Steve Jobs: the same first job, the same mentor's shadow, the same commune state — and a documentary whose narrators I mostly knew · The Graph

Person

Who this is

Apple's co-founder appears in this record at one remove — the honest distance — but the removes line up in a way Jonathan Hare asked the record to set out (S-182). The first job. Jobs, at twelve or thirteen, phoned Bill Hewlett at home for parts for a frequency counter and came away with a summer job on the Hewlett-Packard assembly line building them; Hare's first paid manufacturing job was at HP's scientific-instruments division in Santa Rosa, soldering boards and assembling instrument chassis with authorized access to the spools of solid gold wire — two teenagers on HP lines a decade apart, each taught the HP Way by the people who had it from its authors. The mentor's shadow. Hewlett and Packard were Fred Terman's students; Terman's other protégé was Hare's grandfather Milton Dixon Hare, who worked under him at Harvard's Radio Research Laboratory in the war and followed him to Stanford's Electronics Research Laboratory in 1955, where Hewlett and Packard were regular visitors — so that, in Hare's account, his grandfather and his father knew both men. Jobs reached Hewlett by telephone; Hare later thanked Packard at Stanford GSB and Hewlett through an introduction from E. O. Wilson.

The rest of the pattern, at the record's grade. Jobs spent his post-Reed year on the All One Farm commune in Oregon — the apple orchard the company is named for; Hare was raised on the Takilma commune just over the Oregon border. Jobs went to India in 1974 and came back a Buddhist, married by a Zen priest; Hare's journey through India, the Maldives and Sri Lanka is where he chose the missing layer as his life's problem, and the ashram of his childhood is where his karma-as-veil-of-ignorance ethic comes from (S-160). Jobs gave the 'View from the Top' lecture at Stanford GSB in October 1989 and met Laurene Powell in the front row; Hare arrived the next autumn and parked next to her. Jobs was fired from the company he founded in 1985; Hare lost Consilient to a clause he signed and Resilient to a boardroom coup. The red Ferrari 308 GTS Laurene drove to the Oval was his, borrowed (S-181); the BMW Z8 Hare bid $250,000 for at Sunnyvale went to Jobs when Hare would not go to $330,000; Il Fornaio was one of his tables; and Frank Caufield's refusal came with 'you're like Steve Jobs — you almost got me to invest, and I don't invest in anything.'

The machines, at Hare's grade. He had one of the very first Apple LaserWriters — the PostScript printer that made Adobe, and Jobs's bet — and used it for desktop publishing at Strategic Planning Associates in Washington, having used a Xerox Star there before the Macintosh came out. At Berkeley, his advisor Roger Glassey and other IEOR professors had some of the very first NeXT machines: in Hare's account, Berkeley, Stanford and Carnegie Mellon were the three university partners that helped launch NeXT (S-188).

The narrators. Hare's account (S-182) is that he had personally met almost every one of the roughly twenty people who narrate the Silicon Valley Historical Association's documentary on Jobs — Steve Jobs: Visionary Entrepreneur — 'maybe a couple of exceptions,' and that most of those connections ran through Laurene Powell Jobs, who carries the legacy on. Asked for the list, he named twelve of the twenty-two (S-183); the film's page carries the full credited list against his, and the where-and-through-whom for each is still invited.

Public record, at web grade: born in San Francisco in 1955 and adopted; Reed College, 1972, briefly; Atari; Apple with Wozniak in 1976; NeXT and Pixar after 1985; Apple again from 1997; died in Palo Alto in October 2011, after which Laurene Powell Jobs became the holder of the Steven P. Jobs Trust.

The record

Where this intersects the work

Each entry below carries its own provenance — the source, and how it was processed. That is the condition on which this graph can be extended by anyone without degrading.

Jonathan’s account · S-172 →Jonathan’s account · S-181 →Jonathan’s account · S-182 →Jonathan’s account · S-183 →Jonathan’s account · S-184 →Jonathan’s account · S-188 →Jonathan’s account · S-189 →

L1 · SummaryThe graphYou are here — rapid understanding, forwardable

L2 · EpisodeThe storyHis story, in his voice — ../../episodes/two-red-cars-on-the-oval/L3 · SourceIn his own wordsThe verbatim account — immutable, with its research context

The trail exists so that people who were there can reconstruct their own memories, recognize what they helped incubate, and add to or correct the record — or forward the few pages that belong to someone they know.

