My Story, ‘Steve Jobs’ biography: A wealth of detail

Walter Isaacson's biography, "Steve Jobs," has arrived. It's a good read, and we'll be teasing out some tidbits for those who want a glimpse of the 656-page book.

Jobs died earlier this month at age 56 after a fight with pancreatic cancer, and the book arrives when interest in Apple, the company he co-founded and led, is perhaps at an all-time high. Jobs is about more than the
iPhone 4S, though. Isaacson has brought forth an ocean of anecdotes.

Here's a look at some of the details in the book, which we'll be updating as we go. "Steve Jobs" is published by Simon & Schuster, which like CNET is owned by CBS.

Childhood

The book begins as biographies sensibly often begin: with ancestry. Jobs had two sets of parents, biological and adoptive. The latter were Paul Reinhold Jobs, a repo man who repaired
cars after serving in the Coast Guard during World War II, married Clara Hagopian, a daughter of Armenian immigrants, who couldn't have children after an ectopic pregnancy. The former, "were my parents 1,000 percent," Jobs told Isaacson. The latter, though, "were my sperm and egg bank. That's not harsh, it's just the way it was, a sperm bank thing, nothing more."

Though some suggest being put up for adoption by his biological parents was a seminal part of his personality--his desire to control, his ability to be cruel--Jobs agreed only with the notion that it helped make him independent. When a girl suggested to a six- or seven-year-old Jobs that being adopted meant he'd been abandoned, "lightning bolts went off in my head," he said, and he talked to his parents about it. "They were very serious and looked me straight in the eye. They said, 'We specifically picked you out,'" Jobs told Isaacson.

Paul Jobs "knew how to build anything," Jobs said, and marked off a section of his workbench for Jobs. One lesson, from building the fence around their Mountain View, Calif., home: finish the backs of cabinets and fences well even though they're hidden. Ever look inside a
Mac Pro?

He grew up steeped in the Silicon Valley milieu, with "mysterious and high-tech" defense companies, and an engineer from Hewlett-Packard bringing him electronics "stuff to play with." One such object, a carbon microphone, led Jobs to the realization that "I was smarter than my parents." They accommodated him with ever-better schools, but it was a rough start for the boy: "They came close to really beating any curiosity out of me," he said, and he played pranks and got sent home.

His savior was Imogene "Teddy" Hill, his fourth-grade teacher, who bribed him into doing challenging work with a giant lollipop. The bribes became unnecessary, though: "I just wanted to learn and to please her...if it hadn't been for her I'm sure I would have gone to jail."

His Lutheran upbringing ended at age 13 when he saw starving children on the cover of Life magazine and his pastor didn't have a satisfactory explanation about how God could know about it. "The juice goes out of Christianity when it becomes too based on faith rather than on living like Jesus or seeing the world as Jesus saw it," Jobs told Isaacson. He took up Zen Buddhism, but eventually said: "I think different religions are different doors to the same house. Sometimes I think the house exists, and sometimes I don't. It's the great mystery."

In the ninth grade, he took up with counterculture kids interested in electronics and LSD, with pot smoking beginning at age 15 and LSD by his senior year. At the same time, he took up Heathkit electronics projects and landed an assembly-line job at Hewlett-Packard after calling Bill Hewlett at his Palo Alto home phone number. He got along better with the engineers upstairs, though, and got early schooling in business by buying and reselling used electronics. At the end of high school, he discovered literature and music, too.

Update 11:02 p.m. PT: Apple seeds

Steve Wozniak, who built a 100-transistor calculator in eighth grade but didn't find school a good match for his engineering talent, met the future Apple co-founder when Jobs was in high school but Wozniak was in college. The two bonded over pranks, electronics, and Bob Dylan bootleg recordings. When in 1971 "Woz" discovered Ron Rosenbaum's "Secrets of the Little Blue Box," which described how hackers figured out how to make long-distance calls for free by using audio tones to control AT&T network, the two snuck into the two Stanford Linear Accelerator Center library through an unlocked door Sunday to find the necessary electronics frequencies.

Their first version, built by midnight that same day with the analog recipe, couldn't produce stable enough tones, but a later digital version did work. Jobs decided to start selling the Blue Boxes, going through about 100 of them at $150 apiece before calling it quits when somebody robbed them of one at gunpoint.

It was enough to get the bigger ball rolling, though. "If it hadn't been for the Blue Boxes, there wouldn't have been an Apple," Jobs said. The pattern worked well: Woz led the engineering, and Jobs led the user design, marketing, and making money.

