Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs was the son of an unmarried woman named Joanne Schieble. She was twenty-three and a graduate student in Wisconsin when she became pregnant by a fellow graduate student who was a Syrian. Joanne’s father didn’t want her to marry the Syrian so she moved out of town and had the baby in California. Originally, a lawyer and his wife were going to adopt the baby boy but they changed their mind. Instead, Paul and Clara Jobs, a middle-class working couple who were childless adopted him. The one caveat that Joanne maintained was that the couple had to promise to send the boy to college.

Jobs was precocious as a toddler and very bright. But he was next to impossible to control. He wouldn’t obey his parents and continued that tradition when he want to school. Jobs became interested in electronics as...