When Paul Jobs was mustered out of the Coast Guard after World War II, he made a wager with his crewmates. They had arrived in San Francisco, where their ship was decommissioned, and Paul bet that he would find himself a wife within two weeks. He was a taut, tattooed engine mechanic, six feet tall, with a passing resemblance to James Dean. But it wasn’t his looks that got him a date with Clara Hagopian, a sweet-humored daughter of Armenian immigrants. It was the fact that he and his friends had a car, unlike the group she had originally planned to go out with that evening. Ten days later, in March 1946, Paul got engaged to Clara and won his wager. It would turn out to be a happy marriage, one that lasted until death parted them more than forty years later. Paul Reinhold Jobs had been raised on a dairy farm in Germantown, Wisconsin. Even though his father was an alcoholic and sometimes abusive, Paul ended up with a gentle and calm disposition under his leathery exterior. After dropping out of high school, he wandered through the Midwest picking up work as a mechanic until, at age nineteen, he joined the Coast Guard, even though he didn’t know how to swim. He was deployed on the USS General M. C. Meigs and spent much of the war ferrying troops to Italy for General Patton. His talent as a machinist and fireman earned him commendations, but he occasionally found himself in minor trouble and never rose above the rank of seaman. Clara was born in New Jersey, where her parents had landed after fleeing the Turks in Armenia, and they moved to the Mission District of San Francisco when she was a child. She had a secret that she rarely mentioned to anyone: She had been married before, but her husband had been killed in the war. So when she met Paul Jobs on that first date, she was primed to start a new life. Like many who lived through the war, they had experienced enough excitement that, when it was over, they desired simply to settle down, raise a family, and lead a less eventful life. They had little money, so they moved to Wisconsin and lived with Paul’s parents for a few years, then headed for Indiana, where he got a job as a machinist for International Harvester. His passion was tinkering with old cars, and he made money in his spare time buying, restoring, and selling them. Eventually he quit his day job to become a full-time used car salesman. Clara, however, loved San Francisco, and in 1952 she convinced her husband to move back there. They got an apartment in the Sunset District facing the Pacific, just south of Golden Gate Park, and he took a job working for a finance company as a 「repo man,」 picking the locks of cars whose owners hadn’t paid their loans and repossessing them. He also bought, repaired, and sold some of the cars, making a decent enough living in the process. There was, however, something missing in their lives. They wanted children, but Clara had suffered an ectopic pregnancy, in which the fertilized egg was implanted in a fallopian tube rather than the uterus, and she had been unable to have any. So by 1955, after nine years of marriage, they were looking to adopt a child. Like Paul Jobs, Joanne Schieble was from a rural Wisconsin family of German heritage. Her father, Arthur Schieble, had immigrated to the outskirts of Green Bay, where he and his wife owned a mink farm and dabbled successfully in various other businesses, including real estate and photoengraving. He was very strict, especially regarding his daughter’s relationships, and he had strongly disapproved of her first love, an artist who was not a Catholic. Thus it was no surprise that he threatened to cut Joanne off completely when, as a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin, she fell in love with Abdulfattah 「John」 Jandali, a Muslim teaching assistant from Syria. Jandali was the youngest of nine children in a prominent Syrian family. His father owned oil refineries and multiple other businesses, with large holdings in Damascus and Homs, and at one point pretty much controlled the price of wheat in the region. His mother, he later said, was a 「traditional Muslim woman」 who was a 「conservative, obedient housewife.」 Like the Schieble family, the Jandalis put a premium on education. Abdulfattah was sent to a Jesuit boarding school, even though he was Muslim, and he got an undergraduate degree at the American University in Beirut before entering the University of Wisconsin to pursue a doctoral degree in political science. In the summer of 1954, Joanne went with Abdulfattah to Syria. They spent two months in Homs, where she learned from his family to cook Syrian dishes. When they returned to Wisconsin she discovered that she was pregnant. They were both twenty-three, but they decided not to get married. Her father was dying at the time, and he had threatened to disown her if she wed Abdulfattah. Nor was abortion an easy option in a small Catholic community. So in early 1955, Joanne traveled to San Francisco, where she was taken into the care of a kindly doctor who sheltered unwed mothers, delivered their babies, and quietly arranged closed adoptions. Joanne had one requirement: Her child must be adopted by college graduates. So the doctor arranged for the baby to be placed with a lawyer and his wife. But when a boy was born—on February 24, 1955—the designated couple decided that they wanted a girl and backed out. Thus it was that the boy became the son not of a lawyer but of a high school dropout with a passion for mechanics and his salt-of-the-earth wife who was working as a bookkeeper. Paul and Clara named their new baby Steven Paul Jobs. When Joanne found out that her baby had been placed with a couple who had not even graduated from high school, she refused to sign the adoption papers. The standoff lasted weeks, even after the baby had settled into the Jobs household. Eventually Joanne relented, with the stipulation that the couple promise—indeed sign a pledge—to fund a savings account to pay for the boy’s college education. There was another reason that Joanne was balky about signing the adoption papers. Her father was about to die, and she planned to marry Jandali soon after. She held out hope, she would later tell family members, sometimes tearing up at the memory, that once they were married, she could get their baby boy back. Arthur Schieble died in August 1955, after the adoption was finalized. Just after Christmas that year, Joanne and Abdulfattah were married in St. Philip the Apostle Catholic Church in Green Bay. He got his PhD in international politics the next year, and then they had another child, a girl named Mona. After she and Jandali divorced in 1962, Joanne embarked on a dreamy and peripatetic life that her daughter, who grew up to become the acclaimed novelist Mona Simpson, would capture in her book Anywhere but Here. Because Steve’s adoption had been closed, it would be twenty years before they would all find each other. Steve Jobs knew from an early age that he was adopted. 