The irony is that one of the last things I said before going to bed was to my girlfriend, with whom I shared my concern of the total absence of any reference to Steve during Apple’s latest event. I talked to her about Scoble’s post on Google+:

I’m hearing that Steve Jobs won’t be at tomorrow’s press event. He’s just not feeling well enough to come out in public, I hear (and yes, that makes me sad, the industry will really miss him and they will see again tomorrow why). I keep wishing that these continued rumors are wrong, but know in my head that they probably are right.

and said, “you know, maybe he’s at the hospital or something. One day we might hear he’s dead just like that, out of the blue”. Of course I never expected that day would be today, the day following the event.

It really is Steve-ian to have stayed CEO until the last possible moment. Of course the words of Steve’s resignation keep coming back into my head.

I have always said if there ever came a day when I could no longer meet my duties and expectations as Apple’s CEO, I would be the first to let you know. Unfortunately, that day has come.

But like many others I wouldn’t believe they meant his health condition had been decreasing. I thought he wanted some rest for the last years, if not months, of his life. I thought he would be there around the time his biography came out. I thought he would take time to have his house finally built. But no. Like so many geniuses and heroes before him, he fought until the last moment, and Death has come to him sooner than it should.

Of course I am still overwhelmed by the news and all the testimonials that are pouring out everywhere. I will take some time to reflect and think about what this news for Apple, even for me. As far as the website is concerned, I was working on the next version that would come out in 2-3 weeks. With today’s news I will transform the project into an online tribute to our greatest hero, the man who has changed the world several times over, one of the greatest innovators and entrepreneurs in history: our Steve.

On that subject, I was blessed with two recent findings of great sets of photographs of Steve during his NeXT days (my favorite).

First, thanks to reader JB Durand who shared this with me back in July, you can find on Flickr a great set of pictures (by Esther Dyson) from the PC Forum shows of the late 1980s, including pictures of Steve for the 1984, 1985 and 1990 instances. One example below:

I was also fortunate to be contacted by photographer Robert Holmgren three weeks ago about portraits of Steve Jobs he made while Steve was still CEO of NeXT. Again, awesome pictures:

Robert has a couple of blog posts where he explain how he took those photographs and dealt with a difficult subject (complete with the hi-res versions of these pictures). He also has fun stories about his signed Macintosh and a trip to the Jobses’ garage, including an encounter with Steve’s father, Paul. Be sure to check it out.

I am not adding these pictures to the website just yet, because I am working hard on the next version of the website, which I hope to be able to release after the iPhone 5 introduction. They will be on that new version. Thanks Robert!

Lastly, compliment of a friend of mine, and still along the lines of a “Steve Jobs Museum”, a great find on the original booklet made by Paul Rand to explain his work on the NeXT logo to Steve Jobs (scroll down to Identity Presentations). Steve loved it so much he hugged Paul as a sign of gratitude, as told by Randall E. Stross in Steve Jobs and the NeXT Big Thing. The booklet was actually the only piece of branded marketing made by NeXT in 1987, along with a Tshirt (before the NeXT Cube was introduced).

For more about Paul Rand, check out this YouTube video where Steve talks about their work relationship.

I’ve always thought that the only positive thing that would result from Steve Jobs’ withdrawal from the public spotlight would be the flurry of stories to pour out from all corners of the Wold Wide Web. His recent resignation proved me right. To save you time and effort, here is my personal selection among the several dozens of articles and stories I have read in the past three weeks. If you think a worthy one is missing, do not hesitate to mention it in the comments.

The big news

• Steve Jobs’ resignation letter this one will go down in history
• Tim Cook’s internal letter to all Apple employees  leaked to Ars Technica

Homages

• Walt Mossberg: Essay: Jobs’s Departure as CEO of Apple Is the End of an Extraordinary Era Walt Mossberg comes back on Steve Jobs’ career (disclaimer: no emotional or particularly insightful comments)
• David Pogue: Steve Jobs Reshaped Industries nice article
• Steve: Who’s Going to Protect Us From Cheap and Mediocre Now? by former Apple France boss Jean-Louis Gassée, including a perspicacious metaphor about Steve riding the animal inside him
• Michael Moritz: Jobs founded Apple not once but twice Michael Moritz wrote The Little Kingdom, the first book about Apple — in addition to the infamous TIME portrait The Updated Book of Jobs. He later went on to fund Google and became a millionaire.
• Om Malik (GigaOm): Steve Jobs and the sound of silence a poignant hommage by Om
• No, Apple Won’t Be the Same Without Steve Jobs Mike Elgan over at Cult of Mac pretty much sums up my opinion on the post-Jobs Apple, including a personal favorite:
  

