Stories about Steve

Founder, whole Earth Catalog; co-creator of the pit and Global Business Network

You could say that the creation of Apple Computer, seed soil was a situation of legal right. In 1975, were Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak messing around with his buddy, the computer components in an extremely fertile place that was just come to be known as Silicon Valley. The Steves worked at companies such as Atari and Hewlett-Packard and hanging out with other computer hobbyists during the meetings of the Homebrew Computer Club, every new design hack and the function of a small computer show off they ultimately the Apple name. I was in the neighborhood, in the beginning of that period, on which a publication called the Whole Earth Catalog.

High-tech innovation was the norm among both amateurs and professionals in the Midpeninsula region because a Stanford engineer Frederick Terman named in the 1950s and 60s Stanford Industrial Park founded and attracted world-class engineering talent at the University and companies. By 1975 were bleeding-edge ideas in computers and networks boiling of three excellent research centres near — Xerox PARC, Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and Stanford Research Institute.

In the mid-1970s the counterculture was still in full bloom, with drugs and broad creativity galore in the area, after patterns set by Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters (I was a member of the border), the Midpeninsula free University and the euphemistically named International Foundation for Advanced Study, which research of LSD. Young computer hackers keep jobs and Wozniak identified with our generation, but they had found something even more psychedelic than LSD — computers you might disappear in, fed by the constant acceleration of Moore's law. Drugs were by comparison static.

Across the Bay in Berkeley have demanded radicals "Power to the People!" Computer hobbyists like Steve and Steve demanded nothing. With personal computers, they knew they were creating the real thing: give power to people.

Photographer: AP Photo