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"He can con you into believing his dream," says Bill Atkinson, who by some estimates is the most gifted programmer at Apple. A company consultant, Guy Tribble, says that Jobs sets up what he calls "a reality-distortion field. He has the ability to make people around him believe in his perception of reality through a combination of very fast comeback, catch phrases and the occasional very original insight, which he throws in to keep you off balance." By whatever name—the dream, the Ditch, the rap, the reality-distortion field—fobs' unwavering ambition and ferocious will have caused a number of people to be come rich. Says Jobs, employing perhaps extravagant arithmetic: "We've made about 300 people at Apple millionaires."
Vastly more important, Jobs has been instrumental in selling hundreds of thousands, possibly millions, of Americans on the new technology. He insisted that the Apple II be what the jargon calls "user friendly." He wanted it light and trim, well designed in muted colors, and today pushes his engineers hard to make machines that will not frighten away a skittish and skeptical clientele. The Jobs sales skills will be hard pressed in the months to come. In mid-January, Apple will introduce Lisa, a new model that the company has been working on full-time for four years and that is expected to sell for $10,000. Later in the year, it will officially announce Mackintosh, a more affordable version of Lisa, priced around $2,000. Some of a staff of 70—one of whom is still a teen-ager—are putting in seven-day, 90-hour weeks on Mackintosh, working under Jobs. As a boss, Jobs is admired for courting long chances, but, adds a friend, "something is happening to Steve that's sad and not pretty, something related to money and power and loneliness. He's less sensitive to people's feelings. He runs over them, snowballs them." Adds Jeff Raskin, a former Apple publications manager: "He would have made an excellent King of France."
This once and future king had decidedly modest beginnings. His parents, Paul and Clara Jobs, adopted Steven in February 1955 and later moved from Mountain View, on the peninsula south of San Francisco, to Los Altos after their son complained of rough times at the junior high school. "He came home one day from the seventh grade," Paul Jobs remembers, "and said if he had to go back to school there again he just wouldn't go. So we decided we'd better move."
Jobs made his way through Homestead High, recalls Electronics Teacher John McCollum, "as something of a loner. He always had a different way of looking at things." Solitude may, however, have bred ambition. McCollum was stunned to learn that the young loner, needing parts for class projects, picked up the phone and called Burroughs collect in Detroit and Bill Hewlett, co-founder of Hewlett-Packard, over in Palo Alto.