  The trouble with dictatorship or absolute monarchy is that success or failure depend entirely upon the quality of the despot. That’s why they fail. And that’s why a democracy that limits the power of leaders is best — it still works, more or less, even when incompetent morons are in power.
  But what about when the dictator is literally the single best person to lead? In those almost non-existently rare instances, despotism is by far the best form of government. Heaven, for example, is not a democracy.

• Apple Employees React to Steve Jobs’s Resignation (The Daily Beast)
• Where Some Earn Enmity, Jobs Won Affection (New York Times) about Steve’s uniqueness
• The NY Times has a very nice page with most of Steve Jobs patents – possible source of inspiration for the next version of all about Steve Jobs.com
• YouTube tribute: “We are all Steve”
• Adweek released an edited version of the Think Different ad with Steve Jobs in his right place at the end (the shot is from the 1981 video before he goes on TV for the first time)

Steve Jobs stories

• The Wall Street Journal’s compilation of Steve Jobs quotes good selection
• The First Time I Met Steve Jobs… Fast Company has a very nice compilation of a number of Steve Jobs stories that have come out after the resignation
• Icon Ambulance Vic Gundotra, former Microsoftee and current VP of Social at Google, tells the story of a call from Steve Jobs on a Sunday morning
• Steve Jobs’ Two-Minute Lesson by Forbes editor Quentin Hardy
• An Inspiring Story About a Young Apple Fan’s Experience With Steve Jobs an encounter at the NY 5th Avenue Store opening
• My one question for Steve Jobs in 2000 recollection from a former Apple intern
• So, Steve Jobs has left his role as Apple’s CEO nice anecdote of an encounter on Apple’s campus by former employee David Cairns
• Apple all-star alumni recall Steve Jobs’ lessons on SFGate
• You’re the ones internal Apple employee meeting
• An encounter at a restaurant by Ryan at Gdgt

Rediscovered treasures

• Joe Nocera at the NY Times gives away (PDF) a great profile on Steve Jobs he wrote back in 1986 (during the early NeXT days) for Esquire
• How Apple works: Inside the world’s biggest startup the Fortune article is finally released. Apparently author Adam Lashinsky will turn it into a book later next year
• David Pogue dug out an old article of his from 1998
• The old story (related in Alan Deutschman’s The Second Coming) on the joke played by Steve and Larry Ellison on a naive guy who thought he could run Apple, back in 1998

On Steve’s health

• Steve Jobs: ‘Unfortunately, That Day Has Come’ BusinessWeek reports Steve spent a full day at the Apple campus before he tendered his resignation, including an ‘emotional’ meeting with his executive team
• Rarity of Steve Jobs’ cancer and treatment provides few predictions, few options The San Jose Mercury News confirms that no media/doctor, unless directly involved, know and can predict anything about Steve’s condition
• Jobs Struggled With Health Problems for Years The Wall Street Journal comes back on a decade of fight
• My Neighbor, Steve Jobs a touching story from a Palo Alto resident

Here is the letter most of you will have already read I’m sure.

August 24, 2011 06:34 PM Eastern Daylight Time
Letter from Steve Jobs

CUPERTINO, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–To the Apple Board of Directors and the Apple Community:

I have always said if there ever came a day when I could no longer meet my duties and expectations as Apple’s CEO, I would be the first to let you know. Unfortunately, that day has come.

I hereby resign as CEO of Apple. I would like to serve, if the Board sees fit, as Chairman of the Board, director and Apple employee.

As far as my successor goes, I strongly recommend that we execute our succession plan and name Tim Cook as CEO of Apple.

I believe Apple’s brightest and most innovative days are ahead of it. And I look forward to watching and contributing to its success in a new role.

I have made some of the best friends of my life at Apple, and I thank you all for the many years of being able to work alongside you.

