It was dusk, sprinkling and windy outside. Steve Jobs and I hurried along Manhattan’s Central Park West. Steve was carrying a large box—a birthday present for Sean Lennon, who was turning nine. If he hadn’t been murdered four years earlier, John would have been 44. Both father and son shared the same birthday, October 9.
We turned right onto West 72nd Street at the storied Dakota apartment building. To get into the building through the carriageway, we passed through a gathering of fifty or sixty people, many holding lit candles. They were singing, “Give Peace a Chance,” remembering John. A few had tears. We stood with them for a while before going inside.
Before 1980, the Dakota had been known for its famous residents, including the Lennons, Calvin Klein, Boris Karloff and Lauren Bacall, and the movie filmed there, Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby. Since then it’s been remembered for tragedy—John’s murder on the sidewalk out front. A few months before John died, I’d conducted a lengthy Interview with him and Yoko. It was the final in-depth interview of John’s life. One of the last things he said to me was, “I’m turning forty. Life begins at forty, so they promise. And I believe it, too. I’m, like, excited. Like, what’s going to happen next?”
Steve and I waited for the ancient elevator. “All the girls loved Paul, but John was my favorite Beatle,” he said. “Lennon cut through the bullshit and told it like it was. I still can’t believe they killed him. He was a genius, a beautiful genius.” He said that there had been a period when he was a teenager that he listened exclusively to the Beatles, solo Lennon, and Dylan.
The elevator, with gnarly gargoyles looking down on passengers, creaked slowly upward to the seventh floor. On the landing, Steve knocked on an oversized mahogany door. A man opened it and ushered us in. As instructed, we removed our shoes. Steve found a place to store the large box on the floor, behind a collection of walking sticks.
In the evening light, out the window of the White Room–everything inside was white, including the piano on which John wrote “Imagine”–Central Park was a patchwork of crystal and gray. Across the park, the lights of Fifth Avenue hotels and apartments glittered. The party was in full swing. The guests included Walter Cronkite, Roberta Flack, Harry Nilsson, John Cage, and artists Louise Nevelson, Kenny Scharf, and Keith Haring. Andy Warhol arrived, refusing to take his shoes off. Sean came up and Warhol gave him presents, including a spectacular painting of a heart-shaped candy box and a bracelet he’d made out of pennies. The last time they’d seen each other, Andy had ripped a dollar-bill in two and given half to Sean, who, after thanking him, jokingly asked for the other half. Warhol reached in his pocket and handed Sean a wad of torn-in-half dollars.
Dinner was served and then a birthday cake in the shape of a grand piano. Afterward, the adults talked, and Stevee asked Sean if he’d like his present. Following Sean, Steve lugged the box he’d brought down the hallway to Sean’s bedroom, also white, but that one had shelves of robots. Steve opened the carton and lifted out his present.
Steve had boyish dark hair parted on the side. He wore jeans and a white dress shirt, sleeves rolled up. He sprawled on the floor in front of a computer. Called Macintosh, it was boxy, taller than it was wide, beige, the size of a breadbox set on its side.
Steve turned the computer on, and Sean, sitting on the floor near him, stared at the six-inch, black-and-white built-in monitor. He watched Steve push a cigarette-box-sized contraption that was attached to the computer by a wire along the floor. Steve said it was called a mouse. When he guided it along, an arrow on the screen moved, too. Steve moved the arrow over a tiny picture of a paintbrush and clicked to launch a program called MacPaint. He looked at Sean. “You try,” he said.
Sean took control of the mouse, and rolled the small box along the floor. Steve said, “Now hold the button down while you move it and see what happens.” Sean did, and a thin, jagged, black line, appeared on the screen.
Sean, entranced, said, “Cool!” He clicked the mouse button, pushed it around, and on the screen appeared shapes and lines, which he erased (Steve explained how to use an on-screen eraser), and then he drew a sort of lion-camel and then a figure that he said was Boy George.
A few people entered the room and stood over Sean and Steve, watching over their shoulders. I looked up. “Hmmm,” said one, Andy Warhol. “What is this? Look at this, Keith. This is incredible!” Keith Haring nodded. Mesmerized, the artists stared at the moving line.
Steve continued working with Sean, with Warhol and Haring watching, and then Andy asked, “Can I try?”
