The Second Coming of Steven Jobs

Originally published in the December 1986 issue

(Click here for more on Steve Jobs from Esquire.)

You see them everywhere in Silicon Valley. They are young and unattached and usually men. They favor jeans and T-shirts, and they live in $400-a-month apartments. You see them early in the morning, driving up Route 101 toward the squat, ugly buildings that serve as offices in the Valley, and you see them ten or twelve or fourteen hours later, as they straggle, one by one, out of those same buildings late at night. Almost always, their briefcases are bulging with things they want to work on at home, after dinner.

To an outsider, they can seem a little odd, these people who are drawn to Silicon Valley. Certainly they are single-minded. For although the Valley is awash in money, that is not what has drawn them here. Not really. The Valley is filled with natural beauty, but that does not move them either. They are not here to find love or to enjoy their leisure time. They have come here to work, and they are happiest when they are putting in their fourteen hours in front of their computer terminals. Work is what excites them, what fuels them. Those who consider themselves the luckiest are the people who work for the smaller and newer companies, the "start-ups," where 90-hour weeks are common, and where the intensity of the work experience is as powerful and as addicting as any drug.

Maybe that's not so odd. We live, after all, in a culture in which an increasingly large number of people view their work in a similar fashion -- not just as a part of life, but as the essence of life. It's just that in the Valley everyone is like that.

And even as Silicon Valley represents the apotheosis of the modern work ethic to the rest of the country, so are there people within the Valley who represent it, in even purer form, to those already here. There are monks among the priests. There is Steven P. Jobs.

He sits at the head of a small conference table in a small room on the second floor. He is chairing a staff meeting. Around the table are seven other people, five men and two women, the oldest of whom is forty. They compose his current inner circle, the key members of a team he has been assembling since a year ago last September -- ever since he left Apple Computer, the company he began in 1976 when he was 21 years old.

The company he had loved.

Now he has a new company to love, and he has named his new company -- his life-after-Apple company -- NeXT Inc. Though the name reeks of all-too-obvious symbolism, the small e signifies nothing in particular. Almost before he knew what his new company was going to do, Jobs spent $100,000 to have Paul Rand, the grand old man of American graphics, design the company logo; Rand came up with the lowercase e. This extravagant bit of aesthetic detail is a classic Jobs touch, of the sort he was famous for at Apple.

It is late July. The NeXT staff has been deep in "start-up" for eight months. They are building a computer. Not just any computer, mind you, but the neatest, greatest, whizziest computer you ever saw. "We're going to take the technology to the next level," says Jobs enthusiastically, immodestly. The schedule is as ambitious as the computer itself, for they are attempting to have it completed by the fall of 1987. Already there is a feeling that time is running short. A manufacturing plant is still not past the planning stages. People -- "great people," "people with our kind of values" -- still have to be hired by the handful to add to the thirty or so already on board. There are still major technological hurdles to overcome, and a sales force to put in place, and complicated software to write, and a million other things to do. And Jobs is everywhere -- advising, pushing, berating, encouraging. This new computer has become his primary focus, to the exclusion of everything else, including his personal life. What there is of it.

By nature and inclination, Jobs is one of those who have to dominate any room they're in, and so it is here. It's not quite right to say he is sitting through this staff meeting, because Jobs doesn't much sit through anything; one of the ways he dominates is through sheer movement. One moment he's kneeling in his chair, the next minute he's slouching in it; the next he has leaped out of his chair entirely and is scribbling on the blackboard directly behind him. He is full of mannerisms. He bites his nails. He stares with unnerving earnestness at whoever is speaking. His hands, which are slightly and inexplicably yellow, are in constant motion: pushing back his hair, propping up his chin, buried snugly under his armpits. When he hears something that intrigues him, he curls his head toward his shoulder, leans forward, and allows a slight smile to cross his lips. When he hears something he dislikes, he squints to register his disapproval. He would not be a good poker player. His speech is also mannered, full of slangy phrases. "If we could pull this off," he is saying enthusiastically, "it would be really, really neat!" "The original idea was good," he is saying about some failed project at Apple. "I don't know what happened. I guess somebody there bozoed out." Around the room there are knowing smirks. To bozo is a favorite Jobs verb, but where he once used it mainly to describe some bit of stupidity perpetrated by, say, IBM, he now uses it just as often when he's talking about Apple.

Back in May of 1985, Jobs lost a power struggle to Apple president John Sculley, a man to whom he had once been so close people said they finished each other's sentences. It was awkward, bitter, and very public. In what was labeled a reorganization, Jobs had been humiliatingly dismissed as head of the Macintosh computer division.

