In a 1994 interview preserved by the Silicon Valley Historical Association, Steve Jobs recalls the famous call he made as a high schooler.
He looked up a number in the phone book, dialed the home of Hewlett-Packard cofounder Bill Hewlett, and on the other end the real “Bill Hewlett” picked up.
“I need parts to build a frequency counter.”
Hewlett laughed and said he would send over some spare components, and that summer he even gave the kid an internship on an HP assembly line. The 12-year-old tightened nuts and bolts and absorbed the rhythm of the factory, the smell of industry, and the birth of “things that move the world.” Jobs adds, matter-of-factly:
Most people do not get because they do not ask.
I just asked.- Steven Paul Jobs -
Born in San Francisco and adopted soon after, he grew up in a modest house in Los Altos. His adoptive father, Paul Jobs, built a workbench in the garage and taught him a simple rule: “Make the back as beautiful as the front.” That sentence became a lifelong aesthetic, extending to the inside of a box’s die-cut, the curvature of a motherboard trace, the angle of a store’s lighting, and the margins of a keynote slide.
He often clashed with school, but he was quiet in front of books and electronic parts. He instinctively chased the place where technology meets the humanities, and that intersection became his life’s aim. He enrolled at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, then dropped out, but he audited a calligraphy course where he absorbed stroke weight, letter-spacing, and the rhythm of curves, learning that “beauty leads function.” He would later say:
If I had never dropped in on that single course in college,
the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts.Steve Jobs, Stanford Commencement Address (June 12, 2005)
Around the same time, a trip to India gave him the conviction that the more you remove the unnecessary, the more the essence comes into focus. Rather than surface decoration, he believed in the kind of order that lets a person understand what does what the moment their hand touches it. That philosophy would infuse every product and presentation he directed.
Back in California, he joined Atari in Los Gatos and learned in his body the rhythm of production lines and the harshness of deadlines. By day he worked on boards amid machine noise, and by night he and Steve Wozniak kept “playing” with experiments. They drifted among electronics shops, dorm rooms, and garages, building blue boxes that spoofed the phone network and demoing them live, cultivating the feeling that “our design can beat a giant system.” At Atari he was tasked with implementing the Breakout game circuitry with a minimum number of chips, and in the process he absorbed a truth to the bone: the tighter the constraints, the more creative the design must be. Work and play blurred. Days were process and quality, nights were hacking and prototypes. That is how Jobs and Wozniak honed their craft.
Around then, the Homebrew Computer Club met regularly, a gathering of Silicon Valley hobbyist engineers. It began in a Menlo Park garage, then moved to the SLAC auditorium to accommodate more people. Presenters showed off new chips on their boards, the audience copied schematics by hand, and at home everyone fixed bugs to share at the next meeting. That day Wozniak brought a self-made board that showed text on a monitor and took keyboard input, plugged directly into a TV, the prototype that became the Apple I. It combined the MOS 6502 processor, a BASIC interpreter he had tuned, and the idea of using a household television instead of an expensive dedicated terminal.
In that moment Jobs did not look only at the schematic. He saw an experience. “This should not be a hobbyist kit. It needs a case, and when you plug it in, it should boot right up. It should be a product.” He proposed selling it as a finished machine. Wozniak hesitated at first, but Jobs described the user’s first encounter, from the box and the manual to the emotion when they press the power button, and he convinced him. The name came then too. From the apples he picked on a farm. “Apple.” Easy to say, and starting with A so it came before Atari in the phone book, he added with a grin.
He was not just talking. Jobs went to Paul Terrell, the owner of the Byte Shop in a shopping mall, pushed the prototype across the counter, and secured a preorder for 50 finished units. Payment on delivery. Wozniak, then a teacher, sold his HP calculator. Jobs sold his Volkswagen van to pay for parts. They bought boards on credit. The parents’ garage became a production line, the kitchen handled receipts and invoices, and the living room became a test bench. Neighborhood friends came to solder, Jobs’s mother made sandwiches, and amid boxes of parts, solder smoke, and checklists, “Apple” was born.
This is when Jobs’s standard hardened. “Real artists ship.” It was not enough that the circuit worked. Completion meant the product goes in a box, into a customer’s hands, and the first ten seconds end with a smile. So he fussed over not just component placement on the board but the texture of the case, cable ties inside the packaging, and the opening sentence of the manual. With that conviction, production of the Apple I in a garage was ready to scale into an industry.
The Apple II then served as an elevator that brought computers from “experts’ desks” into homes and classrooms, thanks to color graphics, generous expansion slots, and Wozniak’s meticulously refined disk controller, Disk II. While most home machines still relied on cassette tapes, the Apple II touted relatively fast and reliable disk operations and cleverly exploited NTSC artifact coloring to achieve low-cost color displays. Its eight expansion slots made a playground for modems, printers, graphics cards, memory cards, almost anything you could imagine. When VisiCalc introduced the notion of the “spreadsheet,” small businesses and accounting offices began to view the Apple II as an “essential work device.” In schools, graphics and basic coding classes began in front of an Apple II.
