Read the TIME Magazine Story That Plays a Key Role in Steve Jobs

Jobs (rhymes with lobs) did not make the revolution alone. He did not even make the machine that made the revolution, the Apple II, the personal computer that along with its other skills seemed to mint money. Stephen Wozniak, 32, Jobs’ friend and former colleague who looks like a Steiff Teddy bear on a maintenance dose of marshmallows, created the Apple II. He worked from some pre-existing technology, scaling it down radically and making it affordable to consumers as well as corporations. “Steve didn’t do one circuit, design or piece of code,” says Wozniak, who was widely regarded as the true technological wizard in Jobs’ corporate Oz. “He’s not really been into computers, and to this day he has never gone through a computer manual. But it never crossed my mind to sell computers. It was Steve who said, ‘Let’s hold them up in the air and sell a few.’ ”

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Jobs has been instrumental in selling hundreds of thousands, possibly millions, of Americans on the new technology. He insisted that the Apple II be what the jargon calls “user friendly.” He wanted it light and trim, well designed in muted colors, and today pushes his engineers hard to make machines that will not frighten away a skittish and skeptical clientele. The Jobs sales skills will be hard pressed in the months to come. In mid-January, Apple will introduce Lisa, a new model that the company has been working on full-time for four years and that is expected to sell for $10,000. Later in the year, it will officially announce Mackintosh, a more affordable version of Lisa, priced around $2,000. Some of a staff of 70—one of whom is still a teen-ager—are putting in seven-day, 90-hour weeks on Mackintosh, working under Jobs. As a boss, Jobs is admired for courting long chances, but, adds a friend, “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.” Adds Jeff Raskin, a former Apple publications manager: “He would have made an excellent King of France.”

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[By 1980,] Jobs, hyper and overwrought from the flush of such success, would occasionally burst into tears at meetings and would have to be cooled out with a slow walk around the parking lot. His personal life was also precarious. He again met the woman with whom he had spent the summer in the mountains, and she became pregnant before they finally broke up anew. The baby, a girl, was born in the summer of 1978, with Jobs denying his fatherhood and refusing to pay child support. A voluntary blood test performed the following year said “the probability of paternity for Jobs, Steven. . . is 94.1%.” Jobs insists that “28% of the male population of the United States could be the father.” Nonetheless, the court ordered Jobs to begin paying $385 a month for child support. It may be noted that the baby girl and the machine on which Apple has placed so much hope for the future share the same name: Lisa.