Steve

I will give myself some time to think more deeply about the future of Apple and of course, of Steve himself. What I am dreading the most is the noise that we, “the Apple Community” — and especially we, Steve Jobs admirers — will have to endure in the coming months from ignorant analysts or sensationalist hacks about that historic event. I hope they will show Steve the respect he deserves.

Good luck to Tim Cook for running what is, has always been, and probably always will be, Steve’s company — and certainly his greatest masterwork.

Thank you Steve for the incredible journey you have led Apple and all of us on. I’m sure it is not over. After all, today is the first day of the rest of your life. 

Here’s what I put aside for you:

• July 9: A weird video surfaces from Taiwan. A tea brand shamelessly used an actor to play Steve Jobs and sell bottled tea in a TV commercial. See for yourself:
  
  
  (via Cult of Mac)

• July 8: French magazine Le Point reveals that Steve almost purchased a castle in the South-East of France. Pictured below, the property is valued at around €25m ($36m). Apparently Steve’s wife, Laurene, toured the property herself.
  The article also relates that back in 1985, Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber, a French journalist close to President Francois Mitterrand, apparently asked of the head of state a special present to Steve Jobs for his 30th birthday. I’ve read many stories about that famed birthday, where tons of celebrities attended, including Ella Fitzgerald who was the party singer. Anyway, JJSS (as he is often called) reportedly suggested that the French nationality was offered to the Apple co-founder as a special gift. The French President nonchalantly refused. I think Steve would have appreciated the gift, as he has often testified of his love of France (I have made a compilation of the many times he uses France in Apple demos).

• July 11: a new Tshirt made it to the Apple Gift shop in Cupertino… making fun of the company’s cult of secrecy. I’m buying it next time I go there! (via Macrumors).
  
• July 21: John Gruber of Daring Fireball spotted a nice anecdote about Steve and his legendary curtesy. I am quoting the same thing he did:
  

  The story goes that ESPN president George Bodenheimer attended the first Disney board meeting in Orlando, Florida, just after the company had bought Pixar, the innovative animation factory, and spotted Apple CEO Steve Jobs in a hallway. It seemed like a good time to introduce himself. “I am George Bodenheimer,” he said to Jobs. “I run ESPN.” Jobs just looked at him and said nothing other than “Your phone is the dumbest fucking idea I have ever heard,” then turned and walked away.

• July 21: Philip Elmer-Dewitt dug out a nice chart that compiles all the public data about Apple’s reiumbursements of the expenses of Steve’s famed private jet airplane. I think it is worth mentioning that Steve can use the jet for his personal use, but then of course the company doesn’t reiumburse him of the cost of operating it. The chart is below:

• July 23: after all the nonsense we’ve come to read about Steve’s succession lately (which did grant us a new Steve Jobs quote: “it’s hogwash”, courtesy of the Wall Street Journal) — John Gruber wrote a very good article, the kind that only he knows how to write, on the topic: On Succeeding Steve Jobs. His conclusion: “the obvious structure for a post-Jobs Apple is simply Apple as we know it, without Steve Jobs.” I believe he is 100% right and that’s what we will see, perhaps as early as next year. BUT, and it’s a big BUT, I am not sure Tim Cook can keep the fire alive as Steve did for the next decade. And as I’ve stated before, I think he will have trouble running the company unchallenged the way only the genius-founder Steve Jobs can. His authority to run the super-disciplined fruit company will probably be challenged a couple of years after Steve is gone… Time will tell.

In a fashion that was probably launched by John Sculley, BusinessInsider published an interview of Scotty last month, which is worth a read if you are interested in Apple history and have 15 minutes to spare. The piece is honest, though pretty light on the real reasons of Mike Scott’s departure, namely the lay-offs of Black Wednesday.

For those with severe time-constraints, here are the parts that were the most interesting to me:

BI: What were your impressions on meeting [Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak]?
MS: I never got to see the garage, I just saw it at Markkula’s place up on a hill. Jobs did the talking, and Woz was the quiet one, although more lately Woz has found his voice more. In the early days, we were all so busy, that it was well partitioned over who did what. Woz was doing circuit board itself, Jobs was handling rest of Apple II, Markkula was working on marketing, and I was working on getting us into the manufacturing and all the rest of the business parts.