Although he remained the titular chairman of the board, it was a eunuch's position. Just in case anybody missed the point, Sculley announced before a meeting of analysts that Jobs would no longer have operating responsibilities at Apple. Four months later, Jobs walked.

Now, more than a year later, he insists that he has managed to put Apple behind him. Surely, this is wishful thinking. On the simplest level, Apple gives Jobs a common point of reference with everyone in the room. They, too, once worked at Apple, and all but one quit when he did. (The other had left previously.) They left because they thought he had been treated badly, but also because they could see Apple was changing: it was becoming more "corporate," less freewheeling. For better or worse (and it was usually both), Apple had always been a reflection of Jobs' personality, a mirror of his eccentricities and passions. He used to talk, for instance, about making Apple an "insanely great" place to work, but he wasn't talking about irresistible perks or liberal benefits. Instead, he was talking about creating an environment where you would work harder and longer than you'd ever worked in your life, under the most grinding of deadline pressure, with more responsibility than you ever thought you could handle, never taking vacations, rarely getting even a weekend off … and you wouldn't care!

You'd love it! You'd get to the point where you couldn't live without the work and the responsibility and the grinding deadline pressure. All of the people in this room had known such feelings about work -- feelings that were exhilarating and personal and even intimate -- and they'd known them while working for Steve Jobs. They all shared a private history of their work together at Apple. It was their bond, and no one who was not there could ever fully understand it.

With personal computers so ubiquitous today, you tend to forget that the industry is still barely ten years old; the Apple II, the machine that began it all, was unleashed upon an unsuspecting world in 1977. You forget, that is, until you sit in a room full of people who have built them and realize how young they are. Jobs himself is only thirtyone.

If anything, he looks younger. He is lithe and wiry. He is wearing faded jeans (no belt), a white cotton shirt (perfectly pressed), and a pair of brown suede wing-tipped shoes. There is a bounce to his step that betrays a certain youthful cockiness; the quarterback of your high school football team used to walk that way. His thin, handsome face does not even appear to need a daily shave. And that impression of eternal youth is reinforced by some guileless, almost childlike traits: By the way, for instance, he can't resist showing off his brutal, withering intelligence whenever he's around someone he doesn't think measures up. Or by his almost willful lack of tact. Or by his inability to hide his boredom when he is forced to endure something that doesn't interest him, like a sixth grader who can't wait for class to end.

Which, as it happens, is how he's acting now. Dan'l Lewin, NeXT's director of marketing, has just handed out a complicated diagram outlining his various responsibilities and lines of authority. When Jobs gets his copy his eyes begin to glaze.

As Lewin attempts to explain, somewhat convolutedly, what it all means, Jobs fidgets.

He rocks back and forth in his chair. He rolls his eyes. He squints. About a minute into Lewin's tortured explanation, Jobs can endure no more. "I think these charts are bullshit," he interrupts. "Just bullshit." Lewin stumbles momentarily, then tries to recover, but Jobs won't relent. Finally, Lewin tries to retrieve all the copies of his diagram. "What are you doing?" Jobs asks pointedly as Lewin tries to pull his away.

"If you think it's bullshit, there's no point in talking about it." Others in the room try to assuage Lewin's hurt feelings, but not Jobs. His mind is already elsewhere. "Can we do something really important?" he is asking. "Can we get that electric outlet fixed?"

The meeting drones on. A finance man comes into the room to report the details of a just-completed negotiation. "You did a really, really great job on this," says Jobs when he has finished. (The day before, Jobs had told the man, "This deal is crap.") The man leaves and the discussion turns to other matters. Jobs prods Bud Tribble, a thin, diffident man who is heading his software team, to hire more people. He talks about people in the Valley he'd like to steal away and discusses potential employees who've been in for interviews. As he speaks, he visibly perks up; his mind is engaged again.

"We've got to start thinking about middle managers, even now!" he urges his staff. Then an exhortation: "We're not just building a computer, we're building a company!" And after the meeting has broken up, a final, dazed thought: "I'd forgotten how hard it is to start up a company." There is a hint of joy in his voice.

The last time Steven Jobs started a company, he had no idea how hard it would be. How could he? When he and Steve Wozniak founded Apple he was practically a teenager, a college dropout still living through what he calls "my existential phase."

In college, Jobs had found himself attracted to Eastern philosophy and had also become interested in the power of diets, devouring such books as The Mucusless Diet Healing System by a nineteenth-century Prussian named Arnold Ehret. Those interests remained strong even after he returned to the Santa Clara Valley, where he had grown up.

He became a fruitarian and lectured his friends on the evils of bagels. (Jobs' diet still consists almost entirely of fruit, nuts, and vegetables, but he stopped proselytizing about it long ago.) He meditated. At a time when hippies were becoming an endangered species, Jobs let his hair grow long, smoked dope, and frequently went without shoes. He joined a farm commune, but quickly became disillusioned and wound up back in the Valley.

