Steve graduated high school in 1972, then went straight to Reed College in Portland, Oregon. Reed was one of the most expensive colleges out there that Paul and Clara required their lifetime savings to pay off his high-end education. Steve dropped out the first semester because "he didn't see any value in it, he had no idea what he wanted to do with his life and didn't see how college would help him figure that out". However, that allowed him to “drop in” on classes he was not supposed to attend, such as calligraphy. His life wasn't aimed at a direction other than to sleep in his friends' dorm rooms and take bottles in for money to buy food. One night he saw Steve Wozniak at the "Homebrew Computer Club" where you present your electronic project and exchange parts with others, or start a business. Later on, Wozniak wanted to co-found Apple with Steve. In 1969 Wozniak built a computer board from scratch that impressed Steve a lot with the components of it. Steve Wozniak and Bill named it "The Cream Soda Computer" because it was their favourite beverage at the time when they were working on it. Late 1973, Steve took a job as a technician at Atari, Inc. in Los Gatos, California. He was often the smartest colleague there at Atari. Steve looked up to Atari's founder Nolan Bushnell. Steve got asked to create a circuit board for the arcade game Breakout. Steve had very limited knowledge in circuit board design and scammed Steve Wozniak claiming he'd split the profit 50/50 if Wozniak could minimize the number of chips. Wozniak reduced the number of chips by 50, a design so tight that it was impossible to reproduce on an assembly line, It was very appealing and impressive to the engineers over at Atari. The total profit was $5,000 for the board and Wozniak's share was only $350 (Steve claimed it was a total of $700). Steve also spent several weeks with his girlfriend Chris-Ann and Daniel in a commune in Oregon, the All-One Farm. To get the necessary $1,000 to start building the first boards for their new product, Steve sold his Volkswagen van, and Woz sold his HP 65 calculator. Apple Computer’s first order was from a Homebrew member called Paul Terrel. He was starting a new computer store called the Byte Shop, in Mountain View, and understood just like Steve that there was a demand for such fully-built computers. He ordered 50 of them, at $500 a piece. That was $25,000! It was a huge starting point for the young company, and got Steve and Woz very excited. They started putting together the parts in the garage of Steve's parents', with help from Steve’s sister Patti and his friend, Daniel. They paid them $1 a board. The parts for the Apple cost $220, while the computer was sold to Terrel for $500, who would usually put it in wooden boxes. In 1976, Wozniak single-handedly invented the Apple I computer. In 1978, Mike Markkula hired Mike Scott from National Semiconductor to serve as CEO for several turbulent years. After the Apple II was finished, Steve went on the search for marketers. Mike Markkula was a former Intel employee who had made millions and retired early. Mike drew up a business plan. He wanted to put in $250,000 to build 1,000 machines of the Apple II. The new company got ready to show off their product at the West Coast Computer Faire, a conference held in San Francisco in April 1977. Apple received 300 orders for the Apple II on the show alone, twice as much as the total number of Apple I’s ever sold! This was a huge number by the young men’s standards. In 1983, Steve lured John Scully away from Pepsi to serve as Apple's CEO. Apple was growing at an incredibly fast rate. The numbers were mind-blowing: from 2,500 Apple IIs sold in 1977, 8,000 were sold in 1978, and up to 35,000 in 1979. Apple earned $47 million in revenues in 1979, making Steve a millionaire on paper (he owned $7 million worth of private stock). There were crucial evolutions in Steve’s personal life as well. Steve’s ex-girlfriend from high school Chris-Ann Brennan reappeared claiming she was bearing his baby. Steve denied the fatherhood, although everybody in his entourage knew he was the father. The baby girl was named Lisa, there was a lot of perplexity around Steve’s behavior. After years of research, he had finally found his biological family. His biological mother Joanne was still alive, and she had actually married his father a couple of years after Steve was born. They had given birth to a daughter, Steve’s biological sister, called Mona. Mona Simpson was a young yet accomplished writer who had just published a novel that earned her several literary prizes, Anywhere But Here. Steve was thrilled his sister was an artist: there was indeed art in his genes! He filled a bookshelf at NeXT with free copies of Mona’s book. He also started to fully accept his 9-year-old daughter Lisa as family. She increasingly spent time at his home in Woodside, and he even took her to NeXT’s offices from time to time. He started to get deeply involved in her education. Finally, he became more stable in his relationships and was thinking of marrying his girlfriend Tina Redse. This whole period of Steve’s life is well documented in A Regular Guy, a novel by Mona Simpson which barely disguises Steve Jobs and Lisa as its main characters. The years of 1991 to 1994 were the worst in Steve’s career. Paradoxically, they were some of the happiest years in his private life. In 1990, at age 35, after his girlfriend Tina Redse had turned down his proposal, he started dating a young Stanford MBA student called Laurene Powell. The first product lines to be renovated by Steve Jobs were the pro products, Power Mac and PowerBook, which he revealed in November 1997. For the first time since 1996, it had made a $45 million profit in the last quarter of 1997. Steve unveiled the iMac on May 6 1998, at the Flint Center auditorium in Cupertino, in the same room where he had unveiled Macintosh some fourteen years earlier. Only seven months later, in January 1999, he made two product announcements at Macworld San Francisco. First was a brand new Power Mac G3 tower that was not only faster, but also featured a new, appealing design inspired by the original iMac. The most serious troubles Steve had to face in recent years were not legal ones, but medical ones: in October 2003, while performing a routine abdominal scan, doctors discovered a tumor growing in his pancreas. Then came the eMac, a cheaper version of the iMac G4 with a CRT display, introduced especially for the education market in 2002, and discontinued in 2005. Finally, in January 2005, they released the Mac mini, a stripped-down Mac designed to appeal to switchers, the cheapest Mac ever at $499. Steve never mentioned his nine-month refusal to have surgery and his special diet techniques. The biggest of all was undeniably on January 27, when Steve finally introduced the iPad, Apple’s much-anticipated tablet. That’s why he turned to an outside engineer, PortalPlayer founder Tony Fadell, who had notoriously tried to sell his prototype of a little MP3 player to several consumer electronics company. Fadell joined Apple in February 2001, and the iPod shipped only nine months later, in late October 2001, just in time for the holiday season. April 28 2003, Steve revealed the iTunes Music Store at a special Music event. The results quickly exceeded the company’s best hopes. One of the first thing Steve Jobs did before developing iPhone was to go to the cell phone carriers. He talked to them separately in early 2005, promising to build a device “light-years ahead of anything else”. He soon made a deal with America’s #1 carrier, Cingular. So here’s where we are today. Apple, on the verge of bankruptcy a decade ago, is now one of the most powerful and influential high-tech company in the world.