「My parents were very open with me about that,」 he recalled. He had a vivid memory of sitting on the lawn of his house, when he was six or seven years old, telling the girl who lived across the street. 「So does that mean your real parents didn’t want you?」 the girl asked. 「Lightning bolts went off in my head,」 according to Jobs. 「I remember running into the house, crying. And my parents said, 『No, you have to understand.』 They were very serious and looked me straight in the eye. They said, 『We specifically picked you out.』 Both of my parents said that and repeated it slowly for me. And they put an emphasis on every word in that sentence.」 Abandoned. Chosen. Special. Those concepts became part of who Jobs was and how he regarded himself. His closest friends think that the knowledge that he was given up at birth left some scars. 「I think his desire for complete control of whatever he makes derives directly from his personality and the fact that he was abandoned at birth,」 said one longtime colleague, Del Yocam. 「He wants to control his environment, and he sees the product as an extension of himself.」 Greg Calhoun, who became close to Jobs right after college, saw another effect. 「Steve talked to me a lot about being abandoned and the pain that caused,」 he said. 「It made him independent. He followed the beat of a different drummer, and that came from being in a different world than he was born into.」 Later in life, when he was the same age his biological father had been when he abandoned him, Jobs would father and abandon a child of his own. (He eventually took responsibility for her.) Chrisann Brennan, the mother of that child, said that being put up for adoption left Jobs 「full of broken glass,」 and it helps to explain some of his behavior. 「He who is abandoned is an abandoner,」 she said. Andy Hertzfeld, who worked with Jobs at Apple in the early 1980s, is among the few who remained close to both Brennan and Jobs. 「The key question about Steve is why he can’t control himself at times from being so reflexively cruel and harmful to some people,」 he said. 「That goes back to being abandoned at birth. The real underlying problem was the theme of abandonment in Steve’s life.」 Jobs dismissed this. 「There’s some notion that because I was abandoned, I worked very hard so I could do well and make my parents wish they had me back, or some such nonsense, but that’s ridiculous,」 he insisted. 「Knowing I was adopted may have made me feel more independent, but I have never felt abandoned. I』ve always felt special. My parents made me feel special.」 He would later bristle whenever anyone referred to Paul and Clara Jobs as his 「adoptive」 parents or implied that they were not his 「real」 parents. 「They were my parents 1,000%,」 he said. When speaking about his biological parents, on the other hand, he was curt: 「They were my sperm and egg bank. That’s not harsh, it’s just the way it was, a sperm bank thing, nothing more.」 Silicon Valley The childhood that Paul and Clara Jobs created for their new son was, in many ways, a stereotype of the late 1950s. When Steve was two they adopted a girl they named Patty, and three years later they moved to a tract house in the suburbs. The finance company where Paul worked as a repo man, CIT, had transferred him down to its Palo Alto office, but he could not afford to live there, so they landed in a subdivision in Mountain View, a less expensive town just to the south. There Paul tried to pass along his love of mechanics and cars. 「Steve, this is your workbench now,」 he said as he marked off a section of the table in their garage. Jobs remembered being impressed by his father’s focus on craftsmanship. 「I thought my dad’s sense of design was pretty good,」 he said, 「because he knew how to build anything. If we needed a cabinet, he would build it. When he built our fence, he gave me a hammer so I could work with him.」 Fifty years later the fence still surrounds the back and side yards of the house in Mountain View. As Jobs showed it off to me, he caressed the stockade panels and recalled a lesson that his father implanted deeply in him. It was important, his father said, to craft the backs of cabinets and fences properly, even though they were hidden. 「He loved doing things right. He even cared about the look of the parts you couldn’t see.」 His father continued to refurbish and resell used cars, and he festooned the garage with pictures of his favorites. He would point out the detailing of the design to his son: the lines, the vents, the chrome, the trim of the seats. After work each day, he would change into his dungarees and retreat to the garage, often with Steve tagging along. 「I figured I could get him nailed down with a little mechanical ability, but he really wasn’t interested in getting his hands dirty,」 Paul later recalled. 「He never really cared too much about mechanical things.」 「I wasn’t that into fixing cars,」 Jobs admitted. 「But I was eager to hang out with my dad.」 Even as he was growing more aware that he had been adopted, he was becoming more attached to his father. One day when he was about eight, he discovered a photograph of his father from his time in the Coast Guard. 「He’s in the engine room, and he’s got his shirt off and looks like James Dean. It was one of those Oh wow moments for a kid. Wow, oooh, my parents were actually once very young and really good-looking.」 Through cars, his father gave Steve his first exposure to electronics. 「My dad did not have a deep understanding of electronics, but he』d encountered it a lot in automobiles and other things he would fix. He showed me the rudiments of electronics, and I got very interested in that.」 Even more interesting were the trips to scavenge for parts. 「Every weekend, there』d be a junkyard trip. We』d be looking for a generator, a carburetor, all sorts of components.」 He remembered watching his father negotiate at the counter. 「He was a good bargainer, because he knew better than the guys at the counter what the parts should cost.」 This helped fulfill the pledge his parents made when he was adopted. 