In that wave, Jobs obsessed less over spec sheets and more over the very first encounter. The paper stock of the box, how the cables were tied to avoid tangles, even the pitch of the fan noise on first power-on. For him, a product did not end with the sale. It began when the customer opened the box. Hence he often said, “Real artists ship.” Shipping does not only mean leaving the factory. It means deliberately designing those first ten seconds in a person’s hands.
For that reason, what he truly wanted to build was not a “faster chip” but an “interface that saves people time learning.” In 1979 he secured a visit to Xerox PARC in exchange for some pre-IPO Apple shares. With a small team he went to the Palo Alto lab and saw bitmap displays, windows and icons, the mouse, and an object-oriented environment converging into a new grammar where “what you see is what you manipulate.” The demo ended, and Jobs peppered the researchers with questions. “Why that cursor shape?” “How many mouse buttons are optimal?” “What do you assume a user knows at the start?” He said it felt like seeing a future five years ahead, and his conviction crystallized: “Replace the computer’s grammar with the user’s grammar.” Not memorizing keyboard shortcut lists. A world where you grab what you see and move it.
That conviction became the engine for the Lisa project. Lisa was designed as a high-end business machine, with an advanced document-centric interface for the time, multitasking, a file system, and a menu structure. Jobs insisted, “One button is enough. People do not want to puzzle over three buttons while looking at a mouse.” The price was high, the system heavy, the software limited, and the real barrier was internal tension. As conflicts over Lisa’s management and schedule grew, Jobs was removed from the project. Had it ended there, Lisa might have remained “an experiment too far ahead.”
Jobs soon pivoted to the Macintosh. He took Jeff Raskin’s initial concept of a low-cost, easy computer and pushed it into a mass-market GUI machine with a new balance of emotion, speed, and finish. With a pirate flag flying from the building’s roof, he declared to the team, “I would rather be a pirate than join the Navy.” It was a metaphor for beating the inertia of a big organization with the speed and audacity of a small team. Inside, people like Andy Hertzfeld, Bill Atkinson, Burrell Smith, and Susan Kare added their innovations. Kare gave the Mac a friendly face with the smiling “Classic Mac” icon and pixel drawings that felt like you could read the palm lines. Atkinson’s QuickDraw drew smooth curves in a sea of pixels. The hardware was ahead of its time with 3.5-inch floppy disks, rounded bitmap windows, and even a demo where the Mac said “Hello.” Jobs rehearsed until the day before the launch, tuning the first 90 seconds of the demo, the cursor speed, even the timing of when to raise the laser pointer. His standard of “insanely great” was palpable in the hall.
In January 1984, the Super Bowl “1984” ad blasted the path open. Directed by Ridley Scott, the spot showed a lone runner hurling a color hammer into a gray dystopia and proclaimed, “On January 24th, Macintosh will show you why 1984 won’t be like ‘1984’.”
(Meaning: by launching Macintosh in 1984, Apple was declaring a future different from Orwell’s oppressive surveillance state, returning freedom and creativity to individuals in a uniform computer world dominated by corporate Big Brother figures like IBM.)
A few days later at De Anza College’s Flint Center near Cupertino, when “Hello” appeared on the screen, many felt for the first time that “a computer is talking to me.” It was more than a function demo. It was a declaration that a grammar of dragging a file to the trash and changing a view from a menu bar would replace arcana, bringing the “human grammar” Jobs spoke of to life.
Trials arrived as well. With only 128 KB of memory, a single floppy for storage, and thin early software, the Macintosh’s class was inevitably limited. The enterprise market still favored the expandability of IBM PC compatibles and their spreadsheet ecosystems. Inside Apple, the gap widened between Jobs and John Sculley. Sculley valued the steady cash and education market from Apple II. Jobs wanted an all-in bet on Macintosh. Two visions collided under one roof. In the spring of 1985 a reorganization removed Jobs from the Macintosh group, and a few months later he left the company. In his Stanford address he said, “I lost the thing I loved, but I found a beginner’s mind again.” Failure, to him, was not an endpoint. It was a beginning.
Ironically, the real opening for Macintosh arrived right after. In 1985 the LaserWriter printer and Aldus PageMaker together created a new workflow called desktop publishing. Newspapers, magazines, and design studios adopted the Mac, and it became a WYSIWYG production machine where text, images, and layout interwove in real time. On raw specs the Mac could be outgunned, but it found its rightful mission as “a tool that saves people massive amounts of time.”
Design is a funny word.
Some people think design means how it looks.
