Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine Page #3

There's a lag and, "Hello, how are you?"

"I'm fine." You know?

Why, one might wonder,

would someone want to do that?

To rip off the phone company.

And these were illegal, I have to add.

In college, I had a blue box

of my own. It was important

because long-distance phone calls

were really expensive back then.

It was also a way

of sticking it to the man.

This would become an important

selling point for Jobs, too,

even as he left

the technical work to others.

Well, I had this blue box design.

I did a trick in there

that I've never done that good a trick

in any other design in my life.

And Steve Jobs said,

"Hey, why don't we sell them?"

You know, you rapidly run

out of people you want to call,

but it was the magic that two teenagers

could build this box

for $100 worth of parts

and control hundreds of billions

of dollars of infrastructure

in the entire telephone network

in the whole world.

We could sort of influence the world,

you know?

Control it, in the case of blue boxes,

but something much more powerful

than controlling.

Influencing, in the case of Apple.

And they're very closely related.

I really do, to this day,

feel that if we hadn't had had

those blue box experiences,

there never would have been

an Apple computer.

I think Jobs

was always a storyteller.

There was always this sense

that he was constructing a persona.

The first time I sat down

with him to work on a story,

he immediately asked me

if I had read

Thomas Kuhn's "The Structure

of Scientific Revolutions."

I think he was assimilating

into this personality,

this notion that he had found in Kuhn.

The random result

that eventually creates

a paradigm shift where everybody

one morning wakes up,

and they think the new way.

And I believe that he thought

that he was a paradigm shifter.

That was part of his story. He wanted

to have a foot in both worlds.

He wanted to be the renegade,

but he also wanted to be legit.

This is the video deposition

of Steven P Jobs.

We are on the record at 9:22am.

Can we just sort of briefly go over

your employment history after 1973?

I was employed by Atari,

a maker of video games.

- What timeframe?

- I don't know. Early '70s.

Creativity is a lot about anarchy.

I had been in the video-game

business two years

and our corporate culture

was really "work hard, play hard."

The true original sin of Apple

literally takes place

before the company is founded.

Jobs had left Reed College

and now he was back in Silicon Valley.

Woz was working at HP.

I was such a nerd.

When I finished designing calculators

at Hewlett-Packard in the daytime,

I would work on my own little projects.

I saw "Pong" in a bowling alley,

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