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Hewlett wound up supplying Jobs with parts for a frequency counter, a device that measures the speed of electronic impulses. This introduced Jobs to the concept of timing, critical for understanding a computer, and furnished him with a cornerstone that, according to Wozniak, he never bothered to build on. Says Wozniak: "I doubt Steve was careful down to the last detail, which is really the key to high-level engineering." Shape, not subtlety, was more in Jobs' line, foreshadowing what one Apple manager calls the "technical ignorance he's not willing to admit." It was the practical applications of technology that excited Jobs, whether it was getting together with Wozniak to use "blue boxes" to make free long-distance calls or helping to design for the graduating class of '71 a mechanical sign that showed a huge hand making a time-honored gesture of rudeness.
Despite such spirited eruptions, Jobs was still uncertain, displaced, curious. He graduated, dropped acid for the first time ("All of a sudden the wheatfield was playing Bach") and lived with his first serious girlfriend in a small wooden house along the Santa Cruz Mountains. As the summer ended, he headed for Reed College in Oregon. His father recalls what must have been a familiar litany: "He said if he didn't go there he didn't want to go anywhere." Jobs lasted only a semester but hung around the campus wandering the labyrinths of postadolescent mysticism and post-Woodstock culture. He tried pre-philosophy, meditation, the I Ching, LSD and the excellent vegetarian curries at the Hare Krishna house in Portland. He swore off meat about this time and took up vegetarianism "in my typically nutso way." One temporary result, say friends, was skin tinted by an excess of carotene to the color of an early sunset.
Cutting loose from Reed in 1974, Jobs journeyed back toward home and, answering a help-wanted ad in a local newspaper, landed a job at a video-game outfit called Atari, then in its second year of business. Jobs became the 40th employee of the small and idiosyncratic company founded by Nolan Bushnell and fueled by the success of Pong, the first of a long line of video recreations that turned simple games into eye-glazing national obsessions. Atari was a pretty loose place—staff brainstorming sessions were fueled with generous quantities of grass—but even there Jobs did not quite fit in. "His mind kept going a mile a minute," says Al Alcorn, Atari's chief engineer at the time. "The engineers in the lab didn't like him. They thought he was arrogant and brash. Finally, we made an agreement that he come to work late at night."