BI: Was [Steve Jobs] as particular then as he is said to be now, or in the early days was he learning and acting differently?
MS: No, he was maybe more particular. The Apple II case came, it had a beige and a green, so for all the standard colors of beige available in the world, of which there are thousands, none was exactly proper for him. So we actually had to create “Apple beige” and get that registered. I stayed out of it but for weeks, maybe almost six weeks, the original Apple II case, Jobs wanted a rounded edge on it so it didn’t have a hard feel. They spent weeks and weeks arguing exactly how rounded it would be. So that attention to detail is what Steve is known for, but it also is his weakness because he pays attention to the detail of the product, but not to the people.
BI: Can you explain that? So was that your job to make sure you brought in all the right people and he wasn’t very attuned to that?
MS: I don’t know how much he’s changed being a manager, but he would not, for instance! he was never allowed to have much of a staff while he was there because he would not supervise them. He wouldn’t make sure they got their reviews on time or that they got their raises, or that they got the health they need.You have to take care of the people as well as the product. As they say he yells at people, at times you have to yell, but at times you have to be supportive too, and I would say that that’s still what makes Steve, Steve.

That was a dispute you get into — who gets number 1? One of the first things was that of course, each Steve wanted number 1. I know I didn’t give it to Jobs because I thought that would be too much. I don’t remember if it was Woz or Marrkula that got number 1, but it didn’t go to Jobs because I had enough problems anyway.

(Romain’s note: Steve Jobs actually managed to become Apple Employee Number 0)

The other argument at the meetings was would Steve take his dirty feet and sandals off the table, because he sat at one end of the conference table, and Markkula sat at the other end chain smoking. So we had to have special filters in the attic in the ceiling to keep the room filter. I had the smokers on one side and the people with dirty feet on the other.

That’s still the way it works, it’s still in the culture, you want to do things right, not just “good enough.” The alternative business model is like Microsoft, where something’s “good enough” to ship, instead of wanting it “just right.” It’s always been Apple’s goal to ship something we were proud of and something people would be proud to own, and I think that’s still true from thirty years ago.

A little side story that he and I would fight over. If we were negotiating price for parts, we could negotiate a price with a vendor and at the last minute, Steve would come in and bang on the table and demand to get one more penny off. And of course they would give him one more penny off. Then he’d crow “well I see you didn’t do as good a job as you could’ve getting the price down.” And I’m saying, “Yeah but that one more penny might’ve cost us a bit more ill will for times when parts are in short supply.”

BI: Was there tension with you being brought in as, what we call now, “adult supervision.” Did you get the sense that he wanted to be in charge of the company and resented you or anything?
MS: Steve just wants to be Steve. Steve’s never shy about telling you what he wants and where he stands. He’s very straightforward to deal with. Unlike other people that don’t tell you what they mean.

• The New Yorker did a story on the history of the computer mouse, back to Xerox PARC and the famous Steve Jobs visit that supposedly inspired Lisa then Macintosh. One of the mouse’s inventors, Malcom Galdwell, recalls what we already know, that Apple didn’t “steal” the mouse from Xerox. Unfortunately the story can only be accessed by subscribers — I didn’t subscribe just to read it. The abstract is here (not very well done). It contains interesting old sketches and pictures of prototypes, as well as quotations from the piece, such as this one:
  

  “I had a series of ideas that I wanted to bounce off [Jobs], and I barely got two words out of my mouth when he he said, ‘No, no, no, you’ve got to do a mouse.’ I was, like,‘What’s a mouse?’ I didn’t have a clue,” Hovey told Gladwell.

  (via Cult of Mac)

 

• We’ve talked about it earlier: the building of the extension of Pixar’s Emeryville campus, Pixar Phase II, is now over. Check it out on the excellent Pixar blog.

 

• A curious piece of trivia, some study was made to prove that Apple had actually the same effect on fanboys that a religion (or, more appropriately, a cult) on its followers:
  

  As discussed in the new BBC documentary “Secrets of the Superbrands”, when you put an Apple fanatic under an MRI and start mentioning iPhone 5s and iPad 3s, neuroscientists found that Apple tends to stimulate the same parts of the brain as religious imagery does in people of faith.

  No news to me.