Warhol took Sean’s spot in front of the computer and Steve showed him how to maneuver and click the mouse. Andy didn’t get it; he lifted and waved the mouse, as if it were a conductor’s baton. Jobs gently explained that the mouse worked when it was pushed along a surface. Warhol kept lifting it until Steve placed his hand on Warhol’s and guided it along the floor. Finally Andy began drawing, staring at the “pencil” as it drew on the screen.
Warhol was spellbound–people who knew him know the way he tuned out everything extraneous when he was entranced by whatever it was at the moment–gliding the mouse, eyes affixed to the monitor. Keith was bent over watching. Andy, his eyes wide, looked up, stared at Haring, and said, “Look! Keith! I drew a circle!”
In Warhol’s diary, published after his death, he wrote about that night: “We went into Sean’s bedroom—and there was a kid there setting up the Apple computer that Sean had gotten as a present, the Macintosh model.
“I said that once some man had been calling me a lot wanting to give me one,” Warhol wrote, “but I’d never called him back or something, and then the kid looked up and said, ‘Yeah, that was me. I’m Steve Jobs.’ And he looked so young like a college guy. …Then he gave me a lesson on drawing with it. It only comes in black and white now, but they’ll soon make it in color. …I felt so old and out of it with this whiz guy right there who’d helped invent it.” In the diaries Warhol concluded his entry, writing that he left the party that night and “felt so blue.” It had nothing to do with his frustration drawing on the computer; he was jealous of Haring. “Before I was Sean’s best grownup friend and now I think Keith is. They really hit it off. He invited Keith to his party for kids the next day and I don’t think I was invited and I’m hurt.”
After half an hour, the artists returned to the party to hang out with Yoko and the other guests, and Sean left for a while to do an interview with Yoko. When he returned, he found Steve and, for the rest of the evening, the two were glued to the computer.
***
I had conducted the Interview with John and Yoko in late July and early August 1980. I met Steve under the same circumstances; the interview I conducted in late summer and early spring of 1984 ran in February of that year. Jobs was 28. It’s difficult for most people to remember (if they were born then) that pre-iPhone, iPad, iPod, iMac era when the most popular personal computer consisted of a suitcase-sized base, heavy monochrome monitor, and keyboard, made by what was then one of the world’s most formidable companies, IBM. It ran on an operating system called MS-DOS– “MS” stood for Microsoft–and had 64 kilobytes of random-access memory. Programs came and files were stored on five-and-a-quarter-inch floppy disks that looked like rectangular 45s in cardboard sleeves. To work on a file–a spreadsheet, say–one had to open it by holding down the control key while pressing O and then typing in a filename.
At the time, people listened to music on the Sony Walkman that played cassette tapes. They read newspapers—on paper. If you mentioned Apple to most people, they’d assume you were referring to the Beatles record label—or something you ate.
Jobs was already a superstar, an idol; there has never been a businessman with as zealous of a following. For many people, he has become an integral, indispensable and even defining part of life. In an almost scary way he exists like a Horcrux in the heads of people who experience the world and carry on relationships through devices that are a reflection of his intellect and taste. It’s unprecedented that so many people throughout the world were as emotional about the retirement of a CEO as they were when, last September, Steve announced that he was stepping down from Apple. It’s also unprecedented that so many people were as devastated by the death of a man who was, after all, an entrepreneur and businessman. It was well known that Jobs had been ill–he had pancreatic cancer and, in 2009, had a liver transplant–but his death was still a shock. At Apple stores around the country, his fans made shrines of flowers, letters and apples.
The original personal computers, from the 1970s, were mostly for geeks in high-school computer clubs before Jobs and his partner, Steve Wozniak, founded Apple in 1976. Their first product, the Apple I, was a hobbyist’s toy. The following year, Apple released the Apple II, which was used in schools, and, to a lesser extent, homes, where parents did accounting, word processing, and stored recipes, and kids did their homework and played computer games. Apple was the uncontested leader in the modest personal-computer market in 1981, when IBM, at the time the most formidable name in mainframe computers, released its PC. The Apple II never cracked the business market, which was where the big money was. To most of corporate America, Apple’s computers were for kids, not Fortune 500 companies. IBM was a trusted brand, and it trounced Apple. By 1984, Apple’s market share had declined by half.
