Steve Jobs

Steven Paul Jobs was born in 1955, the biological son of a couple of students who decided to give the child up for adoption. He was raised by Paul and Clara Jobs, an ordinary California couple. Paul was a mechanic and passed on to his son a taste for taking apart and putting together gadgets in the family garage.

This origin marked Jobs his whole life. He said that being chosen by adoptive parents mattered more than being the product of a biological accident, but at the same time he carried a fear of abandonment that shows up later in the way he handled relationships, including with his own daughter.

The family moved to Silicon Valley back when the area was still mostly orchards and electronic parts factories, not the tech hub it is today. It was there, surrounded by retired engineers who lived in the neighborhood, that the curious boy got interested in electronics before he was even a teenager.

As an adult, Jobs went looking for his biological story and discovered he had a sister by blood, the writer Mona Simpson, with whom he built a close relationship. His biological father, though, he never really tried to find, even though the man ran a restaurant that Jobs had eaten at without knowing who he was.

Jobs enrolled at Reed College but dropped out of the formal program after just a few months, continuing to sit in for free on the classes that interested him, without following any curriculum at all.

One of those classes was calligraphy, which taught him about typography and the spacing between letters. Years later he would say that it directly influenced the beautiful fonts of the Macintosh, proof that a seemingly useless curiosity can end up in a successful commercial product.

During this period he also traveled through India in search of spiritual enlightenment, adopted restrictive diets and experimented with psychedelic substances, later saying that experience had been one of the most important of his life.

With no steady income, he slept on the floor of friends' rooms and collected empty soda bottles to trade for spare change so he could get a hot meal on Sundays at a local Hare Krishna temple, a reality far from the billionaire executive he would later become.

Back in California, Jobs reconnected with Steve Wozniak, a brilliant and awkward engineer who was already building homemade computers to show off to friends in an amateur electronics club.

While Wozniak understood hardware and circuits like few others, Jobs saw what all of that could become in the market: a finished, sellable product inside a good-looking box. This duo, one with the technical talent and the other with the commercial vision, founded Apple in 1976 in the garage of Jobs's parents' house.

The first computer, the Apple I, was sold in a handmade way to local electronics stores. The bigger success came with the Apple II, which brought color to the screen and helped open the personal computer market to ordinary people, not just engineers.