Jobs wanted to go to India but couldn't afford passage. To earn money, he began doing bits of work for Nolan Bushnell's Atari Corp., helping to build video games. Jobs was no engineer, but he was very quick and very smart -- and very difficult. Even then, he was blunt to the point of tactlessness, and that, combined with his unwillingness to shower regularly, caused most Atari employees to find him insufferable. But Bushnell, who is something of an eccentric himself, thought Jobs was valuable to have around, and kept throwing him work. The arrangement suited Jobs perfectly. When he needed money, Bushnell provided him the means to earn it; when he didn't, he could cut loose from Atari for a spell and go do something else. It was the one time in his life he thought about work the way an assembly-line worker might: simply as a means to put money in his pocket.

In the summer of 1974, Jobs finally made it to India, where he did all the things a young, impressionable seeker of truth does in such a place. He attended religious festivals and visited monasteries. He had his head shaved by a guru. He came down with dysentery and returned to California in the fall. Yet the fascination with spiritualism did not fade; Jobs now says he was so serious about it that after India he contemplated going to Japan to join a monastery, if only for the experience. "There is a great tradition in that kind of life," he says. "It offers another kind of training, another way of thinking." At the least, it had a strong allure for a kid who was floundering around California, trying to figure out what to do with his life.

Meanwhile, Jobs had another side, perhaps best typified by his friendship with Steve Wozniak. Woz, as everyone called him, didn't give a hoot about mucusless diets or monasteries, and when Jobs was around Woz, which was often, he didn't spend much time talking about such things. It was a waste of breath. What Wozniak cared about passionately, and what he could talk about endlessly, were digital electronics and computers. He was "the hacker," to use his own description of himself, whose goal in life was to become an engineer for Hewlett-Packard, where he could get paid for doing what he loved. Although Woz was also a college dropout, by 1973 he had achieved his goal, only to find it disappointing. He was assigned to work on calculators, not computers.

Although Wozniak was five years older than Jobs, they were best friends. In the intervening years, they have had their differences, but Wozniak can still say with considerable fondness, "We had great times together." They were both a little out of the mainstream, and they both had an abiding interest in electronics and computers. To be sure, Jobs' interest was never quite as abiding or as single-minded as Wozniak's, perhaps because he was never the engineer Woz was, or perhaps because he never had the patience to work out the intricate, painstaking problems that Woz found so engrossing.

But he had done the science-fair bit in high school, had worked in electronic-supply shops, and had spent a summer at Hewlett-Packard. One of the "great times" Wozniak and Jobs had together was building electronic "blue boxes," those infamous devices that allowed you to use the telephone without paying. Jobs was the one who decided they should sell the boxes, which they did haphazardly for about a year.

At around the same time Jobs was trying to decide whether or not to run off to a monastery, his friend Wozniak was attempting to build a small computer. The invention of the microprocessor had made such a machine theoretically possible, and Wozniak and his hacker friends had all become obsessed with the idea of creating one. It was all they did, all the time. They met informally at the Homebrew Computer Club, where they shared information and showed off their latest designs. None of the people in the Homebrew Computer Club had any real sense that microcomputers had much value outside the universe of the hacker. They did it mainly as a hobby, to prove to themselves and each other that such a thing could be done. Of course, none of the big computer companies like Hewlett-Packard had any sense of that, either, which is why none of them were trying to build one. Hewlett-Packard, in fact, turned Wozniak down when he showed the company one of his circuit boards and asked to pursue his hobby for the company. It was still a world of mainframes -- big, lumbering machines.

The one person who had some inkling that these smaller machines might have some kind of broader appeal -- vague though that inkling was, unarticulated though it largely remained -- was Steve Jobs. Somehow he got it, when almost no one else did.

And so his other side, his computer side, began to exert its tug on him. He found himself spending more and more time with Wozniak. They would talk for hours about the technical issues Woz was trying to solve, discussing the kinds of choices Woz was making. What kind of microprocessor should the computer have? What sort of memory device should it use? Jobs was inexorably drawn to Wozniak's machine. By the early part of 1976, he was pestering Wozniak about starting a little company so they could sell the circuit boards Woz was designing. And after that … well, you know what happened after that. You know the legend of Jobs and Wozniak. How they started out in Jobs' garage.

How they worked day and night to create the Apple II. How they became modern-day folk heroes. Jobs says today that at some point early on he had to make a conscious choice: the East or Apple. More recently, he adds, he has come to believe that there was far less difference between the two life choices than appeared to him at the time. "Ultimately," he claims, "it was the same thing." That remark seems more than a little facile, especially when the man saying it is barreling down the freeway in his Mercedes coupe, playing a new compact disc by the Rolling Stones. But certainly there is one way in which the analogy is absolutely true. Jobs' commitment to building the Apple II -- to his work -- was as all-consuming as any commitment he would have had to make in a monastery. In a sense, he had found his monastery in his garage.