「My college fund came from my dad paying $50 for a Ford Falcon or some other beat-up car that didn’t run, working on it for a few weeks, and selling it for $250—and not telling the IRS.」 The Jobses』 house and the others in their neighborhood were built by the real estate developer Joseph Eichler, whose company spawned more than eleven thousand homes in various California subdivisions between 1950 and 1974. Inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright’s vision of simple modern homes for the American 「everyman,」 Eichler built inexpensive houses that featured floor-to-ceiling glass walls, open floor plans, exposed post-and-beam construction, concrete slab floors, and lots of sliding glass doors. 「Eichler did a great thing,」 Jobs said on one of our walks around the neighborhood. 「His houses were smart and cheap and good. They brought clean design and simple taste to lower-income people. They had awesome little features, like radiant heating in the floors. You put carpet on them, and we had nice toasty floors when we were kids.」 Jobs said that his appreciation for Eichler homes instilled in him a passion for making nicely designed products for the mass market. 「I love it when you can bring really great design and simple capability to something that doesn’t cost much,」 he said as he pointed out the clean elegance of the houses. 「It was the original vision for Apple. That’s what we tried to do with the first Mac. That’s what we did with the iPod.」 Across the street from the Jobs family lived a man who had become successful as a real estate agent. 「He wasn’t that bright,」 Jobs recalled, 「but he seemed to be making a fortune. So my dad thought, 『I can do that.』 He worked so hard, I remember. He took these night classes, passed the license test, and got into real estate. Then the bottom fell out of the market.」 As a result, the family found itself financially strapped for a year or so while Steve was in elementary school. His mother took a job as a bookkeeper for Varian Associates, a company that made scientific instruments, and they took out a second mortgage. One day his fourth-grade teacher asked him, 「What is it you don’t understand about the universe?」 Jobs replied, 「I don’t understand why all of a sudden my dad is so broke.」 He was proud that his father never adopted a servile attitude or slick style that may have made him a better salesman. 「You had to suck up to people to sell real estate, and he wasn’t good at that and it wasn’t in his nature. I admired him for that.」 Paul Jobs went back to being a mechanic. His father was calm and gentle, traits that his son later praised more than emulated. He was also resolute. Jobs described one example: Nearby was an engineer who was working at Westinghouse. He was a single guy, beatnik type. He had a girlfriend. She would babysit me sometimes. Both my parents worked, so I would come here right after school for a couple of hours. He would get drunk and hit her a couple of times. She came over one night, scared out of her wits, and he came over drunk, and my dad stood him down—saying 「She’s here, but you’re not coming in.」 He stood right there. We like to think everything was idyllic in the 1950s, but this guy was one of those engineers who had messed-up lives. What made the neighborhood different from the thousands of other spindly-tree subdivisions across America was that even the ne』er-do-wells tended to be engineers. 「When we moved here, there were apricot and plum orchards on all of these corners,」 Jobs recalled. 「But it was beginning to boom because of military investment.」 He soaked up the history of the valley and developed a yearning to play his own role. Edwin Land of Polaroid later told him about being asked by Eisenhower to help build the U-2 spy plane cameras to see how real the Soviet threat was. The film was dropped in canisters and returned to the NASA Ames Research Center in Sunnyvale, not far from where Jobs lived. 「The first computer terminal I ever saw was when my dad brought me to the Ames Center,」 he said. 「I fell totally in love with it.」 Other defense contractors sprouted nearby during the 1950s. The Lockheed Missiles and Space Division, which built submarine-launched ballistic missiles, was founded in 1956 next to the NASA Center; by the time Jobs moved to the area four years later, it employed twenty thousand people. A few hundred yards away, Westinghouse built facilities that produced tubes and electrical transformers for the missile systems. 「You had all these military companies on the cutting edge,」 he recalled. 「It was mysterious and high-tech and made living here very exciting.」 In the wake of the defense industries there arose a booming economy based on technology. Its roots stretched back to 1938, when David Packard and his new wife moved into a house in Palo Alto that had a shed where his friend Bill Hewlett was soon ensconced. The house had a garage—an appendage that would prove both useful and iconic in the valley—in which they tinkered around until they had their first product, an audio oscillator. By the 1950s, Hewlett-Packard was a fast-growing company making technical instruments. Fortunately there was a place nearby for entrepreneurs who had outgrown their garages. In a move that would help transform the area into the cradle of the tech revolution, Stanford University’s dean of engineering, Frederick Terman, created a seven-hundred-acre industrial park on university land for private companies that could commercialize the ideas of his students. Its first tenant was Varian Associates, where Clara Jobs worked. 「Terman came up with this great idea that did more than anything to cause the tech industry to grow up here,」 Jobs said. By the time Jobs was ten, HP had nine thousand employees and was the blue-chip company where every engineer seeking financial stability wanted to work. The most important technology for the region’s growth was, of course, the semiconductor. William Shockley, who had been one of the inventors of the transistor at Bell Labs in New Jersey, moved out to Mountain View and, in 1956, started a company to build transistors using silicon rather than the more expensive germanium that was then commonly used. But Shockley became increasingly erratic and abandoned his silicon transistor project, which led eight of his engineers—most notably Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore—to break away to form Fairchild Semiconductor. That company grew to twelve thousand employees, but it fragmented in 1968, when Noyce lost a power struggle to become CEO. He took Gordon Moore and founded a company that they called Integrated Electronics Corporation, which they soon smartly abbreviated to Intel. Their third employee was Andrew Grove, who later would grow the company by shifting its focus from memory chips to microprocessors. Within a few years there would be more than fifty companies in the area making semiconductors. The exponential growth of this industry was correlated with the phenomenon famously discovered by Moore, who in 1965 drew a graph of the speed of integrated circuits, based on the number of transistors that could be placed on a chip, and showed that it doubled about every two years, a trajectory that could be expected to continue. This was reaffirmed in 1971, when Intel was able to etch a complete central processing unit onto one chip, the Intel 4004, which was dubbed a 「microprocessor.」 