 

• And I thought I would never be able to find new keynotes… but no, two oldies came up this past month to add up to my impressive collection. I hope you guys take time to check them out, because they’re both pretty interesting.
  First, an interesting one (and in high quality, too) from 1996, where Steve Jobs still spoke as CEO of NeXT Inc. — but already famed CEO of Pixar — at a Microsoft Developers Conference, about NeXT’s server technologies, WebObjects. In the video he is a late speaker, which is a testament to how unimportant he seemed to be. He is also very casual and humble, as depicted in a number of articles from that time (he was just coming out of his wilderness years). Watch the keynote here (via Daring Fireball).



• The second one I just found, and on YouTube, too! it’s a casual chat Steve Jobs had with then-struggling Mac developers at the end of the 1997 WWDC! Definitely worth a look if you’re interested in Steve Jobs history. Again, it is a testament to Steve’s unchanging character and principles. He stands by the same rules now as he did then,  including the most important one: building great products. He also mentions something I knew from a 1999 interview, quoted below:
  

  About 10 years ago I put in a T1 to my house. I’m actually getting ready to put a 45 mg fiber to my house, because I want to find out what that will be like, because everybody’s going to have that someday. But I have a pretty sophisticated setup; whether I’m at Apple or at Pixar or at my home, I log in and my whole world shows up on any of those computers. It’s all kept on a server. So I carry none of it with me, but wherever I am, my complete world shows up, all my files. Everything. And I have high speed access to all of it. So my office is at home too. And when I’m not in meetings, my work is fundamentally on email.

  in the aforementioned video, we discover Steve’s been working in such an environment since 1990. This is thanks to NeXT’s very advanced ‘inter-personal computing’ (i.e. networking) technology. So basically Steve’s been living ‘in the cloud’ for over 20 years, while we mere mortals will probably find out  what it’s like thanks to a product that he will introduce (if rumors are to be verified) tomorrow. The advancement of NeXT’s technology still continues to amaze me.

 

• Business Insider has published a thorough interview of Apple’s first CEO, Mike Scott. Honestly I haven’t had time to read it yet, so I wo’nt comment on it, but you can be sure I will pretty soon. (via TUAW) Same goes for the Fortune article Inside Apple, which I finally got my hands on last week, but haven’t yet had time to write about.

 

• Conan O’Brien dressed as  the iLeader in a baroque fresco by Fast Company:

 

• I am still waiting for AllThingsD to put up all their sessions’ videos online, but so far of all the extracts I’ve seen, one was particularly funny. It was an extract from the opening interview with Google Chairman Eric Schmidt (disclaimer: my current employer) in which Kara Swisher told him a Steve Jobs anecdote about Android phones being ‘probes in your pocket‘. The funny part was how Steve called the Google search engine: ‘The Borg’, a Star Trek reference, but also a term often used by Fake Steve to describe Microsoft. Once more, in search of satire, he was actually depicting the truth of Steve’s mind.

 

• Some guy did the One More Thing Rap Song. I hate rap but here goes. Weird.

 

• The biggest news hit this morning (French time): iSteve, The Book of Jobs, the much anticipated authorized Steve Jobs biography by Walter Isaacson, is already available for pre-order on Amazon. I won’t pre-order it because I’m sure that by March 2012 I will have an iPad 3 to read it on via the iBookStore… I was pleasantly surprised with the picture on the cover, a vintage portrait of Steve from the Macintosh heyday. I have no idea whether the iLeader was involved in this design or not — although I assume he was. The cover in high res is below:

I am, as I imagine you are, incredibly excited by the coming of this book.

The biggest news is of course that the book is ‘authorized’, meaning Steve, as opposed to previous biographies, helped its making instead of blocking it. What usually happens is that whenever a journalist or writer tries to interview someone from Steve’s entourage, he faces a wall of silence, akin to an omerta. Indeed, they should be wary of what they say, because historically Steve has shown some pretty harsh un-forgiveness with indiscreet friends and relatives.