In 1972, Jobs started going to Reed College in Portland, Ore., where he discovered Zen Buddhism and vegetarnianism. He was bored but found Reed more to his liking after dropping out and instead auditing courses. And LSD remained a part of his life. He told Isaacson: "Taking LSD was a profound experience, one of the most important things in my life. LSD shows you that there's another side to the coin, and you can't remember it when it wears off, but you know it. It reinforced my sense of what was important--creating great things instead of making money, putting things back into the stream of history and of human consciousness as much as I could."

In 1974, he returned to his parents' house and found work at video game maker Atari, drawn by an ad that said, "Have fun, make money." He arrived in the lobby, demanded a job, and chief engineer Al Alcorn hired him. Jobs was wrongly convinced his diet would eliminate body odor, so Alcorn put Jobs on a night shift so he didn't have to deal with complaining coworkers.

After a dysentery-afflicted interlude in India, Jobs returned to Atari, where founder Nolan Bushnell did a little meta-engineering: he gave Jobs the challenge of creating a game that he suspected would bring Woz into the picture. Woz, who often hung around the Atari offices although working at HP, rose to the challenge. Woz designed the system while Jobs built the electronics, and the design was done in four days. They split the pay, but Jobs kept all of the bonus Bushnell paid for a design that used fewer than 50 microchips.

Update 11:28 p.m. PT: Apple sprouts

The Apple II towed the company into the bigtime. Its polished exterior required a lot more money to build, so newly incorporated Apple got a $250,000 line of credit and Woz, after much persuading, left HP. Guaranteeing the money and joining the company was business-savvy Mike Markkula, who'd grown wealthy off Intel and Fairchild Semiconductor stock. He wrote a short pice, "The Apple Marketing Philosophy," which laid out a course that remains at Apple to this day: "We will truly understand their needs better than any other company...In order to do a good job of those things that we decide to do, we must eliminate all of the unimportant opportunities...People DO judge a book by its cover...We may have the best product, the highest quality, the most useful software etc.; if we present them in a slipshod manner, they will be perceived as slipshod; if we present them in a creative, professional manner, we will impute the desired qualities."

The Apple II tested the wills of Woz and Jobs. Jobs wanted a sealed box, but Woz threatened to quit unless it could be expanded with new circuit boards. Woz one--that time. But future Apple products generally took Jobs' route, becoming ever more self-contained. The newer crop of MacBook Pros, following the course of iPods and iPhones, don't have replaceable batteries.

The launch, at the West Coast Computer Faire, also foreshadowed a Jobs to come. He paid extra for prime real estate, obsessed over the appearance of the only three Apple II models that were completed, and took Markkula's advice to clean up and dress in a suit. It worked: Apple sold 300 of the metal-cased, beige systems.

Also prologue to Jobs' future was a will that was strong. Isaacson recounts the views of Mike Scott, Apple's first president, who told Jobs to bathe more often. Scott told Isaacson: "My very first walk [where Steve held important discussions] was to tell him to bathe more often...He said that in exchange I had to read his fruitarian diet book and consider it as a way to lose weight...Steve was adamant that he bathed once a week, and that was adequate as long as he was eating a fruitarian diet."

They clashed over Jobs' perfectionism, too. Pantone had 2,000 shades of beige, but "none of them were good enough for Steve," Scott told Isaacson. The early Apple was a place with plenty of conflict, but it sold 16 million Apple II systems and played a key role in launching the computing industry.

Update 12:28 a.m. PT October 24: Big money

Jobs was at heart a calculating businessman. One anecdote from the book reveals just how much.

Daniel Kottke, who'd been Jobs' friend through college and India, joined Apple when it was still in Jobs' parents' garage, and worked as an hourly employee, wasn't eligible for stock options when Apple went public in 1980. Jobs wouldn't talk to Kottke about it, though. When Kottke finally brought it up in Jobs' office, Jobs was "cold," Isaacson recounts the incident. He quotes Kottke: "I just got choked up and began to cry and just couldn't talk to him...Our friendship was all gone. It was so sad."

This was when Jobs was 25 years old.

His own wealth--$256 million from the initial public offering--made jobs comfortable, but he pledged not to let it control his life. In the book, he said, "I made a promise to myself that I'm not going to let this money ruin my life."