Moore’s Law has held generally true to this day, and its reliable projection of performance to price allowed two generations of young entrepreneurs, including Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, to create cost projections for their forward-leaning products. The chip industry gave the region a new name when Don Hoefler, a columnist for the weekly trade paper Electronic News, began a series in January 1971 entitled 「Silicon Valley USA.」 The forty-mile Santa Clara Valley, which stretches from South San Francisco through Palo Alto to San Jose, has as its commercial backbone El Camino Real, the royal road that once connected California’s twenty-one mission churches and is now a bustling avenue that connects companies and startups accounting for a third of the venture capital investment in the United States each year. 「Growing up, I got inspired by the history of the place,」 Jobs said. 「That made me want to be a part of it.」 Like most kids, he became infused with the passions of the grown-ups around him. 「Most of the dads in the neighborhood did really neat stuff, like photovoltaics and batteries and radar,」 Jobs recalled. 「I grew up in awe of that stuff and asking people about it.」 The most important of these neighbors, Larry Lang, lived seven doors away. 「He was my model of what an HP engineer was supposed to be: a big ham radio operator, hard-core electronics guy,」 Jobs recalled. 「He would bring me stuff to play with.」 As we walked up to Lang’s old house, Jobs pointed to the driveway. 「He took a carbon microphone and a battery and a speaker, and he put it on this driveway. He had me talk into the carbon mike and it amplified out of the speaker.」 Jobs had been taught by his father that microphones always required an electronic amplifier. 「So I raced home, and I told my dad that he was wrong.」 「No, it needs an amplifier,」 his father assured him. When Steve protested otherwise, his father said he was crazy. 「It can’t work without an amplifier. There’s some trick.」 「I kept saying no to my dad, telling him he had to see it, and finally he actually walked down with me and saw it. And he said, 『Well I』ll be a bat out of hell.』」 Jobs recalled the incident vividly because it was his first realization that his father did not know everything. Then a more disconcerting discovery began to dawn on him: He was smarter than his parents. He had always admired his father’s competence and savvy. 「He was not an educated man, but I had always thought he was pretty damn smart. He didn’t read much, but he could do a lot. Almost everything mechanical, he could figure it out.」 Yet the carbon microphone incident, Jobs said, began a jarring process of realizing that he was in fact more clever and quick than his parents. 「It was a very big moment that’s burned into my mind. When I realized that I was smarter than my parents, I felt tremendous shame for having thought that. I will never forget that moment.」 This discovery, he later told friends, along with the fact that he was adopted, made him feel apart—detached and separate—from both his family and the world. Another layer of awareness occurred soon after. Not only did he discover that he was brighter than his parents, but he discovered that they knew this. Paul and Clara Jobs were loving parents, and they were willing to adapt their lives to suit a son who was very smart—and also willful. They would go to great lengths to accommodate him. And soon Steve discovered this fact as well. 「Both my parents got me. They felt a lot of responsibility once they sensed that I was special. They found ways to keep feeding me stuff and putting me in better schools. They were willing to defer to my needs.」 So he grew up not only with a sense of having once been abandoned, but also with a sense that he was special. In his own mind, that was more important in the formation of his personality. School Even before Jobs started elementary school, his mother had taught him how to read. This, however, led to some problems once he got to school. 「I was kind of bored for the first few years
When Paul Jobs was mustered out of the Coast Guard after World War II, he made a wager with his crewmates. They had arrived in San Francisco, where their ship was decommissioned, and Paul bet that he would find himself a wife within two weeks. He was a taut, tattooed engine mechanic, six feet tall, with a passing resemblance to James Dean. But it wasn’t his looks that got him a date with Clara Hagopian, a sweet-humored daughter of Armenian immigrants. It was the fact that he and his friends had a car, unlike the group she had originally planned to go out with that evening. Ten days later, in March 1946, Paul got engaged to Clara and won his wager. It would turn out to be a happy marriage, one that lasted until death parted them more than forty years later. Paul Reinhold Jobs had been raised on a dairy farm in Germantown, Wisconsin. Even though his father was an alcoholic and sometimes abusive, Paul ended up with a gentle and calm disposition under his leathery exterior. After dropping out of high school, he wandered through the Midwest picking up work as a mechanic until, at age nineteen, he joined the Coast Guard, even though he didn’t know how to swim. He was deployed on the USS General M. C. Meigs and spent much of the war ferrying troops to Italy for General Patton. His talent as a machinist and fireman earned him commendations, but he occasionally found himself in minor trouble and never rose above the rank of seaman. Clara was born in New Jersey, where her parents had landed after fleeing the Turks in Armenia, and