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His Atari salary helped stake Jobs to a trip to India, where he met up with a Reed buddy, Dan Kottke. "It was kind of an ascetic pilgrimage," says Kottke, "except we didn't know where we were going." Seeking spiritual solace and enlightenment with a shaved head and a backpack did not distract Jobs from stubbornly haggling over prices in the marketplace and dressing down a Hindu woman for apparently watering their milk. An erratic Siddhartha at best, Jobs came home in the fall of 1974 with more questions than answers. He tried primal therapy, went in search of his real parents and on a friend's farm bumped his head on one of the last vestiges of '60s idealism: communal living. "Once I spent a night sleeping under a table in the kitchen," Jobs says. "In the middle of the night everybody came in and ripped off each other's food."
Jobs turned from life science to applied technology. Wozniak and some other friends gravitated toward an outfit called the Homebrew Computer Club in 1975, and Jobs would occasionally drop by. Wozniak was the computer zealot, the kind of guy who can see a sonnet in a circuit. What Jobs saw was profit. At convocations of the Homebrew, Jobs showed scant interest in the fine points of design, but he was enthusiastic about selling the machines Wozniak was making.
"I was nowhere near as good an engineer as Woz," Jobs freely admits. "He was always the better designer." No one in the neighborhood, however, could match Jobs' entrepreneurial flair and his instincts for the big score. It was Jobs who badgered local electronics suppliers for credit; Jobs who arranged for payment ("They'd say, 'Well, how's 30 days net?' We said, 'Sign us up.' We didn't know what 30 days net was"); Jobs who attracted a first-class industrial p.r. firm and a team of experienced managers; Jobs who organized the early manufacturing; Jobs who finally persuaded Wozniak to leave Hewlett-Packard; and Jobs who gave the fledgling company a name ("One day I just told everyone that unless they came up with a better name by 5 p.m., we would go with Apple"). In 1977, when the Apple II was introduced, the company receipts were kept in a desk drawer. By 1980, when Apple went public, it had sales of $139 million.
Jobs, hyper and overwrought from the flush of such success, would occasionally burst into tears at meetings and would have to be cooled out with a slow walk around the parking lot. His personal life was also precarious. He again met the woman with whom he had spent the summer in the mountains, and she became pregnant before they finally broke up anew. The baby, a girl, was born in the summer of 1978, with Jobs denying his fatherhood and refusing to pay child support. A voluntary blood test performed the following year said "the probability of paternity for Jobs, Steven. . . is 94.1%." Jobs insists that "28% of the male population of the United States could be the father." Nonetheless, the court ordered Jobs to begin paying $385 a month for child support. It may be noted that the baby girl and the machine on which Apple has placed so much hope for the future share the same name: Lisa.