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

CHAPTER FIVE
THE APPLE I
Turn On, Boot Up, Jack In . . .
Daniel Kottke and Jobs with the Apple I at the Atlantic City computer fair, 1976
Machines of Loving Grace
In San Francisco and the Santa Clara Valley during the late 1960s, various cultural currents 
flowed together. There was the technology revolution that began with the growth of military 
contractors and soon included electronics firms, microchip makers, video game designers, and 
computer companies. There was a hacker subculture—filled with wireheads, phreakers, 
cyberpunks, hobbyists, and just plain geeks—that included engineers who didn’t conform to the 
HP mold and their kids who weren’t attuned to the wavelengths of the subdivisions. There were 
quasi-academic groups doing studies on the effects of LSD; participants included Doug Engelbart 
of the Augmentation Research Center in Palo Alto, who later helped develop the computer mouse 
and graphical user interfaces, and Ken Kesey, who celebrated the drug with music-and-light 
shows featuring a house band that became the Grateful Dead. There was the hippie movement, 
born out of the Bay Area’s beat generation, and the rebellious political activists, born out of the 
Free Speech Movement at Berkeley. Overlaid on it all were various self-fulfillment movements 
pursuing paths to personal enlightenment: Zen and Hinduism, meditation and yoga, primal scream 
and sensory deprivation, Esalen and est.
This fusion of flower power and processor power, enlightenment and technology, was 
embodied by Steve Jobs as he meditated in the mornings, audited physics classes at Stanford, 
worked nights at Atari, and dreamed of starting his own business. “There was just something 
going on here,” he said, looking back at the time and place. “The best music came from here—the 
Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Joan Baez, Janis Joplin—and so did the integrated circuit, and 
things like the 
Whole Earth Catalog
.”
Initially the technologists and the hippies did not interface well. Many in the counterculture saw 
computers as ominous and Orwellian, the province of the Pentagon and the power structure. In 
The Myth of the Machine
, the historian Lewis Mumford warned that computers were sucking 

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away our freedom and destroying “life-enhancing values.” An injunction on punch cards of the 
period—“Do not fold, spindle or mutilate”—became an ironic phrase of the antiwar Left.
But by the early 1970s a shift was under way. “Computing went from being dismissed as a tool 
of bureaucratic control to being embraced as a symbol of individual expression and liberation,” 
John Markoff wrote in his study of the counterculture’s convergence with the computer industry, 
What the Dormouse Said
. It was an ethos lyrically expressed in Richard Brautigan’s 1967 poem, 
“All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace,” and the cyberdelic fusion was certified when 
Timothy Leary declared that personal computers had become the new LSD and years later revised 
his famous mantra to proclaim, 
“Turn on, boot up, jack in.” The musician Bono, who later became a friend of Jobs, often 
discussed with him why those immersed in the rock-drugs-rebel counterculture of the Bay Area 
ended up helping to create the personal computer industry. “The people who invented the twenty-
first century were pot-smoking, sandal-wearing hippies from the West Coast like Steve, because 
they saw differently,” he said. “The hierarchical systems of the East Coast, England, Germany, 
and Japan do not encourage this different thinking. The sixties produced an anarchic mind-set that 
is great for imagining a world not yet in existence.”
One person who encouraged the denizens of the counterculture to make common cause with the 
hackers was Stewart Brand. A puckish visionary who generated fun and ideas over many decades, 
Brand was a participant in one of the early sixties LSD studies in Palo Alto. He joined with his 
fellow subject Ken Kesey to produce the acid-celebrating Trips Festival, appeared in the opening 
scene of Tom Wolfe’s