they moved to the Mission District of San Francisco when she was a child. She had a secret that she rarely mentioned to anyone: She had been married before, but her husband had been killed in the war. So when she met Paul Jobs on that first date, she was primed to start a new life. Like many who lived through the war, they had experienced enough excitement that, when it was over, they desired simply to settle down, raise a family, and lead a less eventful life. They had little money, so they moved to Wisconsin and lived with Paul’s parents for a few years, then headed for Indiana, where he got a job as a machinist for International Harvester. His passion was tinkering with old cars, and he made money in his spare time buying, restoring, and selling them. Eventually he quit his day job to become a full-time used car salesman. Clara, however, loved San Francisco, and in 1952 she convinced her husband to move back there. They got an apartment in the Sunset District facing the Pacific, just south of Golden Gate Park, and he took a job working for a finance company as a 「repo man,」 picking the locks of cars whose owners hadn’t paid their loans and repossessing them. He also bought, repaired, and sold some of the cars, making a decent enough living in the process. There was, however, something missing in their lives. They wanted children, but Clara had suffered an ectopic pregnancy, in which the fertilized egg was implanted in a fallopian tube rather than the uterus, and she had been unable to have any. So by 1955, after nine years of marriage, they were looking to adopt a child. Like Paul Jobs, Joanne Schieble was from a rural Wisconsin family of German heritage. Her father, Arthur Schieble, had immigrated to the outskirts of Green Bay, where he and his wife owned a mink farm and dabbled successfully in various other businesses, including real estate and photoengraving. He was very strict, especially regarding his daughter’s relationships, and he had strongly disapproved of her first love, an artist who was not a Catholic. Thus it was no surprise that he threatened to cut Joanne off completely when, as a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin, she fell in love with Abdulfattah 「John」 Jandali, a Muslim teaching assistant from Syria. Jandali was the youngest of nine children in a prominent Syrian family. His father owned oil refineries and multiple other businesses, with large holdings in Damascus and Homs, and at one point pretty much controlled the price of wheat in the region. His mother, he later said, was a 「traditional Muslim woman」 who was a 「conservative, obedient housewife.」 Like the Schieble family, the Jandalis put a premium on education. Abdulfattah was sent to a Jesuit boarding school, even though he was Muslim, and he got an undergraduate degree at the American University in Beirut before entering the University of Wisconsin to pursue a doctoral degree in political science. In the summer of 1954, Joanne went with Abdulfattah to Syria. They spent two months in Homs, where she learned from his family to cook Syrian dishes. When they returned to Wisconsin she discovered that she was pregnant. They were both twenty-three, but they decided not to get married. Her father was dying at the time, and he had threatened to disown her if she wed Abdulfattah. Nor was abortion an easy option in a small Catholic community. So in early 1955, Joanne traveled to San Francisco, where she was taken into the care of a kindly doctor who sheltered unwed mothers, delivered their babies, and quietly arranged closed adoptions. Joanne had one requirement: Her child must be adopted by college graduates. So the doctor arranged for the baby to be placed with a lawyer and his wife. But when a boy was born—on February 24, 1955—the designated couple decided that they wanted a girl and backed out. Thus it was that the boy became the son not of a lawyer but of a high school dropout with a passion for mechanics and his salt-of-the-earth wife who was working as a bookkeeper. Paul and Clara named their new baby Steven Paul Jobs. When Joanne found out that her baby had been placed with a couple who had not even graduated from high school, she refused to sign the adoption papers. The standoff lasted weeks, even after the baby had settled into the Jobs household. Eventually Joanne relented, with the stipulation that the couple promise—indeed sign a pledge—to fund a savings account to pay for the boy’s college education. There was another reason that Joanne was balky about signing the adoption papers. Her father was about to die, and she planned to marry Jandali soon after. She held out hope, she would later tell family members, sometimes tearing up at the memory, that once they were married, she could get their baby boy back. Arthur Schieble died in August 1955, after the adoption was finalized. Just after Christmas that year, Joanne and Abdulfattah were married in St. Philip the Apostle Catholic Church in Green Bay. He got his PhD in international politics the next year, and then they had another child, a girl named Mona. After she and Jandali divorced in 1962, Joanne embarked on a dreamy and peripatetic life that her daughter, who grew up to become the acclaimed novelist Mona Simpson, would capture in her book Anywhere but Here. Because Steve’s adoption had been closed, it would be twenty years before they would all find each other. Steve Jobs knew from an early age that he was adopted. 「My parents were very open with me about that,」 he recalled. He had a vivid memory of sitting on the lawn of his house, when he was six or seven years old, telling the girl who lived across the street. 「So does that mean your real parents didn’t want you?」 the girl asked. 「Lightning bolts went off in my head,」 according to Jobs. 「I remember running into the house, crying. And my parents said, 『No, you have to understand.』 They were very serious and looked me straight in the eye. They said, 『We specifically picked you out.』 Both of my parents said that and repeated it slowly for me. And they put an emphasis on every word in that sentence.」 Abandoned. Chosen. Special. Those concepts became part of who Jobs was and how he regarded himself. His closest friends think that the knowledge that he was given up at birth left some scars. 「I think his desire for complete control of whatever he makes derives directly from his personality and the fact that he was abandoned at birth,」 said one longtime colleague, Del Yocam. 「He wants to control his environment, and he sees the product as an extension of himself.」 