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

Newsweek
to pitch a story on “the kids who created the Mac.” After giving a 
demo of the Macintosh, they were taken upstairs to meet Katharine Graham, the legendary 
proprietor, who had an insatiable interest in whatever was new. Afterward the magazine sent its 
technology columnist and a photographer to spend time in Palo Alto with Hertzfeld and Smith. 
The result was a flattering and smart four-page profile of the two of them, with pictures that made 
them look like cherubim of a new age. The article quoted Smith saying what he wanted to do next: 
“I want to build the computer of the 90’s. Only I want to do it tomorrow.” The article also 
described the mix of volatility and charisma displayed by his boss: “Jobs sometimes defends his 
ideas with highly vocal displays of temper that aren’t always bluster; rumor has it that he has 
threatened to fire employees for insisting that his computers should have cursor keys, a feature 
that Jobs considers obsolete. But when he is on his best behavior, Jobs is a curious blend of charm 
and impatience, oscillating between shrewd reserve and his favorite expression of enthusiasm: 
‘Insanely great.’”
The technology writer Steven Levy, who was then working for 
Rolling Stone
, came to 
interview Jobs, who urged him to convince the magazine’s publisher to put the Macintosh team on 
the cover of the magazine. “The chances of Jann Wenner agreeing to displace Sting in favor of a 
bunch of computer nerds were approximately one in a googolplex,” Levy thought, correctly. Jobs 
took Levy to a pizza joint and pressed the case: 
Rolling Stone
was “on the ropes, running crummy 
articles, looking desperately for new topics and new audiences. The Mac could be its salvation!” 
Levy pushed back. 
Rolling Stone
was actually good, he said, and he asked Jobs if he had read it 
recently. Jobs said that he had, an article about MTV that was “a piece of shit.” Levy replied that 
he had written that article. Jobs, to his credit, didn’t back away from the assessment. Instead he 
turned philosophical as he talked about the Macintosh. We are constantly benefiting from 
advances that went before us and taking things that people before us developed, he said. “It’s a 
wonderful, ecstatic feeling to create something that puts it back in the pool of human experience 
and knowledge.”
Levy’s story didn’t make it to the cover. But in the future, every major product launch that Jobs 
was involved in—at NeXT, at Pixar, and years later when he returned to Apple—would end up on 
the cover of either 
Time
, 
Newsweek
, or 
Business Week
.
January 24, 1984

---

On the morning that he and his teammates completed the software for the Macintosh, Andy 
Hertzfeld had gone home exhausted and expected to stay in bed for at least a day. But that 
afternoon, after only six hours of sleep, he drove back to the office. He wanted to check in to see if 
there had been any problems, and most of his colleagues had done the same. They were lounging 
around, dazed but excited, when Jobs walked in. “Hey, pick yourselves up off the floor, you’re not 
done yet!” he announced. “We need a demo for the intro!” His plan was to dramatically unveil the 
Macintosh in front of a large audience and have it show off some of its features to the inspirational 
theme from 
Chariots of Fire
. “It needs to be done by the weekend, to be ready for the rehearsals,” 
he added. They all groaned, Hertzfeld recalled, “but as we talked we realized that it would be fun 
to cook up something impressive.”
The launch event was scheduled for the Apple annual stockholders’ meeting on January 24—
eight days away—at the Flint Auditorium of De Anza Community College. The television ad and 
the frenzy of press preview stories were the first two components in what would become the Steve 
Jobs playbook for making the introduction of a new product seem like an epochal moment in 
world history. The third component was the public unveiling of the product itself, amid fanfare 
and flourishes, in front of an audience of adoring faithful mixed with journalists who were primed 
to be swept up in the excitement.
Hertzfeld pulled off the remarkable feat of writing a music player in two days so that the 
computer could play the