A testament of prophecy, true belief, go-getting and megabucks Stop. Before proceeding: a test. A kind of measured mile on the long
road to high-tech heaven. There are only a couple of questions.
Either: a> “What will a computer do for me?”; b> “Do I really need a
personal computer?”; or c>—the beginner’s question—”What are these
things anyway?” A bonus: there are no penalties for wrong answers. The weight of the
argument and the heat of the debate are what count now. And of all the
people who have floated these questions into the cultural
ozone—scientists and sociologists, computer freaks and microchip
madmen, quick-buck artists and free-falling futurists—none has kept
them aloft for so long, or turned them to such profitable purpose, as
Steven Paul Jobs. He is 27 years old. He lives in Los Gates, Calif., and works 20 minutes
away in Cupertino, a town of 34,000 that his company has so transformed
that some San Franciscans, about 35 miles to the north, have taken to
calling it Computertino. There is no doubt in any case that this is a
company town, although the company, Apple, did not exist seven years
ago. Now, Apple just closed its best year in business, racking up sales
of $583 million. The company stock has a market value of $1.7 billion.
Jobs, as founder of Apple, chairman of the board, media figurehead and
all-purpose dynamo, owns about 7 million shares of that stock. His
personal worth is on the balmy side of $210 million. But past the
money, and the hype, and the fairy-tale success, Jobs has been the
prime advanceman for the computer revolution. With his smooth sales
pitch and a blind faith that would have been the envy of the early
Christian martyrs, it is Steven Jobs, more than anyone, who kicked open
the door and let the personal computer move in. Jobs did not make the revolution alone. He did not
even make the machine that made the revolution, the Apple II, the
personal computer that along with its other skills seemed to mint
money. Stephen Wozniak, 32, Jobs’ friend and former colleague who looks
like a Steiff Teddy bear on a maintenance dose of marshmallows, created
the Apple II. He worked from some pre-existing technology, scaling it
down radically and making it affordable to consumers as well as
corporations. “Steve didn’t do one circuit, design or piece of code,”
says Wozniak, who was widely regarded as the true technological wizard
in Jobs’ corporate Oz. “He’s not really been into computers, and to
this day he has never gone through a computer manual. But it never
crossed my mind to sell computers. It was Steve who said, ‘Let’s hold
them up in the air and sell a few.’ “