Greg Calhoun, who became close to Jobs right after college, saw another effect. 「Steve talked to me a lot about being abandoned and the pain that caused,」 he said. 「It made him independent. He followed the beat of a different drummer, and that came from being in a different world than he was born into.」 Later in life, when he was the same age his biological father had been when he abandoned him, Jobs would father and abandon a child of his own. (He eventually took responsibility for her.) Chrisann Brennan, the mother of that child, said that being put up for adoption left Jobs 「full of broken glass,」 and it helps to explain some of his behavior. 「He who is abandoned is an abandoner,」 she said. Andy Hertzfeld, who worked with Jobs at Apple in the early 1980s, is among the few who remained close to both Brennan and Jobs. 「The key question about Steve is why he can’t control himself at times from being so reflexively cruel and harmful to some people,」 he said. 「That goes back to being abandoned at birth. The real underlying problem was the theme of abandonment in Steve’s life.」 Jobs dismissed this. 「There’s some notion that because I was abandoned, I worked very hard so I could do well and make my parents wish they had me back, or some such nonsense, but that’s ridiculous,」 he insisted. 「Knowing I was adopted may have made me feel more independent, but I have never felt abandoned. I』ve always felt special. My parents made me feel special.」 He would later bristle whenever anyone referred to Paul and Clara Jobs as his 「adoptive」 parents or implied that they were not his 「real」 parents. 「They were my parents 1,000%,」 he said. When speaking about his biological parents, on the other hand, he was curt: 「They were my sperm and egg bank. That’s not harsh, it’s just the way it was, a sperm bank thing, nothing more.」 Silicon Valley The childhood that Paul and Clara Jobs created for their new son was, in many ways, a stereotype of the late 1950s. When Steve was two they adopted a girl they named Patty, and three years later they moved to a tract house in the suburbs. The finance company where Paul worked as a repo man, CIT, had transferred him down to its Palo Alto office, but he could not afford to live there, so they landed in a subdivision in Mountain View, a less expensive town just to the south. There Paul tried to pass along his love of mechanics and cars. 「Steve, this is your workbench now,」 he said as he marked off a section of the table in their garage. Jobs remembered being impressed by his father’s focus on craftsmanship. 「I thought my dad’s sense of design was pretty good,」 he said, 「because he knew how to build anything. If we needed a cabinet, he would build it. When he built our fence, he gave me a hammer so I could work with him.」 Fifty years later the fence still surrounds the back and side yards of the house in Mountain View. As Jobs showed it off to me, he caressed the stockade panels and recalled a lesson that his father implanted deeply in him. It was important, his father said, to craft the backs of cabinets and fences properly, even though they were hidden. 「He loved doing things right. He even cared about the look of the parts you couldn’t see.」 His father continued to refurbish and resell used cars, and he festooned the garage with pictures of his favorites. He would point out the detailing of the design to his son: the lines, the vents, the chrome, the trim of the seats. After work each day, he would change into his dungarees and retreat to the garage, often with Steve tagging along. 「I figured I could get him nailed down with a little mechanical ability, but he really wasn’t interested in getting his hands dirty,」 Paul later recalled. 「He never really cared too much about mechanical things.」 「I wasn’t that into fixing cars,」 Jobs admitted. 「But I was eager to hang out with my dad.」 Even as he was growing more aware that he had been adopted, he was becoming more attached to his father. One day when he was about eight, he discovered a photograph of his father from his time in the Coast Guard. 「He’s in the engine room, and he’s got his shirt off and looks like James Dean. It was one of those Oh wow moments for a kid. Wow, oooh, my parents were actually once very young and really good-looking.」 Through cars, his father gave Steve his first exposure to electronics. 「My dad did not have a deep understanding of electronics, but he』d encountered it a lot in automobiles and other things he would fix. He showed me the rudiments of electronics, and I got very interested in that.」 Even more interesting were the trips to scavenge for parts. 「Every weekend, there』d be a junkyard trip. We』d be looking for a generator, a carburetor, all sorts of components.」 He remembered watching his father negotiate at the counter. 「He was a good bargainer, because he knew better than the guys at the counter what the parts should cost.」 This helped fulfill the pledge his parents made when he was adopted. 「My college fund came from my dad paying $50 for a Ford Falcon or some other beat-up car that didn’t run, working on it for a few weeks, and selling it for $250—and not telling the IRS.」 The Jobses』 house and the others in their neighborhood were built by the real estate developer Joseph Eichler, whose company spawned more than eleven thousand homes in various California subdivisions between 1950 and 1974. Inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright’s vision of simple modern homes for the American 「everyman,」 Eichler built inexpensive houses that featured floor-to-ceiling glass walls, open floor plans, exposed post-and-beam construction, concrete slab floors, and lots of sliding glass doors. 「Eichler did a great thing,」 Jobs said on one of our walks around the neighborhood. 「His houses were smart and cheap and good. They brought clean design and simple taste to lower-income people. They had awesome little features, like radiant heating in the floors. You put carpet on them, and we had nice toasty floors when we were kids.」 Jobs said that his appreciation for Eichler homes instilled in him a passion for making nicely designed products for the mass market. 「I love it when you can bring really great design and simple capability to something that doesn’t cost much,」 he said as he pointed out the clean elegance of the houses. 「It was the original vision for Apple. That’s what we tried to do with the first Mac. That’s what we did with the iPod.」 