HP, as teenagers — Jobs c. 1968, Hare a decade on

The same first job

'We both had the same job at Hewlett Packard in high school.' Jobs: the phone call to Hewlett, the frequency-counter line in Palo Alto. Hare: the scientific-instruments line in Santa Rosa, the gold wire he first took for a flex. Different decades, the same company, the same founders' way of working handed down by the people who had it first.

Hare's accountAuthor's statement — source record S-182; Hare's HP account in S-025; Jobs's in the public record

Harvard 1942–45; Stanford 1955–60

Terman's two lines

'My grandfather worked for Fred Terman at Harvard and Stanford, and he and my father knew Bill Hewlett and David Packard.' Terman made HP possible and recruited Milton Dixon Hare to the ERL, where the two founders came and went. Jobs got to Hewlett by dialing the number in the phone book; the Hares got to both by being in the building.

Hare's accountAuthor's statement — source record S-182; the family record in S-025 and S-094

The graph

Connected from here

There is no single root. This is one view of the graph, from this node — what you see depends on where you enter and what you are looking for.

married March 1991; the connector, in Hare's account

Laurene Powell Jobs: two red cars on the Oval, the Culture Club, the roach coach — and everything she is a link away from

A year ahead at Stanford GSB; a symphony series; a borrowed Ferrari that was Steve Jobs's. Now: Emerson Collective, The Atlantic, and a network the record wants to reach

Open →the same first job

Hewlett-Packard, and the spools of solid gold wire

Gold wire, three mentors, and a lesson that stuck

Open →the mentor behind HP — and behind Hare's grandfather

Fred Terman, the father of Silicon Valley, was my grandfather's mentor

The father of Silicon Valley — and Hare's grandfather's mentor

Open →knew Hewlett and Packard at the ERL

My other grandfather invented chaff, and died at forty-six

Radar, chaff, and the Stanford lab at the center of Silicon Valley

Open →the other Oregon commune

Raised on a clothing-optional commune, where a strawberry taught me how the network should work

A clothing-discouraged commune, and an education in what people do when nobody makes them

Open →the India journey

I named the missing layer at Microsoft in 1991. Thirty-five years later it is still missing

Named at Microsoft in 1991. Still the claim.

Open →the documentary; its narrators

Steve Jobs: Visionary Entrepreneur — the documentary whose narrators Hare says he had almost all met

Silicon Valley Historical Association, January 2013 — built on a 1994 interview at NeXT; twenty-two credited voices, twelve of whom Hare records having met

Open →bought the car Hare bid on

Steve Jobs outbid me for the BMW Z8 — and the dealer wasn't bluffing

Bond's car, sawn in half off Baku in the film; first seen near Trafalgar Square; lost at Sunnyvale BMW to the one buyer the story couldn't top

Open →one of his tables

Il Fornaio: Steve Jobs's dining room, and the nine-word walkout

The Cowper Street epicenter of tech power-dining, where Doug Ayer's ultimatum met 'I decline your offer'

Open →'you're like Steve Jobs'

Frank Caufield of Kleiner Perkins: “you're like Steve Jobs, and I don't invest in anything”

“You're like Steve Jobs. You almost got me to invest, and I don't invest in anything.”

Open →the landmark lunch

Paul Berg, who spliced the first DNA at Stanford, paused the field to think about it, and gave Steve Jobs a landmark lunch — a man I never met but know through many who did

1980 Nobel in Chemistry for recombinant DNA; organizer of Asilomar 1975; first director of Stanford's Beckman Center; the biochemist whose lunch turned Jobs toward NeXT — and a narrator of the Jobs documentary

Open →

Provenance

Where this came from

Everything above is a distillation. The primary source is published in full, so that any claim on this page can be walked back to what was actually said — and where the two differ, the source governs.

Primary source · S-172