Jobs attempted to fight back with new, more powerful models, including the Apple III and Lisa, but they were failures. In the early 1980s, industry wags speculated that another Apple failure could sink the company, and there were even rumors that an IBM-Apple takeover was imminent. (Typical of Apple bravado, when I met him, Randy Wigginton, a 24-year-old software designer, squelched the rumor. “IBM already said they weren’t for sale,” he cracked.) During our interview, Jobs admitted he was “betting the store” on the Macintosh. “Yeah, we felt the weight of the world on our shoulders,” he said. “We knew that we had to pull the rabbit out of the hat with Macintosh, or else we’d never realize the dreams we had for either the products or the company.”
***
The interview scheduled, I arrived at Apple headquarters in Cupertino and was escorted to a conference room called Picasso. A meeting with four of his chief software designers was underway. Steve was reputed to be an unconventional CEO, and he was. During the course of our interview, he would talk about his influences that included everything from the book Be Here Now, by Baba Ram Das, to John and Yoko, to lengthy conversations he’d had with his business heroes Edwin Land, the founder of Polaroid, and Akio Moritz, founder of Sony. Indeed, the Jobs I witnessed in action was unlike other corporate executives I’d met. In the conference room, I noticed was that it was the first time I’d arrived at an interview with a corporate CEO and felt overdressed. Jobs was in a flannel shirt, jeans, and sneakers, whereas I was dressed more like another of Jobs’ visitors that day, California Governor Jerry Brown, who wore a black suit.
Though the Mac had been extravagantly announced and forty thousand computers were selling a month, it wasn’t bug-free, and Jobs wasn’t pleased. The Apple engineers in the room, all on the Mac team, appeared exhausted. Later I learned that other than quick naps on the floor under their desks, they hadn’t slept in weeks, because they were furiously working to fix the software glitches. Undeterred by the presence of a journalist, Steve laid into them, and they looked miserable. One held back tears. After berating them, however, Jobs’ diatribe turned into a passionate pep talk. “We’re almost at the finish line,” he said. “Remember, we aren’t just building a product. We’re making history. We’re changing the world. Someday you’ll tell your children you were part of this.”
This wasn’t the last time Steve claimed that he wasn’t merely making software and hardware, but was fomenting revolution. He would go on to say as much at the announcement of almost every new Apple computer and other product. Over the decades since I interviewed him, I’ve profiled founders, CEOs, and presidents of dozens of high-tech companies in California’s Silicon Valley, Tokyo, Kyoto, Moscow, London, Beijing, Shanghai, and other cities. Almost every one of them described his or her company and product as revolutionary–“Our company will change life as we know it”–even when they were doing little more than providing new ways to buy books, do payroll, or flirt. But it was Jobs who set the bar. When I interviewed Oracle founder Larry Ellison, he told me, “People ask how much difference one person can make. Steve Jobs is the answer.” Edward Tian, one of the fathers of the Chinese Internet, told me that as a young boy in Beijing, he became inspired by Jobs’ idea that computers are not just computing machines, but tools with the inherent ability to change lives. “Steve Jobs gave the computer industry a much greater goal: to make a better world,” Tian said. “The idea began to consume me.” Few would argue that the computer is transforming China, once again changing the world.
***
I sat across from Steve and turned on my twin tape recorders and opened my reporter’s notebook that was filled with dozens of pages of questions and notes, but Jobs stopped me. He wanted to know if I wrote on a computer or was stuck in the “Neanderthal” world of typewriters.
I explained that a few years earlier I had an Apple II computer on which I wrote articles (including the John and Yoko interview), printing out the final drafts on a dot-matrix printer that spit out paper like a tickertape. However, in 1981, I bought a first-generation IBM PC. When Jobs heard that I’d abandoned the Apple II for a PC, and, as I said, it had served me well, he looked at me as if I had betrayed American secrets to the Nazis in World War II. Then he smiled. “OK. Here’s a challenge. Try a Mac. Write your article on it and compare it to the PC. We’ll see what you think.” It was an intriguing idea to test-drive a computer as I interviewed its creator, and so I agreed. The next day a loaner showed up at my home.
