Rebooting Steve Jobs
No single person has done more to propagate the lone-gunslinger, out-of-the-garage, into-our-hearts Everyman myth of Silicon Valley than Steve Jobs. Forget Bill Hewlett and David Packard, finessing their first audio oscillator in a garage on Addison Avenue in Palo Alto. Bill Gates? A complete stiff compared to Steve. Larry Ellison? A thug, calling ahead to his office to have a cop chasing him for speeding stopped in the company parking lot by a corporate lawyer. And there’s the shotgun, which we’ll see later. Gordon Moore? Moore’s Law? Twice the chip density every 18 months? Boring! Plain and simple, it was Steve, the granola-crunching swami of technology who made it all seem so possible: You, too, could drop out of college, take drugs, spend time soul-searching in India, start a company, and become a billionaire, if only you had the right idea and the right style to pull it off. And you could wear your jeans with the holes in them all the while.
I first met Steve in 1977, just as the Apple II was being launched. He was living in a modest house in Los Gatos, wandering around in his bare feet, occasionally resting those feet on the kitchen table to pick at his toenails. I was then a Washington Post reporter, hoping to write about the seismic shift in American enterprise quaking
