Benjamin franklin and albert einstein, this is the exclusive biography of steve jobs

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
, and worked with Doug Engelbart to create 
a seminal sound-and-light presentation of new technologies called the Mother of All Demos. 
“Most of our generation scorned computers as the embodiment of centralized control,” Brand later 
noted. “But a tiny contingent—later called hackers—embraced computers and set about 
transforming them into tools of liberation. That turned out to be the true royal road to the future.”
Brand ran the Whole Earth Truck Store, which began as a roving truck that sold useful tools 
and educational materials, and in 1968 he decided to extend its reach with the 
Whole Earth 
Catalog
. On its first cover was the famous picture of Earth taken from space; its subtitle was 
“Access to Tools.” The underlying philosophy was that technology could be our friend. Brand 
wrote on the first page of the first edition, “A realm of intimate, personal power is developing—
power of the individual to conduct his own education, find his own inspiration, shape his own 
environment, and share his adventure with whoever is interested. Tools that aid this process are 
sought and promoted by the 
Whole Earth Catalog
.” Buckminster Fuller followed with a poem that 
began: “I see God in the instruments and mechanisms that work reliably.”
Jobs became a 
Whole Earth
fan. He was particularly taken by the final issue, which came out in 
1971, when he was still in high school, 
and he brought it with him to college and then to the All One Farm. “On the back cover of their 
final issue” Jobs recalled, “was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might 
find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: ‘Stay Hungry. 
Stay Foolish.’” Brand sees Jobs as one of the purest embodiments of the cultural mix that the 
catalog sought to celebrate. “Steve is right at the nexus of the counterculture and technology,” he 
said. “He got the notion of tools for human use.”
Brand’s catalog was published with the help of the Portola Institute, a foundation dedicated to 
the fledgling field of computer education. The foundation also helped launch the People’s 
Computer Company, which was not a company at all but a newsletter and organization with the 
motto “Computer power to the people.” There were occasional Wednesday-night potluck dinners, 
and two of the regulars, Gordon French and Fred Moore, decided to create a more formal club 
where news about personal electronics could be shared.
They were energized by the arrival of the January 1975 issue of 
Popular Mechanics
, which had 
on its cover the first personal computer kit, the Altair. The Altair wasn’t much—just a $495 pile of 
parts that had to be soldered to a board that would then do little—but for hobbyists and hackers it 
heralded the dawn of a new era. Bill Gates and Paul Allen read the magazine and started working 
on a version of BASIC, an easy-to-use programming language, for the Altair. It also caught the 
attention of Jobs and Wozniak. And when an Altair kit arrived at the People’s Computer 

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Company, it became the centerpiece for the first meeting of the club that French and Moore had 
decided to launch.
The Homebrew Computer Club
The group became known as the Homebrew Computer Club, and it encapsulated the 
Whole Earth
fusion between the counterculture and technology. It would become to the personal computer era 
something akin to what the Turk’s Head coffeehouse was to the age of Dr. Johnson, a place where 
ideas were exchanged and disseminated. Moore wrote the flyer for the first meeting, held on 
March 5, 1975, in French’s Menlo Park garage: “Are you building your own computer? Terminal, 
TV, typewriter?” it asked. “If so, you might like to come to a gathering of people with like-minded 
interests.”
Allen Baum spotted the flyer on the HP bulletin board and called Wozniak, who agreed to go 
with him. “That night turned out to be one of the most important nights of my life,” Wozniak 
recalled. About thirty other people showed up, spilling out of French’s open garage door, and they 
took turns describing their interests. Wozniak, who later admitted to being extremely nervous, said 
he liked “video games, pay movies for hotels, scientific calculator design, and TV terminal 
design,” according to the minutes prepared by Moore. There was a demonstration of the new 
Altair, but more important to Wozniak was seeing the specification sheet for a microprocessor.
As he thought about the microprocessor—a chip that had an entire central processing unit on 
it—he had an insight. He had been designing a terminal, with a keyboard and monitor, that would 
connect to a distant minicomputer. Using a microprocessor, he could put some of the capacity of 
the minicomputer inside the terminal itself, so it could become a small stand-alone computer on a 
desktop. It was an enduring idea: keyboard, screen, and computer all in one integrated personal 
package. “This whole vision of a personal computer just popped into my head,” he said. “That 
night, I started to sketch out on paper what would later become known as the Apple I.”
At first he planned to use the same microprocessor that was in the Altair, an Intel 8080. But 
each of those “cost almost more than my monthly rent,” so he looked for an alternative. He found 
one in the Motorola 6800, which a friend at HP was able to get for $40 apiece. Then he discovered 
a chip made by MOS Technologies that was electronically the same but cost only $20. It would 
make his machine affordable, but it would carry a long-term cost. Intel’s chips ended up becoming 
the industry standard, which would haunt Apple when its computers were incompatible with it.
After work each day, Wozniak would go home for a TV dinner and then return to HP to 
moonlight on his computer. He spread out the parts in his cubicle, figured out their placement, and 
soldered them onto his motherboard. Then he began writing the software that would 
get the microprocessor to display images on the screen. Because he could not afford to pay for 
computer time, he wrote the code by hand. After a couple of months he was ready to test it. “I 
typed a few keys on the keyboard and I was shocked! The letters were displayed on the screen.” It 
was Sunday, June 29, 1975, a milestone for the personal computer. “It was the first time in 
history,” Wozniak later said, “anyone had typed a character on a keyboard and seen it show up on 
their own computer’s screen right in front of them.”
Jobs was impressed. He peppered Wozniak with questions: Could the computer ever be 
networked? Was it possible to add a disk for memory storage? He also began to help Woz get 
components. Particularly important were the dynamic random-access memory chips. Jobs made a 
few calls and was able to score some from Intel for free. “Steve is just that sort of person,” said 
Wozniak. “I mean, he knew how to talk to a sales representative. I could never have done that. I’m 
too shy.”
Jobs began to accompany Wozniak to Homebrew meetings, carrying the TV monitor and 
helping to set things up. The meetings now attracted more than one hundred enthusiasts and had 
been moved to the auditorium of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. Presiding with a pointer 
and a free-form manner was Lee Felsenstein, another embodiment of the merger between the 
world of computing and the counterculture. He was an engineering school dropout, a participant in 
the Free Speech Movement, and an antiwar activist. He had written for the alternative newspaper