The interview continued off and on over two months. There were sessions at Apple headquarters in Cupertino, where there were video games, a ping pong table, and a stereo with six-foot speakers blaring the Rolling Stones in the central gathering area in the Mac building. We met in conference rooms–besides Picasso, there was da Vinci. Jobs occasionally grabbed fresh carrot or vegetable juice from a refrigerator in a snack room. (I learned that the juice budget for the Mac group was $200,000 a year.)
I’d been warned that Jobs liked to walk while he talked, but hadn’t considered that I should have gone into training to keep apace. He dashed around Apple like a power walker obsessed, making brief pit stops to talk to programmers, hardware engineers, department managers, marketers, product designers, and customers meeting his sales teams. We walked during subsequent interview sessions in San Francisco, along the waterfront and through North Beach; on the Stanford campus; in the hills above Woodside; through redwoods in Jack London State Park in Sonoma County, and along steep trails in the high Sierra near Aspen, Colorado. Unsurprisingly, Jobs was exceptionally bright about most subjects, but in Aspen he stopped a passerby to ask, “What are all these trees with the white bark?”
For our meetings, Jobs often showed up in a Porsche, but otherwise had few of the accouterments normally associated with wealth (though at the time he was already worth more than a quarter of a billion dollars). When we weren’t walking, we often talked over meals, usually sushi or some macrobiotic combination of lettuce, beans, and rice. (A couple years later, for a period of two weeks, he went on a grape juice fast. The juice was hand pressed by my brother, who for awhile worked for Steve as chef and caretaker of a home Steve bought in Woodside, California.)
Over the course of a half dozen weeks, Jobs fielded hundreds of questions, including ones about his background (for the first time, he talked about being adopted, but said he didn’t want to reveal details about his search for his biological parents, because he didn’t want to hurt the feelings of the couple who raised him); his wealth (he laughed about losing $200,000,000 in one day); the founding, with Steve Wozniak, of Apple (in a garage, which by then, as I wrote, had already taken on the aura of Abraham Lincoln’s log cabin); his stint at Atari, the gaming company behind Pong; a trip to Tibet, during which a guru shaved his head; his education (college and LSD); his relationship with Wozniak; the Apple I, II, III, and Lisa computers; his competitors (he railed against what he viewed as the devil incarnate, IBM), and the new Mac (the future of computing and portal into a world of unimaginable possibilities). Steve talked as excitedly about fonts and internal storage devices as politics, but he became most animated when he answered questions about his inspirations and his vision of the impact of technology in the future.
The launch of the commercial Internet and World Wide Web was more than a decade away, and yet at the time Steve envisioned “a nationwide communications network” linked by computers. “We’re just in the beginning stages of what will be a truly remarkable breakthrough for most people—as remarkable as the telephone,” he said. I was skeptical and asked him to be more specific. “What kind of breakthrough are you talking about?” He answered, “I can only begin to speculate. You don’t know exactly what’s going to result, but you know it’s something very big and very good.” I pressed; I wanted more than very big and very good. He thought for awhile before responding, “A hundred years ago, if somebody had asked Alexander Graham Bell, ‘What are you going to be able to do with a telephone?’ he wouldn’t have been able to tell him the ways the telephone would affect the world. He didn’t know that people would use the telephone to call up and find out what movies were playing that night or to order some groceries or call a relative on the other side of the globe.”
The interviews continued. More walks. One late night, we trudged up the famously steep streets of San Francisco’s Russian Hill. We were still walking at 3 in the morning, when I asked about his long-term vision for Apple. He answered that he thought the company could have an impact beyond its computers. “I think Apple has a chance to be the model of a Fortune 500 company in the late Eighties and early Nineties,” he said. “Ten to 15 years ago, if you asked people to make a list of the five most exciting companies in America, Polaroid and Xerox would have been on everyone’s list. Where are they now? They would be on no one’s list today. What happened? Companies, as they grow to become multibillion-dollar entities, somehow lose their vision. They insert lots of layers of middle management between the people running the company and the people doing the work. They no longer have an inherent feel or a passion about the products. The creative people, who are the ones who care passionately, have to persuade five layers of management to do what they know is the right thing to do.
“What happens in most companies is that you don’t keep great people under working environments where individual accomplishment is discouraged rather than encouraged. The great people leave and you end up with mediocrity. I know, because that’s how Apple was built. Apple is an Ellis Island company. Apple is built on refugees from other companies. These are the extremely bright individual contributors who were troublemakers at other companies.”