The most famous example of this trait is Michael Moritz’s 1982 piece, The Updated Book Of Jobs, which he wrote as Time Magazine’s Silicon Valley correspondent (Moritz later wrote the first good book on Apple, and arguably the first Steve Jobs biography, The Little Kingdom). Moritz had been given carte blanche at Apple to write the portrait of Steve Jobs who was a serious candidate to become Man of the Year 1983. Instead, he turned out this much more critical piece, including a testimonial from Steve’s college friend Dan Kottke: “something is happening to Steve that’s sad and not pretty, something related to money and power and loneliness. He’s less sensitive to people’s feelings. He runs over them, snowballs them”. Steve apparently broke all ties with Dan after that article was published.

But this time, Steve is said to give biographist Isaacson acces to his closest friends and relatives. I imagine among the friends there will be Larry Ellison, Bill Campbell, Bob Metcalfe, perhaps Al Gore. I am curious about Steve’s relatives. Will Laurene speak up on her husband? I’ve never found any trace of her speaking of Steve in public. Or perhaps his biological sister Mona? That’s more likely.

The active collaboration of Steve will have of course positive as well as negative effects. So far, previous biographies (such as my personal favorite, Alan Deutschman’s The Second Coming of Steve Jobs) only could be based on interviews of ghosts from Steve’s past life (I’m referring to you, Dan Kottke and Andy Hertzfeld), or of pissed off former employees who had regained their ‘freedom of speech’. This is nicely put by Chris Smith in an article I will refer to below:

In recent years, several biographers have gamely tried to chart the depths of Jobsʼ psyche, with little help from the man himself. He rarely speaks to the press, save for tightly scripted sound bites, so all these accounts are based on talks with old colleagues and Apple Deep Throats, supplemented by occasional in-depth interviews heʼs granted to a few lucky reporters over the years.

Any journalist who’s tried to go a little deeper had to endure Steve’s legendary wrath, as described by Rich Karlgaard in his 2006 WSJ article Vladimir llyich Jobs? (for the heck of me I can’t find a link to it, but I have a scanned version on my Mac):

Years ago, he phoned me on a Saturday morning and tried to squash a story my then-magazine, Upside, was about to print on NeXT, Inc. NeXT was his second startup after Apple. But it was failing and our story said so. On the phone Mr. Jobs cooed and threatened, including warnings to “watch my backside” and strangely, “don’t ride a bicycle alone on dark roads.” We ran the story. Michael Moritz, before he was a venture capitalist funding Yahoo and Google, once covered Apple as a Time magazine reporter. Mr. Jobs repeatedly tried to get him fired. Dozens of journalists have stories like this.

Of course, it’s no wonder in these circumstances that Steve Jobs portraits tend to be dark. What’s to be feared from an authorized biography is the opposite, that it’d be too polished. The only example I can think of is the excellent TV documentary on the history of Pixar, The Pixar Story (2007). Jobs appears in the film, but in exchange, there is barely any mention of Alvy Ray Smith, one of Pixar’s visionary co-founders , whom Steve fired in the early 1990s (after they’d had a rough argument in which Alvy criticized NeXT and Steve, Alvy’s Southerner accent).

An excellent article was posted by Michael Wolff on this precise issue, it’s called The Steve Jobs Biography: What Story Will Be Told? Wolff makes a wish that Isaacson will perhaps criticize Steve to sell even more copies. Quote:

If Isaacson likes to associate with great men, to imagine himself as a great, too, what he really understands is the shape of the modern career, the strategic, even Faustian mastery of the commercial world that produces epic success. That’s the darkness that animates Isaacson’s Kissinger book— preternatural talent depends on preternatural ruthlessness.

Finally let’s come back to the title of the book. It’s not only interesting because it re-uses the clever pun Moritz made up in his 1982 article (as well as the not-so-clever use of Apple’s trademark i prefix, already used by Steve Wozniak in his own autobiograhy, iWoz). It’s also to me the latest in Steve’s many whimsical allusions to biblical culture. I can think of several, including the Tablet of Commandments during the iPad introduction, or the clever quote pictured below: “we’ve consulted every possible higher authority“ (to make the G5 run cooler), during the Macworld 2006 keynote.