Was it his age that allowed him to work with such maniacal intensity? Sure, that was part of it. If you ask Jobs about the difference between then and now, the first thing he'll say is, "Well, I can't stay up four nights in a row like I used to."

Was it the cocoonlike atmosphere of the garage where he and Wozniak were isolated with their dreams? Sure, that was part of it too; the excitement in the garage was palpable, and anyone who spent any time around Jobs in those days felt some of it rub off. The simple satisfaction of building something was an important part of it: the satisfaction a good carpenter knows. And so was the thought of making money, especially for Wozniak, whose devotion to work was never like Jobs'. Wozniak has always been quite direct: once building the Apple computer was no longer his hobby but his means of employment, his main motivation was money.

But with Jobs, there was always something more, something that ties into the larger culture. Although he was working himself to exhaustion, his approach to work was extremely narcissistic -- it was a form of self-expression, of pleasure. His loyalty was not to some faceless corporation but to himself; Jobs likes to say that he is one of those people who wakes up in the morning, looks in the mirror, and says: "Am I doing what I want to do?" Fundamentally, his sense of who he was, which he had been searching for all along, became a function of what he did.

Few people in the country took things to the extreme Jobs did. But during the period when he was in the garage, the young professional class was embracing many of these same ideas about work. Work was no longer supposed to be work, it was supposed to be fun. It was supposed to have some larger purpose. It was supposed to offer a form of self-identity. And if it didn't offer those elements -- if you woke up one morning and couldn't say to yourself that you were doing what you wanted to be doing -- well, then you quit. Your father's loyalty may have been to the company or perhaps to the family he had to provide for. But your loyalty was to yourself, in a manner that had once been the style mainly of artists and ballplayers.

In Silicon Valley, the company most people wanted to work for, pre-Jobs, was Hewlett-Packard. At HP, people were well treated and well paid, and the company was renowned for never laying anyone off, which provided comforting security to anyone who was even remotely competent. But it was -- and is -- a very large corporation, with more than eighty thousand people, and while you can do good work there, you're also part of a huge bureaucracy. In return for the loyalty the company shows you, it expects the same kind of loyalty. Pre-Jobs, that was about what people thought they had a right to expect from their employers.

In the Jobs era, the young engineers streaming into the Valley had a different set of expectations, and they gravitated to companies like Apple. One former Apple executive remembers the first time he spoke to Jobs about working there. "I said, 'Steve, I really want to come work at Apple, but I don't want to do anything regular. Can you help me find something really, really neat to do?' " Nobody at Apple was ever willing to do anything "regular." Everybody wanted to do something "really, really neat." The implicit promise at Apple was that everybody would discover, while giving themselves up entirely to their really neat projects, the same feelings of pleasure and worth and all the rest of it that Jobs had felt when he was building the Apple II. They all wanted that magical experience. Not least of all Steve Jobs himself.

"The hardest thing," Steve Jobs is saying, "is trying to have a personal life as well as a work life." Well, yes. It is late on a Tuesday afternoon, and Jobs is behind the wheel of his car, en route to a meeting in San Francisco that will start in an hour. The meeting, it seems obvious, could have been better timed. Jobs' girlfriend, whom he's been seeing for two years, will be returning to Silicon Valley in, oh, three hours or so. The two of them had spent a rare weekend water-skiing -- something Jobs says he hasn't done since he was a teenager -- and though he returned on Sunday to get back to NeXT, she stayed behind for a few days. Before he left, he told her they would have dinner together the night she got back. Now, of course, those plans are out the window.

Late that afternoon, Jobs spent a few minutes at his Macintosh writing her a pagelong note explaining why he wouldn't be home when she arrived. "I miss you terribly," he wrote. Then he raced to his house, a huge old mansion in the hills of the Valley, to drop off the note. A small thing, perhaps. Or perhaps not. The rumblings around the NeXT office are that Jobs' girlfriend thinks he spends too much time working, and that as a result they don't have "a life together." After spending a few days with Jobs, you find yourself sympathizing with her. The very next day, Jobs committed himself to attend what would surely be a lengthy board meeting of Pixar (a computer-graphics company he had bought from George Lucas) in San Francisco on Saturday. He had previously made plans to leave town Sunday for meetings in Minneapolis with his new ad agency. So there went the weekend. It is hard to have a personal life and a work life; it's especially hard when all the compromises come on the personal side, but that's the way it's always been with Steven Jobs.