After two more weeks of interviewing, I gathered tapes and transcripts and began writing on the Macintosh. At first I found the mouse awkward (rather than pointing and clicking, I was used to pressing CTR K and D to save a file), but I quickly got the hang of it. Yes, it was easier to use, and, as Jobs described it, more “intuitive.” In the interview, he explained the thinking behind the mouse. “If I want to tell you there is a spot on your shirt, I’m not going to do it linguistically: ‘There’s a spot on your shirt 14 centimeters down from the collar and three centimeters to the left of your button.’ If you have a spot—‘There!’ [He pointed]–I’ll point to it. Pointing is a metaphor we all know. We’ve done a lot of studies and tests on that, and it’s much faster to do all kinds of functions, such as cutting and pasting, with a mouse, so it’s not only easier to use but more efficient.”
I’d completed about three-quarters of the interview when Steve called–he was in my neighborhood. At the time I was living in Glen Ellen, a small town in Sonoma County, more than an hour’s drive from San Francisco. Steve came rolling up the dirt road in the Porsche. He said he wanted to clarify a few things. We sat on a porch swing and went over them. Mostly they were minor details, but just as Jobs obsessed with every aspect of the Macintosh, he obsessed about everything else he did, including our interview. He clarified some dates. He wanted to be sure that I had down the names of people who had worked on various components and software for the Mac. He said he’d thought of something he’d said and thought he could phrase it more succinctly. I explained that the interview was almost complete, and it was too late to include new information, though I’d make factual corrections. He didn’t care. Nor did he slow down when I told him that I had to get back to work. He talked for another hour and a half. I included his comments about his hero, Polaroid funder Edwin Land, who he called “one of the troublemakers.” Jobs said, “He dropped out of Harvard and founded Polaroid. Not only was he one of the great inventors of our time but, more important, he saw the intersection of art and science and business and built an organization to reflect that. Polaroid did that for some years, but eventually Dr. Land, one of those brilliant troublemakers, was asked to leave his own company–which is one of the dumbest things I’ve ever heard of. So Land, at 75, went off to spend the remainder of his life doing pure science, trying to crack the code of color vision. The man is a national treasure. I don’t understand why people like that can’t be held up as models: This is the most incredible thing to be–not an astronaut, not a football player–but this.”
I’d completed a first draft by Friday before the Monday deadline. On Saturday morning, I reread the piece and began editing. I was polishing a section when without warning the words on the screen vanished. I clicked the mouse and nothing happened. I felt sick. My article–days of work–was gone. I continued to click the mouse and type on the keyboard, but everything was frozen. I was horrified. There was no backup.
Another user would have to call Apple tech support, but I called Jobs. After all, this experiment was his idea. On the phone, he walked me through a few attempts at fixing the computer. I couldn’t even get it to turn off, so he instructed me to try a high-tech fix: unplug it and then start it up again. The computer turned on, but there was no sign of my interview, even when I followed Jobs’ directions, clicking the mouse, opening hidden files, searching where he told me to search. I was panicked, but Jobs was said he knew what to do, that I should stand by.
On Sunday morning, Jobs’ solution arrived in the person of Randy Wigginton, the author of MacWrite, the program with which I’d used to write the Interview, who’d I’d briefly met at Apple. Wigginton, with blonde hair, wearing a Lacoste shirt, and (of course) jeans, was 23 years old. Hired at sixteen, he had been Apple’s sixth employee.
I led Wigginton to my office and the dead Mac. He worked on it for a couple hours during which Jobs called to check in. I asked Wigginton how it was going and he shook his head. He continued working and I began writing again–starting from scratch–but on the IBM. If ever you’ve lost something you’ve worked on on a computer, and if you have no backup, you understand the desolate feeling of staring again at a blank screen, starting over.
Wigginton was more haggard than when I last saw him at Apple, but he didn’t take a break. I was beginning to write on the PC when Wigginton came in to find me. After four hours, he’d found the lost and corrupted file somewhere inside some recess of the computer’s memory, and he reconstructed it.
I went back to work.