Across the street from the Jobs family lived a man who had become successful as a real estate agent. 「He wasn’t that bright,」 Jobs recalled, 「but he seemed to be making a fortune. So my dad thought, 『I can do that.』 He worked so hard, I remember. He took these night classes, passed the license test, and got into real estate. Then the bottom fell out of the market.」 As a result, the family found itself financially strapped for a year or so while Steve was in elementary school. His mother took a job as a bookkeeper for Varian Associates, a company that made scientific instruments, and they took out a second mortgage. One day his fourth-grade teacher asked him, 「What is it you don’t understand about the universe?」 Jobs replied, 「I don’t understand why all of a sudden my dad is so broke.」 He was proud that his father never adopted a servile attitude or slick style that may have made him a better salesman. 「You had to suck up to people to sell real estate, and he wasn’t good at that and it wasn’t in his nature. I admired him for that.」 Paul Jobs went back to being a mechanic. His father was calm and gentle, traits that his son later praised more than emulated. He was also resolute. Jobs described one example: Nearby was an engineer who was working at Westinghouse. He was a single guy, beatnik type. He had a girlfriend. She would babysit me sometimes. Both my parents worked, so I would come here right after school for a couple of hours. He would get drunk and hit her a couple of times. She came over one night, scared out of her wits, and he came over drunk, and my dad stood him down—saying 「She’s here, but you’re not coming in.」 He stood right there. We like to think everything was idyllic in the 1950s, but this guy was one of those engineers who had messed-up lives. What made the neighborhood different from the thousands of other spindly-tree subdivisions across America was that even the ne』er-do-wells tended to be engineers. 「When we moved here, there were apricot and plum orchards on all of these corners,」 Jobs recalled. 「But it was beginning to boom because of military investment.」 He soaked up the history of the valley and developed a yearning to play his own role. Edwin Land of Polaroid later told him about being asked by Eisenhower to help build the U-2 spy plane cameras to see how real the Soviet threat was. The film was dropped in canisters and returned to the NASA Ames Research Center in Sunnyvale, not far from where Jobs lived. 「The first computer terminal I ever saw was when my dad brought me to the Ames Center,」 he said. 「I fell totally in love with it.」 Other defense contractors sprouted nearby during the 1950s. The Lockheed Missiles and Space Division, which built submarine-launched ballistic missiles, was founded in 1956 next to the NASA Center; by the time Jobs moved to the area four years later, it employed twenty thousand people. A few hundred yards away, Westinghouse built facilities that produced tubes and electrical transformers for the missile systems. 「You had all these military companies on the cutting edge,」 he recalled. 「It was mysterious and high-tech and made living here very exciting.」 In the wake of the defense industries there arose a booming economy based on technology. Its roots stretched back to 1938, when David Packard and his new wife moved into a house in Palo Alto that had a shed where his friend Bill Hewlett was soon ensconced. The house had a garage—an appendage that would prove both useful and iconic in the valley—in which they tinkered around until they had their first product, an audio oscillator. By the 1950s, Hewlett-Packard was a fast-growing company making technical instruments. Fortunately there was a place nearby for entrepreneurs who had outgrown their garages. In a move that would help transform the area into the cradle of the tech revolution, Stanford University’s dean of engineering, Frederick Terman, created a seven-hundred-acre industrial park on university land for private companies that could commercialize the ideas of his students. Its first tenant was Varian Associates, where Clara Jobs worked. 「Terman came up with this great idea that did more than anything to cause the tech industry to grow up here,」 Jobs said. By the time Jobs was ten, HP had nine thousand employees and was the blue-chip company where every engineer seeking financial stability wanted to work. The most important technology for the region’s growth was, of course, the semiconductor. William Shockley, who had been one of the inventors of the transistor at Bell Labs in New Jersey, moved out to Mountain View and, in 1956, started a company to build transistors using silicon rather than the more expensive germanium that was then commonly used. But Shockley became increasingly erratic and abandoned his silicon transistor project, which led eight of his engineers—most notably Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore—to break away to form Fairchild Semiconductor. That company grew to twelve thousand employees, but it fragmented in 1968, when Noyce lost a power struggle to become CEO. He took Gordon Moore and founded a company that they called Integrated Electronics Corporation, which they soon smartly abbreviated to Intel. Their third employee was Andrew Grove, who later would grow the company by shifting its focus from memory chips to microprocessors. Within a few years there would be more than fifty companies in the area making semiconductors. The exponential growth of this industry was correlated with the phenomenon famously discovered by Moore, who in 1965 drew a graph of the speed of integrated circuits, based on the number of transistors that could be placed on a chip, and showed that it doubled about every two years, a trajectory that could be expected to continue. This was reaffirmed in 1971, when Intel was able to etch a complete central processing unit onto one chip, the Intel 4004, which was dubbed a 「microprocessor.」 Moore’s Law has held generally true to this day, and its reliable projection of performance to price allowed two generations of young entrepreneurs, including Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, to create cost projections for their forward-leaning products. The chip industry gave the region a new name when Don Hoefler, a columnist for the weekly trade paper Electronic News, began a series in January 1971 entitled 「Silicon Valley USA.」 