nearby Mountain View, introduced himself to Steve and Woz after the presentation and let them know he was impressed enough to want to talk about doing some business together, Steve knew exactly what to do. The very next day he borrowed a car and drove over to the Byte Shop, Terrell’s humble little store on El Camino Real, Silicon Valley’s main thoroughfare. Terrell surprised him, saying that if the two Steves could deliver fifty fully assembled circuit boards with all the chips soldered into place by a certain date, he would pay them $500 a pop—in other words, ten times what Steve and Woz had been charging club members for the printed circuit boards alone. Without missing a beat, Steve happily promised delivery, even though he and Woz had neither the wherewithal to buy the components nor anything like the “factory space” or “labor force” necessary to build anything.

From this point forward, Steve’s opportunism and drive would define the contours of his relationship with Woz. Woz, who was five years older, taught Steve the intrinsic value of great engineering. His accomplishments reinforced Steve’s sense that anything was possible when you had technological genius on your side. But it was Steve’s ability to manipulate Woz that drove the partnership, and not always for the better. Back in 1974, when Atari had been trying to develop a new version of its big hit, Pong, Nolan Bushnell had asked Jobs to create a prototype, offering a considerable bonus if he could reduce the number of chips required for each circuit board. Steve brought Woz in on the project, promising to split the fee. Woz’s design was more economical than Bushnell had thought was even possible, and so Steve was paid a bonus of $5,000 on top of the base $700 fee. According to Woz, Steve only paid him $350, not the $2,850 he should have earned. Walter Isaacson, Steve’s official biographer, wrote that Jobs denied shortchanging Woz. But the accusation rings true, because it fits with a few other instances in which Steve took shortcuts with people who were close to him.

Still, like several other close collaborators who later grew disenchanted with Steve, Woz admits that he would never have succeeded so brilliantly without Steve. Terrell’s order for $25,000 worth of computer motherboards was about $25,000 higher than anything Woz imagined he might ever sell.

The two young men had created a nice little market for their “blue boxes,” but that was trivial compared with this. They had never manufactured multiple units of anything at such a significant scale. They had never formally financed a business. Nor had they ever really sold anything of any real value. None of this dissuaded Jobs. He set about taking care of the details of production. For a makeshift factory, he commandeered a bedroom in his parents’ house. He roped his adoptive sister, Patty, into fitting and soldering the semiconductors and other parts into their marked spaces on the circuit board. When Terrell ordered up another fifty, Steve moved the operation into his parents’ garage after his father cleared out the cars he was fixing up for resale. He hired Bill Fernandez, the very guy who back in high school had first introduced him to Woz. And he brought in other neighborhood kids to accelerate the process. He signed up an answering service and rented a post office box. He did, in other words, whatever it took.

The garage became home to an assembly line in miniature. In one area, Steve’s sister and some friends soldered chips into place. Woz had his own workspace nearby where he could vet the assembled boards as they were finished. On the other side of the garage they took turns testing the “stuffed” boards for hours under heat lamps to verify their durability. Steve’s mother answered phone calls. Everyone worked nights and weekends. And Steve was more focused than anyone. He prodded the team ceaselessly. When things went wrong, he moved fast; after an old girlfriend failed to solder a few chips correctly, he made her the team’s bookkeeper. His temper was short and he never hesitated to belittle their work when something went wrong. As a child, Steve had rarely been given any reason to hold back his honest feelings. Now he began to learn one of his first management lessons, namely that his temper, properly targeted, could actually be a very effective motivational tool. It was a lesson that would prove hard to undo.

Sure enough, under Steve’s gimlet eye, his motley team delivered all the circuit boards Terrell ever ordered. The product didn’t exactly fly off the shelf—fewer than two hundred Apple 1’s were ever sold. Even so, that summer in the legendary garage represented the first time Steve rallied a group of people to dig down deep and deliver something that was innovative and miraculous, and that they weren’t even sure they could create. It wouldn’t be the last time he would pull off such a trick. After an aborted stint at college, a picaresque pilgrimage to India, some revelatory travels on LSD, and an internship of sorts at Atari, Steve had discovered his true mission. And now he was totally locked in.

Chapter 2

“I Didn’t Want to Be a Businessman”

The story of Steve Jobs’s first tenure at Apple Computer is the tale of a young visionary in the adolescence of his career. After playing such a crucial role in making and selling the Apple 1, Steve faced the challenge of moving his vision, intelligence, intuition, and ferocious personality from his father’s garage into a much bigger “space”—the corporate and financial and industrial world of Silicon Valley. Steve may have been a quick study, but he didn’t have an instinctive sense of how to do this. Some young men and women are bred for corporate life—Bill Gates comes to mind. Steve was not.

If Steve was ever going to do something grander than just cook up something cool with the kids in the garage, he had to learn to play with the grown-ups. But it wasn’t going to be easy. As he told me several times: “I didn’t want to be a businessman, because all the businessmen I knew I didn’t want to be like.” Steve’s natural inclination was to position himself as the critic, the rebel, the visionary, the lithe and nimble David against the stodgy Goliath of whatever powers might be. Collaborating with “the Man,” to use the colloquial terminology of his day, wasn’t just problematic, it was tantamount to collusion. Yes, he wanted to play their game, but by his own rules.