Later, Wigginton told me that he almost fell asleep at the wheel as he drove home. He made it to his couch, where he passed out from exhaustion. Minutes later, Jobs called, waking him, telling he needed him in the office. Wigginton rushed in. “Steve was out to change the world,” Wigginton said, “but to be honest, a lot of us never bought into that. Like many of us at Apple, especially on the Mac team, I worked 22 hours a day for one reason, to please Steve. That’s what he demanded of us, and that’s what we cared about. If he criticized us we were crushed, but we lived for his praise.”
***
I’d flown to New York and was working in the magazine’s office there when Steve called. He happened to be in New York, too; he’d bought an apartment in the two-towered San Remo apartment building, which had been built in 1929, and was meeting with the architect IM Pei about renovating it. Pei had never worked on a personal residence, but, as Wigginton inferred, people didn’t say no to Jobs, who was nothing if not persuasive. John Scully learned this, too. As Jobs described in the interview, a couple years earlier he had recruited Scully, then president of Pepsi, to join Apple and help him run the company. Scully was balking at the offer when Jobs famously challenged him, “Are you going to keep selling sugar water to children when you could be changing the world?” Scully joined Apple.
I had plans the evening Steve called me in New York. I was attending Sean Lennon’s birthday party at the Dakota, and called and asked Yoko if I could bring Steve along. She said she’d enjoy meeting him. I called him back and invited him. He said it sounded fun.
After the party, Steve and I left the Dakota. A few dozen people were still outside with candles. Someone plaintively strummed a guitar and a girl sang, “Across the Universe.”
Steve and I walked down 72nd Street—it was raining harder. We talked about the saddest moment at the party. Harry Nilsson had led everyone in a song for Sean, a rousing “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow.” Afterward, Sean said, “If my dad were here we’d sing, ‘For they’re jolly good fellows.’”
We walked in silence for a while and then I mentioned the party again, what seemed to be an extraordinary moment, Andy Warhol thrilled to have drawn a circle. Steve seemed less interested in the famous artist drawing on the Mac than in Sean. He explained, “It’s that older people sit down and ask, ‘What is it?’ but a child asks, ‘What can I do with it?’”
***
At one point during the Interview, Steve had said, “I’ll always stay connected with Apple.” Of course it was prescient, and particularly ironic because he would soon be fired by the Apple board and John Scully. Jobs continued, “I hope that throughout my life I’ll sort of have the thread of my life and the thread of Apple weave in and out of each other, like a tapestry. There may be a few years when I’m not there, but I’ll always come back.” He did. Scully left, Apple was again in trouble, and Steve, who in the break from Apple founded NeXT, another computer company, and acquired the fledgling animation studio, Pixar, from George Lucas, returned. He continued, “And that’s what I may try to do. The key thing to remember about me is that I’m still a student. I’m still in boot camp. If anyone is reading any of my thoughts, I’d keep that in mind. Don’t take it all too seriously. If you want to live your life in a creative way, as an artist, you have to not look back too much. You have to be willing to take whatever you’ve done and whoever you were and throw them away. What are we, anyway? Most of what we think we are is just a collection of likes and dislikes, habits, patterns. At the core of what we are is our values, and what decisions and actions we make reflect those values. That is why it’s hard doing interviews and being visible: As you are growing and changing, the more the outside world tries to reinforce an image of you that it thinks you are, the harder it is to continue to be an artist, which is why a lot of times, artists have to go, ‘Bye. I have to go. I’m going crazy and I’m getting out of here.’ And they go and hibernate somewhere. Maybe later they re-emerge a little differently.”
The evening of party, Steve and I turned on Columbus Avenue and talked more about the long-term promise of technology. I asked Steve what was coming down the road—way down the road, how else technology would change life, and if he would be at the forefront of whatever it is. “That’s for the next generation,” he said. “I think an interesting challenge in this area of intellectual inquiry is to grow obsolete gracefully, in the sense that things are changing so fast that certainly by the end of the Eighties, we really want to turn over the reins to the next generation, whose fundamental perceptions are state-of-the-art perceptions, so that they can go on, stand on our shoulders and go much further. It’s a very interesting challenge, isn’t it? How to grow obsolete with grace.”
I asked what he might do if he were to retire from Apple. With a few hundred million dollars, he could do anything he wanted to. He took a moment to answer, and when he did, he said, “Well, my favorite things in life are books, sushi and….” He stopped. “My favorite things in life don’t cost any money. It’s really clear that the most precious resource we all have is time.”