Why? He is worth, after all, $150 million or so. When he left Apple there was no adventure he could not have tried. Yet he wound up forming a company in which he is recreating as closely as possible the life he knew before: the life of not just work but nonstop work, no-other-life work. Why is this the path he chose?

On the way up to San Francisco, Jobs is musing on this and other matters.

"Whenever you do any one thing intensely over a period of time," he says, "you have to give up other lives you could be living." He gives a shrug that implies that this is a small

price. "You have to have a real single-minded kind of tunnel vision if you want to get anything significant accomplished," Again, the same it's-worth-it shrug. "Especially if the desire is not to be a businessman, but to be a creative person. …" But isn't he a businessman?

"My self-identity does not revolve around being a businessman, though I recognize that is what I do. I think of myself more as a person who builds neat things. I like building neat things. I like making tools that are useful to people. I like working with very bright people. I like interacting in the world of ideas, though somehow those ideas have to be tied to some physical reality. One of the things I like the most is dropping a new idea on a bunch of incredibly smart and talented people and then letting them work it out themselves. I like all of that very, very much." There is a note of excitement in his voice. "I've had lots of girlfriends," he adds. "But the greatest high in my life was the day we introduced the Macintosh."

And Apple?

"Apple," he says slowly, searching for the right analogy, "Apple is like an intense love affair with a girl you really, really like, and then she decides to drop you and go out with someone who's not so neat." Lewin, who is sitting next to Jobs, immediately chuckles at the seeming absurdity of the comparison, and that makes Jobs chuckle too.

But Jobs truly did love Apple; in a weird way it seems right that he should compare it to a passionate affair.

Mostly he speaks about Apple with more sorrow than anger. There was a time when he thought he would always be connected to it -- taking sabbaticals from time to time, but always coming back. Coming home. He clearly regrets that that possibility no longer exists. He will not say anything at all about Sculley, nor will Sculley speak publicly about Jobs; not long ago the Apple president, under contract to write his autobiography, simply could not bring himself to "tell all" about how he bested Jobs. But both men are obviously saddened by their falling out. One mutual friend recently bumped into a limo driver who occasionally drives both men. "Whenever Sculley or his wife gets in the car," the driver said, "the first thing they ask is, 'How's Steve?' "

We have almost arrived in San Francisco. "I think I have five more great products in me," Jobs says, and then goes off on a long, rambling discourse on the joys of working on computers at this particular moment in history. He compares it to what it must have been like to work for Henry Ford when the automobile was still in its infancy and the technological boundaries were there to be broken. "It must have been the most incredible feeling," he says, "to know that this was going to change America. And it did!" He grins suddenly. "If we can create the kind of company I think we can, it will give me an extreme amount of pleasure."

After the meeting in San Francisco, Jobs and a party of about ten other people went out to dinner. Someone at the table mentioned some films that Jobs had expressed an interest in seeing. The man mentioned that he might be able to bring them by that Friday night and show them in Jobs' living room. Jobs was immediately enthusiastic about the idea, and within the next minute everyone at the table had been invited to Jobs' house for a party on Friday night. "One thing, Steve," the man asked, as they continued discussing plans for the screening, "I don't remember if you have curtains in your living room. Do you?"

The question stopped Jobs in his tracks. He thought about it for a minute. He had been living in the house for two years. "I don't know," he said.

In 1981, at age 26, Jobs was in the odd position of having nothing to do at his own company. He was fantastically rich by then; Apple had gone public the year before. He was chairman of the board. Time magazine was preparing to put him on its cover. And of course the company itself had become one of the great American success stories. By 1981, its revenues were close to $331 million, heading toward $1 billion and beyond, and the Apple II was still the best-known, biggest-selling computer in the world. As the company grew, so did its legend: Jobs' garage became Apple's log cabin.

One thing Jobs never had, not for a day in his life, was control of Apple. Yes, he set the tone, and yes, his input carried considerable weight, but the task of actually running the place always fell to other people -- to Sculley most recently, and before that to Mike Markkula, Apple's original chief executive officer, and Michael Scott, its original president. Both men had come on board in the garage days, when Jobs realized he needed some executives around him who knew a thing or two about business. For a long time, the arrangement worked well. Jobs was the brash visionary; Markkula and Scott made the company run. Jobs put his singular imprint on the company's products; Markkula and Scott got the products out the door.

Around 1980, with the Apple II selling well and the company more or less humming along prosperously, Apple decided to create a new computer, one that could get a foothold in the increasingly important office market. It was called the Lisa project. The importance of the Lisa project guaranteed that the new division was where the action was going to be. All the best engineers in the world would want to help build the machine; all the best marketing people in the world would want to sell it. And Steve Jobs wanted to be in charge of it. Much to his surprise, however, Markkula and Scott turned him down.