Update 1:21 a.m. PT October 24: Birth of the Mac

Jobs had extracted the famous graphical user interface technology from Xerox PARC--the Palo Alto Research Center--for 100,000 shares of Apple stock at $10 apiece before its IPO, a tidy investment. The technology started making its way into Apple's Lisa project. But Jobs was ejected in September 1980 after management clashes and stripped of his title, vice president for research and development.

Ultimately, it was fortuitous, because he ended up taking control of the Macintosh project, which proved much more influential and successful even though it began as a company sidelight. "It was like going back to the garage for me. I had my own ragtag team and I was in control," Jobs told Isaacson.

Macintosh was the embodiment of the vision of Jef Raskin, who wanted to build a computer for the masses, but he and Jobs fought, and Jobs won out. "Steve started acting on what he thought we should do, Jef started brooding, and it instantly was clear what the outcome would be," Mac team member Joanna Hoffman told Isaacson.

Raskin left, and Apple II engineer Andy Hertzfeld, took his place. When he passed Jobs' scrutiny, but Hertzfelt said he needed to wrap up an Apple II project first, Jobs intervened forcefully, according to the book: "What's more important than working on the Macintosh? You're just wasting your time with that...Who cares about the Apple II? The Apple II will be dead in a few years. The Macintosh is the future of Apple, and you're going to start on it now!" And he unplugged Hertzfelt's Apple II, wiping out the code he had been working on.

One Mac programmer welcomed Hertzfeld by warning him about what he called Jobs' "reality distortion field.": "In his presence, reality is malleable. He can convince anyone of practically anything. It wears off when he's not around, but it makes it hard to have realistic schedules."

The term came to define Jobs.

Of it, Hertzfelt said: "The reality distortion field was a confounding melange of a charismatic rhetorical style, indomitable will, and eagerness to bend any fact to fit the purpose at hand...Amazingly, the reality distortion field seemed to be effective even if you were acutely aware of it. We would often discuss potential techniques for grounding it, but after a while most of us gave up, accepting it as a force of nature."

Aiding the field was Jobs' exquisite sensitivity to the emotions and beliefs of whoever he was talking to. "It's a common trait in people who are charismatic and know how to manipulate people. Knowing that he can crush you makes you feel weakened and eager for his approval, so then he can elevate you and put you on a pedestal and own you," Hoffman said.

One example of his motivational skills came with engineer Larry Kenyon, who was working on the Mac's operating system software. Jobs wanted the computer to boot faster. "If it could save a person's life, would you find a way to shave ten seconds off the boot time?" Isaacson said he asked Kenyon, who said probably could. Jobs then did the math: 5 million Mac users spending 10 extra seconds a day each to boot their Macs meant something like 3 million hours per year saved--more than 100 lifetimes. Kenyon peeled 28 seconds off the boot time.

During this period, Jobs cajoled the team with aphorisms: "Don't compromise." "The journey is the reward." "It's better to be a pirate than to join the navy." And famously brushing aside the idea of market research, "Customers don't know what they want until we've shown them." Replacing the first, after the Lisa arrived before the Mac: "Real artists ship."

When it did ship, though, the chief executive Jobs had recruited to run Apple, John Sculley from PepsiCo, raised the price from the planned $1,995 to $2,495. Jobs disagreed but went along with it. But he saw the decision as a fatal mistake: "It's the main reason the Macintosh sales slowed and Microsoft got to dominate the market," he said.

Update 1:45 a.m. PT October 24: Steve Jobs vs. Bill Gates

Isaacson spoke to both Jobs and, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, and got each to comment on his arch-rival. Each had sharp words, but only one of them was at all gracious.

Gates on Jobs: "He really never knew much about technology, but he had an amazing instinct for what works."

Jobs on Gates: "Bill is basically unimaginative and has never invented anything, which is why I think he's more comfortable now in philanthropy than technology...He just shamelessly ripped off other people's ideas."

Microsoft and Apple worked together several times, but rarely without friction. One example: when Gates was at Apple, privately showing Windows to Jobs, Gates recounted the meeting thus: "Steve didn't know what to say...He could either say, 'Oh, this is a violation of something,' but he didn't. He chose to say, 'Oh, it's actually really a piece of shit.'" He responded, "Yes, it's a nice little piece of shit," and though Windows 1.0 was a dud, Windows has long prevailed in the personal computer market.

The debate lives on. Jobs told Isaacson: "They just ripped us off completely, because Gates has no shame," to which Gates responded, "If he believes that, he really has entered into one of his own reality distortion fields."