Steve Jobs

For a while, Steve Jobs was living the life of a middle class person. However, when Apple took off, stock prices that he had invested rose, and he became rich. Not all things, however, were great for jobs around this time. Ironically, he got his girlfriend pregnant at the age of 23, the same year jobs's biological father got his girlfriend pregnant. Jobs, like his biological father, didn't want anything to do with the child. Despite Jobs's anger towards his biological parents for not wanting him, Jobs did the exact same thing to his child, Lisa, and to his girlfriend, Chrisann. Some people would call this "Job's reality distortion field", in which Jobs could "change" reality into whatever he wanted it to be. In this case, Jobs denied he was the father, even though DNA tests showed over a 94% possibility. Jobs's reality distortion field also applied at Apple, when he was being very strict/cruel with employees there. Although Jobs found it to be acceptable, the company did not. Jobs got his rank lowered, and he took it hard, possibly lowering the intensity of his reality distortion field. Despite the evident social problems with Jobs, he had a way of getting many people to come to Apple. He got engineers from HP and Xerox PARC, both very strong companies during the early days of Apple. He also was responsible for creating brilliant ideas for the computer's exterior design. Once Jobs knew what size he wanted, he didn't let anyone change it. In-fact, if an engineer told him it wasn't possible to fit the equipment in side such a small case, Jobs immediately fired him/her. Luckily for Jobs, there was someone who could get the job done.

Jobs's revolutionary phase began early. Jobs often used the words of Picasso to describe his feeling of taking someone else's idea and using it: "'Good artist copy, great artists steal." And that's exactly what jobs did. During his visit to Xerox PARK, the lead engineers showed Jobs, as well as Jobs's engineers and programmers, what they were working on. They called it, at Xerox PARK, a GUI, or a graphical user interface. Rather than typing in command, you could click on items with a mouse and then type in a command for that item (ex. move to parent directory). Jobs didn't like this, because he wanted to do everything with no command line tools at all. So, he did. He took the idea of a GUI and changed it so that you could drag folders, documents, open folders with a double click, etc. Already, this was a huge step in the ease of use for personal computers, and Jobs only continued to make it even better.

Walter Isaacson, the author of the biography Steve Jobs, does an excellent job showing the many different, and complex, social traits of Jobs. Walter Isaacson has seamlessly, and amazingly, incorporated Jobs's many odd social qualities with his work at Apple. Isaacson shows how this combination can both benefit Jobs (and the whole company), as well as hurt Jobs personally. I am still at-awe at how many details Jobs disclosed to Walter Isaacson, and how well Isaacson has taken these complex and contrasting ideas and formed a uniform, streamline book out of them. When Jobs was alive, he kept his life outside of Apple top-secret. Now, it seems, everything Jobs has done is available, oddly, to the public. I would definitely recommend this book, especially if you have an interest in computer science, or the history of Apple or Steve Jobs.