Their grounds were that he was too young and inexperienced to manage an organization as large and complex as the Lisa division was bound to become. "I was hurt," Jobs said. "There's no getting around it."

For the previous five years Jobs had always been at the center of things at Apple. Now he was being pushed to the side. He never seriously considered leaving Apple, but he was floundering, searching for a way to fill the void in his life.

At first, he tried to assume the role of minister-without-portfolio inside the company. He would attend an Apple II marketing meeting, and in typical Jobs fashion, within ten minutes of his arrival he would be telling the group that their marketing plans were dogshit. That didn't go over too well. Or he would drop in unannounced at the Lisa division and spend an afternoon looking over the shoulders of the engineers and managers, trying to get people to listen to his ideas. They wouldn't listen. The Lisa division was run by a former Hewlett-Packard man who brought in other people from HP to build the machine, and as the Lisa design became more grandiose and expensive, Jobs became increasingly agitated over the shape it was taking. He thought the people from the big company had brought their big-company mentality with them -- their bells-and whistles, screw-the-cost mentality. Lisa, Jobs was convinced, was not going to save Apple. She might well destroy it. Meanwhile, many at Apple felt, in the words of someone who was there, that "Steve was a royal pain in the butt."

He decided to build the computer that would save Apple from itself. He was the only one who could do it. All he needed was some way to get started without anyone realizing what he was up to. And then he saw it: a small project that had been stumbling along for a few years without being taken very seriously by management. Could he go run that? he asked Scott and Markkula. Yes, they said, by all means. Go. Good luck. See you later. And so, off he went to run this little thing called the Macintosh division. To save Apple. To change the world.

How, exactly, the Macintosh computer was going to change the world is something former Mac group members have a hard time explaining now. The Macintosh is a supremely elegant computer, a technological marvel, but it quite obviously did not create a revolution, and when people point to this feature or that as the element that was going to astonish the world, you get the feeling they are trying to convince themselves more than you.

With the Macintosh project, Steve Jobs was attempting to recapture those glorious days when he and Woz were alone, dreaming their dream, in the garage. "The metaphysical garage," Jobs called the Mac project. He even moved the Mac group into its own "garage," a building away from the rest of Apple, and fostered a culture in which the Mac people thought they were somehow divorced from the company that paid their salaries. Although the Mac group was the one division run by the chairman of the board, the people in the group felt like renegades; a pirate's flag flew above their building. And since the Apple II really did change the world, the Macintosh would have to do the same.

"Very few of us were even thirty years old," says Mike Murray, Macintosh's former director of marketing. "We all felt as though we had missed the civil rights movement. We had missed Vietnam. What we had was the Macintosh."

Hundred-hour weeks -- that's 8:00 a.m. to 10:00 p.m., Sunday through Saturday -- were not unusual. People were working so hard they forgot to eat lunch. They were working so hard they forgot to eat breakfast and lunch. But did anyone complain about all the work? Of course not! They loved it. They were living the dream. They were doing what they had come to Silicon Valley to do.

There were, of course, drawbacks to having a hundred or so twenty-six-year-olds working fourteen-hour days. One was that a lot of mistakes were made, which then had to be corrected. Another was that nobody could step back and get a little perspective.

Especially Jobs. You'd arrive in the morning and Jobs would give you Plan A, and you'd slave over it all day, and then at 7:00 p.m., he'd come by your cubicle to tell you that Plan A had been discarded and here was Plan B (and could you stay late tonight to work on it?). There was a joke people at Apple told: "What's the difference between the Boy Scouts and Apple? The Boy Scouts have adult supervision."

And when the Macintosh finally did come out, the people who had worked so hard on it for so long -- in many cases, two and a half years -- finally took a moment to look up from their desks, and some of them didn't like what they saw. As they had gotten sucked deeper and deeper into the Mac project, other parts of their lives that had once been extremely important had been lost. Marriages had broken up. Friendships had dissolved. People who had poured every ounce of emotional energy into the expectation that the Macintosh would one day change the world started to realize that that wasn't going to happen at all. They became disillusioned. They wondered why they had worked so hard. Slowly, some of the original members of the Mac group began to leave Apple.

The drug had lost its kick.

For Jobs, the Mac experience also came at a price, though of a different sort. Even after the machine had been introduced, there was still a tremendous amount of work to be done: software had to be written for it, and a printer had to be built, just for starters. And because there was a computer on the market, the Mac group was under far more time pressure to put out these products than it had been to build the Mac itself. Jobs tried to rally his troops for their next assault, but it couldn't be done. They were too burned out.

As a result, they started missing deadlines with regularity, which was more than a little annoying to people who had bought Macintosh computers and were now waiting for some software.

