Early life and education
Steven Paul Jobs was born in San Francisco in 1955, and adopted at birth by Paul Reinhold Jobs (1922–1993) and Clara Jobs (1924–1986). Clara's maiden name was Hagopian.[15] When asked about his "adoptive parents," Jobs replied emphatically that Paul and Clara Jobs "were my parents."[16] He later stated in his authorized biography that they "were my parents 1,000%."[17]
The Jobs family moved from San Francisco to Mountain View, California when Steve was five years old.[1][2] Paul and Clara later adopted a daughter, Patti. Paul Jobs, a machinist for a company that made lasers, taught his son rudimentary electronics and how to work with his hands.[1] Clara was an accountant,[16] who taught him to read before he went to school.[1] Clara Jobs had been a payroll clerk for Varian Associates, one of the first high-tech firms in what became known as Silicon Valley.[18] Asked in a 1995 interview what he wanted to pass on to his children, Jobs replied, "Just to try to be as good a father to them as my father was to me. I think about that every day of my life."
During World War II, Paul Jobs joined the Coast Guard and "ferried troops around the world for General Patton. I think he was always getting into trouble and getting busted down to Private,"[1] Jobs said. A machinist by trade, his father worked hard and was "a genius with his hands."
Jobs told an interviewer, "I was very lucky. My father, Paul, was a pretty remarkable man."[1] When his son was five or six, Paul Jobs sectioned a piece of his workbench and gave it to Jobs, saying "'Steve, this is your workbench now.' And he gave me some of his smaller tools and showed me how to use a hammer and saw and how to build things. It really was very good for me. He spent a lot of time with me... teaching me how to build things, how to take things apart, put things back together."[1] Jobs also noted that while his father "did not have a deep understanding of electronics [...] he'd encountered electronics a lot in automobiles and other things he would fix. He showed me the rudiments of electronics and I got very interested in that."[1]
Jobs attended Monta Loma Elementary, Mountain View, Cupertino Junior High and Homestead High School in Cupertino, California.[2] He frequented after-school lectures at the Hewlett-Packard Company in Palo Alto, California, and was later hired there, working with Steve Wozniak as a summer employee.[19] Following high school graduation in 1972, Jobs enrolled at Reed College in Portland, Oregon. Although he dropped out after only one semester,[20] he continued auditing classes at Reed, while sleeping on the floor in friends' rooms, returning Coke bottles for food money, and getting weekly free meals at the local Hare Krishna temple.[21] Jobs later said, "If I had never dropped in on that single calligraphy course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts."