The forty-mile Santa Clara Valley, which stretches from South San Francisco through Palo Alto to San Jose, has as its commercial backbone El Camino Real, the royal road that once connected California’s twenty-one mission churches and is now a bustling avenue that connects companies and startups accounting for a third of the venture capital investment in the United States each year. 「Growing up, I got inspired by the history of the place,」 Jobs said. 「That made me want to be a part of it.」 Like most kids, he became infused with the passions of the grown-ups around him. 「Most of the dads in the neighborhood did really neat stuff, like photovoltaics and batteries and radar,」 Jobs recalled. 「I grew up in awe of that stuff and asking people about it.」 The most important of these neighbors, Larry Lang, lived seven doors away. 「He was my model of what an HP engineer was supposed to be: a big ham radio operator, hard-core electronics guy,」 Jobs recalled. 「He would bring me stuff to play with.」 As we walked up to Lang’s old house, Jobs pointed to the driveway. 「He took a carbon microphone and a battery and a speaker, and he put it on this driveway. He had me talk into the carbon mike and it amplified out of the speaker.」 Jobs had been taught by his father that microphones always required an electronic amplifier. 「So I raced home, and I told my dad that he was wrong.」 「No, it needs an amplifier,」 his father assured him. When Steve protested otherwise, his father said he was crazy. 「It can’t work without an amplifier. There’s some trick.」 「I kept saying no to my dad, telling him he had to see it, and finally he actually walked down with me and saw it. And he said, 『Well I』ll be a bat out of hell.』」 Jobs recalled the incident vividly because it was his first realization that his father did not know everything. Then a more disconcerting discovery began to dawn on him: He was smarter than his parents. He had always admired his father’s competence and savvy. 「He was not an educated man, but I had always thought he was pretty damn smart. He didn’t read much, but he could do a lot. Almost everything mechanical, he could figure it out.」 Yet the carbon microphone incident, Jobs said, began a jarring process of realizing that he was in fact more clever and quick than his parents. 「It was a very big moment that’s burned into my mind. When I realized that I was smarter than my parents, I felt tremendous shame for having thought that. I will never forget that moment.」 This discovery, he later told friends, along with the fact that he was adopted, made him feel apart—detached and separate—from both his family and the world. Another layer of awareness occurred soon after. Not only did he discover that he was brighter than his parents, but he discovered that they knew this. Paul and Clara Jobs were loving parents, and they were willing to adapt their lives to suit a son who was very smart—and also willful. They would go to great lengths to accommodate him. And soon Steve discovered this fact as well. 「Both my parents got me. They felt a lot of responsibility once they sensed that I was special. They found ways to keep feeding me stuff and putting me in better schools. They were willing to defer to my needs.」 So he grew up not only with a sense of having once been abandoned, but also with a sense that he was special. In his own mind, that was more important in the formation of his personality. School Even before Jobs started elementary school, his mother had taught him how to read. This, however, led to some problems once he got to school. 「I was kind of bored for the first few years
一
一波未平，一波又起！
剛剛，臺灣傳來噩耗！
1、臺積電正式對外宣布：未計劃在9月14日之後給華為繼續供貨，將由其他客戶填補空缺。
簡單來講，臺積電的意思就是：2個月後徹底斷供華為！
臺積電是誰？
全球最大晶圓代工企業！2020年二季度全球前十大晶圓代工廠營收排名中，臺積電位列第一，市佔率達51.5%！華為最牛逼的手機晶片海思麒麟系列，就是請的臺積電生產！！
一旦兩個月後臺積電真正開始斷供華為，那華為的智慧型手機將陷入：空有領先世界的技術，卻無人無工廠能生產出來的真正「 絕境 」！！
4天前（7月13日），臺媒鉅亨網還曾報導，臺積電已向美國政府遞交意見書，希望能在華為禁令120天寬限期滿之後，可繼續為華為供貨。
然而，今天斷供這條消息的宣布，毫無疑問的代表著。臺積電向美國遞交的意見書，已經徹底被美國否決了！
可能普通人不在科技圈，根本不知道這件事的影響有多麼巨大。簡單說幾點：
1、臺積電只不過是「 背鍋俠 」
做生意的人，誰想失去華為這樣的大客戶？！沒有人想！然而今年5月15日，美國商務部發出禁令，全面限制華為，購買採用美國軟體和技術生產的半導體，而該禁令將於9月15日正式生效。
千不該萬不該，現在臺積電代工的晶片，其中使用的一項技術涉及到了EDA軟體和技術設計出來的，並且還使用了美國的ARM架構。
這些領域美國擁有最多的專利，美國不批准，臺積電只能斷供華為，放棄這個頂級大客戶。
2、如果說，逼迫臺積電斷供華為，美國是從產業鏈的角度，對華為動手；那麼，前幾天遊說英國停止在5G建設中使用華為設備，則是從市場角度上，對華為釜底抽薪！
三天前！7月14日，英國文化大臣奧利弗·道登宣布，英國政府將從2020年12月31日起停止購買新的華為設備，英國5G網絡中目前所使用的華為設備須在2027年前拆除。
明眼人都知道，英國禁用華為，背後其實是美國在作祟，川普自己耶承認，自己曾以與美國的商業往來為藉口威脅，「親口說服」很多國家禁用華為。
短短三天的時間，兩個超級大新聞全都是瞄準華為；一個斷你的供應鏈，一個直接斷你的市場，一頭一尾，兩頭夾擊。
川普這次真的就是狗急跳牆了！
太悲壯了！華為，最危險的時候真正來臨了。。。
二
美國為何要對華為持續不斷下狠手？
1、以美國為首的五眼聯盟，通過行動網路設備，監聽獲取各國情報！
之前的1G/2G/3G/4G 時代，美國是最大的贏家，全球都在用他們設置的網絡。但是5G華為的半路出現，比他們更早的研發出來新一代通信網絡技術；
這就是美國的最大攔路石，讓其必欲除之而後快！
臭名昭著的「五眼聯盟「，有多可怕？
這個二戰後由美國、英國、澳大利亞、加拿大和紐西蘭組成的組織，是一個世界上最完整、最全面的情報網，專門幹著監聽世界各個國家、組織的勾當。
參與「五眼聯盟」的這五個國家，他們有個共同點，都是英國人的嫡系，都是盎格魯薩克遜國家，文化種族高度一致。
換句話說，英美本來就是一家，因為他們不盡有共同的語言，而且還有共同的血脈。
七十多年來，五個英語國家一直進行秘密或者公開的在全球範圍內進行監聽，並且建立了相應的設施，這個聯盟至今仍然是最複雜和歷史最悠久的情報組織。
2013年，供職於CIA的斯諾登良心發現，把美國監控自己百姓、監控全世界的稜鏡門計劃給曝光了，同時他還揭露了五眼聯盟的分工。
這一下，全世界才知道，原來美國情報部門，一直在通過行動網路設備，監聽全球手機，竊取全球機密。
美國的監聽活動，連盟友都不會放過，而且實力越強，越要嚴加監視，連默克爾大媽的手機，都被美國人監聽了，可以說，在美國人面前，毫無隱私可言，如同一個透明人一樣。
但是，隨著華為發展起來，五眼聯盟的麻煩來了。
畢竟，搞竊聽的以美國為首的五眼聯盟，依靠的，就是裝著通訊後門的思科等美國企業。
現在，華為主推的短碼PolarCode通信技術，成為了全球5G短碼的最終結果方案！以絕對的實力碾壓了美國的長碼制定技術！
全球5G一旦普及；就等於全世界廣泛在使用華為的5G設備，這就等於斷了美國竊聽，監聽的門路。
這就是華為成為五眼聯盟的眼中釘，必欲除之而後快的最大、最直接原因！！
所以我們看到，加拿大按照美國的意圖拘捕了孟晚舟，澳大利亞鼓吹對中國調查和索賠，現在英國又出手了，全面停購華為產品，這些行為，其實都是充當美國的馬前卒！
不是因為華為不安全，而是華為太安全；
讓美國無利可圖、所以美國才如此著急！！
三
2、華為是中國科研力量的一個大碉堡：華為的科技實力實在太強，如果不趕緊封殺，以後難度將越來越大。
華為對技術的韌勁，全世界都難以企及，這點，從華為研發投入就可略見一斑。
2018年，中國研發經費投入超1000億的省份共有6個，分別為廣東、江蘇、北京、山東、浙江和上海。
現在華為的年收入超過1000億美元，但它極其激進地把其中150億到200億美元，投入到研發上，也就是說，華為的研發費用，高達1400億元人民幣。
也就是說，華為一家企業的研發經費，比剩餘25個省份都高。
華為的研發經費，和中科院持平，比所有境外上市的中國企業都要高。
華為用千億研發經費，養活了700個數學家、800個物理學家和60000多工程師。
華為有15000人做基礎研究，負責把錢變成知識，另外60000名工程師負責把知識變成錢，這些人分布在世界各地。
截止今年2月20日，華為已獲得91個5G商用合同（其中歐洲47個，亞洲27個，其他區域17個），5G基站發貨量超過60萬個。
可以說，華為現在已經衝在了信息和通訊技術的最前沿，他們研究的，是別人根本都沒有接觸到的課題。
以5G這條賽道為例，華為已經把美國甩在了後面，按照這個速度發展，以後美國要想封殺華為，就更難了！
3、從長期看，華為是中美戰略博弈中的「上甘嶺」之戰：如果華為挺住了，將極大鼓舞我方士氣，增強全世界對中國科技企業的信心，並滋養帶動一大批優秀的中國製造企業。
要知道，華為，作為一家平臺型的公司，它不僅能夠壯大自己，它還能形成一個行業生態，滋養其他企業，華為的成長，將帶動一整個高科技行業的升級。
華為的供應商名單，也是中國製造業的頂尖公司名單。他們中的很多，是靠華為的訂單活著，也是靠和華為的合作，磨練自己的技術和產能。
美國舉全國之力打擊華為的另一大目的，就是遏制中國的產業升級！！！
簡單一句話形容就是：
「美國想鎖死華為，想鎖死中國的產業升級，讓中國一直只能做低端行業，讓中國人永遠給他們打工。」
所以華為之戰，已經不僅僅只是華為！更是中美科技戰的新上甘嶺戰場，這已經不是一個企業和一個國家的矛盾了，而是國與國之間的較量和戰爭。
不知道到了今天，你們是否還記得任正非年初說的那段話：
「 我已做好此生再也見不到女兒的準備！」」「沒有後悔，只是對不起女兒，她是替我受罪，她.」
在今年的華為內部會議上，任正非說著說著突然哽咽了。。。
仰不愧於天，俯不怍於人！任正非出身貧寒，是真正體會到了中國底層人民苦難的中國企業家。所以，他不像其他企業家大談財富，他講的是要重視基礎教育，他講的是中國人要團結！
朋友們，今天寫下這篇文章，沒有其他意思。只是想說，有時候我們愛國，我們力挺國產的品牌，力挺我們中國的企業；
並不是綁架！只是希望你看到全球大國競爭、大企業競爭的真實一面；知道這背後的所有細節！所有磨難！
華為，加油！中國，加油！！
最危險的時候已經到了，吾輩當自強！！
另：大量讀者還有沒養成點讚的習慣，希望大家閱讀後順手點亮「在看」，以示鼓勵！長期堅持原創真的很不容易，謝謝大家。