Apple eventually merged the Lisa division with the Mac division, which meant that Jobs had more than a thousand employees working for him. Still, he couldn't change his style. He prodded and cajoled and presumed that everyone would put in ninety-hour weeks. It didn't work. Yet Jobs could not bring himself to concede that he was now running a normal corporate division in which people had to live normal lives. He couldn't let go of the metaphysical garage. By the spring of 1985, Apple was about to announce its first quarterly loss ever. Apple's board of directors, and even its president, John Sculley, who had once deferred almost instinctively to Jobs, now wanted him out. In the ensuing three-week power struggle, Jobs never really had a chance. The Macintosh may have saved Apple -- especially when Lisa turned out to be an expensive fiasco. But it also brought down the man who created it.

One night, in his cavernous, sparsely furnished living room, Jobs was talking about his experience building the Macintosh -- an experience he views as one of the highlights of his life. He interrupted himself to retrieve what turned out to be several photograph albums. Then he knelt on the floor, propped the albums against a footrest, and began flipping through them.

The albums were filled with pictures taken at several large parties Jobs had thrown for the Mac group. "This was our Christmas party," he said excitedly as he leafed through the largest of the albums. "It was so great! I hired seventy-five members of the San Francisco Symphony to play for us. A lot of these people are wearing tuxes for the first time. We subsidized tuxedoes for the manufacturing people because we wanted everybody to be able to come. It was really important for everybody to feel like they were part of the team."

He began pointing out some of the people in the pictures. "There's Woz," he said.

Though he was grinning broadly, Wozniak looked distinctly uncomfortable in his tuxedo.

"We always invited Woz to our parties." He flipped to another page: "There's Bud!" He pointed to the tiny figure of Bud Tribble, dancing in the background of one of the pictures. "Bud is so incredibly smart. Did you know that after he left Apple he went to med school?"

In practically every picture, Jobs spotted someone whom he now recalled with genuine fondness. "This is Rod Holt. He was one of the unsung heroes of Mac. After it was over, he went sailing for a year. He hasn't worked since. This is Debbie Coleman, the financial controller for the Mac group. She's still at Apple, but she's really a good person." And finally: "This is --- ---. That's his wife next to him. He'd been married to her forever, and she was a real drip. Just hopeless." He pointed to another woman, a member of the Mac group, posing for a different picture. "See her? --- became totally infatuated with her. He wanted to marry her on the spot. They started having this affair."

One night, Jobs continued, the man's wife asked him if anything was wrong. Halfjokingly, she suggested that maybe he wanted to leave her. He looked up at her and replied, "Yes, I do."

"It was great," said Jobs of this bit of Macintosh matchmaking. "Unfortunately, the new relationship didn't last. Oh, well," he shrugged. "Such is life."

It was all coming back to him now. "The greatest day of my life," he said, looking up from the album, "was the day we introduced the Macintosh." He knew the date precisely -- January 23, 1984 -- and he could recall the scene vividly. Apple was going to unveil the computer at the company's annual stockholders' meeting, which was held each year in the Flint Center, the finest and largest auditorium in Cupertino. Jobs had been up until 3:00 that morning, trying to get the kinks out of the program the Mac group had written especially for this event. He was tired and a little discouraged; all night long, the program kept breaking down.

But then the meeting started, and the curtains opened, and there stood a Macintosh computer, alone, on a pedestal. Behind it, in giant letters, was the word MACINTOSH. Jobs walked over to the computer, took it out of its case, and stuck in a small floppy disk. The theme from Chariots of Fire began playing. Then silence. The Macintosh began speaking. Speaking! "Hello," it said. "I'm the Macintosh. I'm really glad to get out of that bag." The room erupted.

For the next half-hour the Macintosh went through its dazzling paces, and when the demonstration was over, everyone stood and cheered for a full five minutes. Jobs, standing on the stage next to his creation, was overcome. Tears began to well up in his eyes. "I looked out at the first four rows," he recalled, "where most of the Mac team was sitting, and I could see tears in their eyes, too. It struck me as so unbelievable that these incredibly great people had come together to make this collective work of art.

"It was such an intense experience," he went on. "What I felt that day was beyond anything I could put into words." He stopped for a moment and searched for the words. "I think I know what it must be like to watch the birth of your child," he said finally. Pause. Frown. He snapped the album shut.

"But that's over," he sighed.