Which leads me to the article I mentioned earlier, by Chris Smith, which is three years old now, but which I only stumbled across very recently, appropriately called Is Steve Jobs God? It is definitely one of the finest (and most delightful to read) pieces I’ve ever read on the state of Steve Jobs literature, and it’s error-free to boot. I agree with its final stance, that basically the best Steve Jobs portrait so far is perhaps by Dan Lyons, aka Fake Steve (in his blog and his derived book, oPtion$):

Much like Hunter S. Thompsonʼs Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, whose phantasmagoric, not strictly factual probing of the rot at the core of the American dream told us more about the shifting cultural winds of ʼ60s-era America than any number of straight histories could, oPtion$ digs deep into the zeitgeist and comes up with a foundation myth that resonates.

The last two paragrahs are too good to be left out. They put the justification for my enthusiasm to build and maintain all about Steve Jobs, which Mike Cassidy called “a digital shrine to a tech god”, in beautiful words:

The gods donʼt have to play by our rules, and Jobs, bless his sometimes Grinchlike heart, is a god for our times, a secular deity who for years has offered us a better tomorrow courtesy of technology and design. Now he has his finger on the pulse of three major industries—computers, music, and movies—and is busily threading them together. In the process, heʼs forging a whole new world. Such is the power of his vision that we cheer his victories as if they were our own and forgive his occasional missteps (remember the underpowered and overpriced Cube?), because, well, God created both the peacock and the mosquito, and his ways are sometimes inscrutable.Even if you spend your Sunday mornings with the Times instead of the Bible, youʼre probably still looking for the meaning of it all. I know I am.
Jobs, the computer geek who elevated design to high art—and who once dressed up as Jesus for a Halloween party—has provided that spiritual heft for many of us. Thereʼs a reason Apple fans used to make Kool-Aid jokes. Forget the legions of politicians, prognosticators, and fire-and-brimstone preachers: When Jobs talks of a new day rising, we canʼt wait for dawn to break.

Steve, I’m definitely not the only one waiting for your Holy Book!

But no (and frankly it continues to amaze me) — I sometimes stumble across never-seen-(by-me)-before pictures of Steve’s past, and it’s always refreshing.

Today is one of those occasions:

• the first two pics are from the very early days of Apple, 1976. They’re of very fine quality, for once.
• the following two from 1980 and 1981
• the following pic with John Sculley and Woz, is from the Apple IIc introduction event in February 1984. It is not new but of better quality than the previous version, and it’s corrected, as I had (like many) misattributed it to the Mac introduction of January 24
• the following two are from the April 24 1984 Apple event (anyone knows what that one was?)
• the following is from Apple’s Annual Shareholders Meeting of 1985
• the following from 1988
• the second to last is very interesting. I only had a cropped version of it. This is the only pic I’ve found of Steve with Peter Van Cuylenburg, who was brought in as COO of NeXT by investor Canon in 1992. He only stayed one year, as he betrayed Steve (even worse than Sculley) by calling up Sun’s Scott McNealy to have him buy NeXT and install him as CEO. It was a professionally fatal blow to Steve.
• the last pic is from Steve’s ‘wildest wilderness year’, 1994. He is posing with Morgan Stanley execs for a NYT article about NeXTSTEP. I have found the article in the NYT archive, have a look at it, it’s pretty telling that Steve is barely mentioned in there…

Steve Jobs is a biological Arab-American with roots in Syria

Interesting excerpts:

“My father was a self-made millionaire who owned extensive areas of land which included entire villages,” Jandali said.

“My daughter Mona is a famous writer, and my biological son is Steve Jobs, the chief executive of Apple. The reason he was put up for adoption was because my girlfriend’s father was extremely conservative and wouldn’t let her marry me, and she decided to give him up for adoption. Steve is my biological son, but I didn’t bring him up, and he has a family that adopted him. So if it’s said that I’m the ‘father of invention’, then that’s because my biological son is a genius and my daughter a brilliant writer

“I think that if my son Steve had been brought up with a Syrian name he would have achieved the same success. He has a brilliant mind. And he didn’t finish his university studies. That’s why I think he would have succeeded whatever his background. I don’t have a close relationship with him. I send him a message on his birthday, but neither of us has made overtures to come closer to the other. I tend to think that if he wants to spend time with me he knows where I am and how to get hold of me.

I’m proud of my son and his accomplishments, and of my work. Of course I made mistakes, and if I could go back in time I would have put some things right. I would have been closer to my son, but all’s well that ends well. Steve Jobs is one of the most successful people in America, and Mona is a successful academic and novelist.”