But of course, if you dig deeper, it is really how it works.1996 WIRED interview
After leaving Apple he launched two new ships, NeXT and Pixar. NeXT, with its black magnesium cube and object-oriented operating system, experimented with “the future of software.” The hardware did not score big commercially, but the technology became the heart of Mac OS X. Pixar married a rendering engine to story and created Toy Story. Through it he embraced a core premise: engineering can work coldly while the result can land warmly. That insight shaped Apple’s later keynotes, which presented products not as spec recitals but as stories and scenes.
Carrying the principles validated at NeXT and Pixar, he returned to Apple in 1997. His first act was subtraction. He collapsed a scattered portfolio into four boxes, Pro or Consumer by Desktop or Portable, focusing the organization’s energy. To the outside he revived the brand’s story with “Think different.” The copy about the crazy ones, the misfits, the round pegs in square holes was not only ad copy. It was a product roadmap.
That manifesto became reality with iMac. A translucent all-in-one, and a bold decision to drop the floppy and keep only USB, reset the baseline of experience. There were boos and cheers at the time, but the choice pulled standards forward. On that momentum he refined the design language with Jony Ive, synchronized the supply chain with Tim Cook, and prepared iPod, iTunes, and iPhone.
In 2001 the iPod changed how we consumed music with one sentence: “1,000 songs in your pocket.” The feel of the click wheel combined with a tiny hard drive’s capacity turned music from files into a daily route. Soon the iTunes Store bound price, rights, and distribution into one experience, redesigning the relationship among labels, users, creators, and platforms.
In June 2005 at Stanford, he compressed his philosophy into three stories.
First, “connecting the dots.” He cited calligraphy at Reed returning years later as fonts and spacing on the Macintosh. “You cannot connect the dots looking forward. You can only connect them looking backward. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.”
Second, “love and loss.” He told how, after being fired from the company he founded, he found work and love again at NeXT and Pixar. “The only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you have not found it yet, keep looking. Do not settle.”
Third, “death.” After a pancreatic tumor diagnosis, he asked himself each morning in the mirror a question he also gave the audience. “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?”
He ended with, “Stay hungry. Stay foolish.” It was not a slogan for style. It was his philosophy. Hungry means never resting on laurels and keeping a thirst to learn and build better. Foolish means questioning the rules with a beginner’s courage and experimenting even when things are unfinished. His products began with thirst and shipped with a beginner’s courage.
On January 9, 2007, on stage at Moscone Center in San Francisco, he delivered another “all-timer.” The iPhone keynote.
Black turtleneck, jeans, sneakers.
A widescreen iPod,
a revolutionary phone,
and an Internet communicator…
This is not three devices. It is one device.
Today, we are reinventing the phone.
When “iPhone” appeared on the screen, the roar felt like a door opening to another era. “No stylus. Who wants a stylus? We have fingers.” He zoomed photos with a two-finger pinch, rotated the screen instantly with an accelerometer, flipped through Cover Flow to play music, used Visual Voicemail to pick messages from a list, and scrolled the “real web” in your pocket with Safari. He double-tapped a New York Times column to fit it, dropped a pin in Google Maps to find a store and called directly. “I would like to order 4,000 lattes… just kidding.”
The keynote’s core was not specs. It was a redefinition of grammar. It moved interactions from buttons to gestures, brought desktop-class web to your fingers instead of a watered-down mobile web, and fused phone, iPod, and Internet into one screen you could switch among naturally. The App Store opened the next year, giving solo developers a global distribution rail and changing the verbs of city life, shopping, finance, and education.
The essence of Jobs’s leadership was the art of focus and deletion. In meetings he asked first, “Will the first ten seconds make you smile?” more than “Can we cram in this feature?” He managed the box’s corner radius, a button’s shading and animation easing, even the twist in the power cable. He also left us lines that were not just taste but philosophy and execution: “Real artists ship.” “Design is not what it looks like but how it works.” “Great products come from thousands of nos.” “We are here to put a dent in the universe.” “I would rather be a pirate than join the Navy.”
I skate to where the puck is going to be,
not where it has been.- Wayne Gretzky -
A quote Steve Jobs often cited
By now Steve Jobs comes into focus. He was an entrepreneur and inventor, a master showman and an obsessive editor. He sought answers at the intersection of technology and the humanities. He set his convictions and then rearranged hardware, software, services, supply chain, stores, and keynotes into one tone to uphold them. He believed failure was not an end but the start of the next success.
The audacity of a 12-year-old who pulled Bill Hewlett’s number from a phone book and dialed without fear echoes today in Apple’s Home screens, its icons, the feel of a store’s door handle, and the small pleasure of opening a box. He leaves us this counsel: “The dots connect later. Do what you love. And please, stay hungry and dare to remain foolish.”
Thank you for reading. I wish you happiness always.
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