One day in late August of 1985, Steve Jobs had lunch with Paul Berg, Stanford's Nobel Prize-winning biochemist. For most of the previous four months, ever since the Sculley reorganization, Jobs had had nothing to do, and he had hated it. He tried to fill the time by reading and traveling. That didn't help. He toyed with the idea of going back to school, or even getting into politics. (He reportedly asked Regis McKenna, a Silicon Valley publicist, "Do we have to go through that political bullshit to get elected governor?") But neither prospect satisfied him. What he needed was the one thing Apple could no longer provide: work. "It was a very difficult time for me," he says of his brief, forced attempt at a more leisurely life. "I was incredibly depressed." Then came the lunch with Berg. It took place in a coffee shop in Palo Alto. It lasted two and a half hours.

Remember that lunch. If NeXT becomes successful, the lunch with Berg will take its place alongside the garage in the Jobs iconography. The way Jobs tells the story, the restless, underemployed Apple founder was talking to the Nobel laureate about recombinant DNA, which he had been reading up on. Why, he asked Berg, weren't people speeding up the lengthy, arduous, DNA experiments by simulating them on a computer? Because, came the reply, any hardware powerful enough to simulate such experiments cost close to $100,000. And the software didn't exist. Jobs immediately became enthused; suddenly he knew what he had to do. He had to build the computer that Berg -- and every other scientist and professor and student in America -- was waiting for. He was the only one who could do it. He had purpose again.

Within weeks of that lunch, Jobs left Apple, taking his core of loyalists with him.

Within days of his departure, he was talking excitedly to the press about his new dream: to build the first personal computer specifically designed for universities -- a machine for learning, not for crunching numbers or writing memos, a machine at least three times faster, ten times more powerful than any personal computer ever built. Precise enough for science professors to re-create DNA experiments. Powerful enough to allow premed students to simulate the mechanics of the nervous system. Inexpensive enough for both students and professors to buy them "by the jillion," as Jobs likes to put it.

Jobs gave a speech to a group called Educom, which consists of key administrators who buy computers for major universities. "We're gonna build products for you guys!" Jobs explained. "Just tell us what you want!" He put up $7 million of his own money to start NeXT, and rented office space, small, cramped quarters at first -- "to get back to the purity of the garage" -- and then larger offices as NeXT grew. He became obsessed with building his computer. Work was fun again.

So much fun, in fact, that he recently purchased controlling interest in another company so that he'd have something to do in his "spare time." Since February, he's been devoting one day a week to his acquisition, Pixar, the computer-graphics division of George Lucas's Lucasfilm. As chairman of the board, Jobs is overseeing the development of the "Pixar," a machine that will generate some of the world's finest photographicquality computer images. So far, Pixar has been chiefly responsible for eye-popping effects in a handful of Hollywood space operas, but Jobs, as is his wont, envisions yet another machine that will change the world. Doctors will use the Pixar to read CAT scans; engineers, for computer-aided design; and oil companies, for analyzing seismic surroundings. Even defense contractors, interpreting data beamed from spy satellites, will, Jobs hopes, find the Pixar indispensible.

Mike Murray says that in conversations he's had with Jobs recently, Jobs always says, "I'm doing better now." By that, Jobs means that he is doing better at managing his new organization, that he has a better understanding of the fact that most people simply cannot work all the time, even if they think they can. "I don't want people at NeXT working more than sixty hours a week," he says. "If I see someone working too late, I tell them to go home. This is a marathon," he adds, "not a sprint."

But you wonder. You wonder what will happen as the pressure grows and the deadline approaches. You wonder if the people at NeXT, most of whom are fueled by work almost as much as Jobs himself, will really be able to click it off at 6:00 p.m. And you wonder about Jobs, too. To change his work habits, Jobs would have to change his very nature -- the deepest, strongest part of himself. And that he cannot do.

There is unquestionably something extremely admirable about Jobs' obsession with work. People who accomplish great things almost always live outside the boundaries that hem the rest of us in. They can be rude and oblivious to the feelings of others because they don't have time to worry about people's feelings. It takes their eye off the ball. They are maniacal about details most of us would ignore because they sense that such details will mean the difference between success and failure. They give up their personal life because it seems trivial next to what they are trying to get done. They are driven human beings.

But is it really enough to love your work to the exclusion of all else? It is hard to know how to react to someone who says, in all seriousness, that the introduction of a computer can compare emotionally to the birth of a child. You react, finally, by feeling a little sorry for him.

Jobs, however, will brook no such suggestion. "I'm happier than I've been in a long time," he insists. He is in his car, driving back to NeXT. It is late at night. "I remember many late nights coming out of the Mac building," he is saying, "when I would have the most incredibly powerful feelings about my life. Just exhilarating feelings about my life. I feel some of that now with NeXT. I can't explain it. I don't really understand it. But I'm comfortable with it." And maybe in his inability to explain lies the explanation.

It is always difficult to articulate your compulsions, and Steve Jobs is, quite simply, compelled to work. There was never any other choice.