Steve Jobs Dies: Early Life of 60s’ Counterculture Inspired Visionary

The death of Steve Jobs was unexpected, although almost everyone was aware that he was fighting a rare and aggressive form of pancreatic cancer. However, his death has turned the spotlight on the early life and career of a man being hailed as a visionary.

The Stanford University in the U.S. has archived a complete collection of documents, photographs, videos, hardware and software (approximately 600 linear feet), making it the largest assortment of Apple-related materials in the world.

Early photographs (when Jobs was 21 and had only recently founded Apple) show Jobs sporting long and hippie-like hair and, as late as 1988, a photograph from the Douhlas Menuez Photography Collection shows him barefoot at a business meeting, according to a Stanford University press release.

Moving on, although Jobs participated in the counterculture movement of the 1960s, he interpreted his role in it differently.

Steve Jobs and Bill Gates are the true revolutionaries of our time. Not the students who occupied the dean's office in the late '60s. Not the anti-war marchers who were determined to overthrow the establishment. Jobs and Gates are the ones who changed the way the world thinks, acts and communicates, said Martyn Burke, director of the documentary Pirates of Silicon Valley, which documented the rise of Personal Computers, in an interview.

In the unauthorized biography, The Second Coming of Steve Jobs, author Alan Deutschman reports that Jobs once dated Joan Baez, an American folk singer, songwriter, musician and a prominent activist in the fields of human rights, peace and environmental justice. Deutschman quotes Elizabeth Holmes, a friend of Jobs from his time at Reed College, as saying she believed that Steve became the lover of Joan Baez in large measure because Baez had been the lover of Bob Dylan.

In another unauthorized biography, iCon: Steve Jobs by Jeffrey S. Young and William L. Simon, the authors suggest that Jobs might have married Baez but her age at the time (41) meant it was unlikely the couple could have children.

Jobs was also a fan of The Beatles. He referred to them on multiple occasions at Keynotes and was also interviewed when he showed up at a Paul McCartney concert. When asked about his business model on 60 Minutes, he replied: My model for business is The Beatles: They were four guys that kept each other's negative tendencies in check; they balanced each other. And the total was greater than the sum of the parts. Great things in business are not done by one person, they are done by a team of people.

Jobs' wedding to Laurene Powell, on March 18, 1991, was presided over by Zen Buddhist monk Kobun Chino Otogawa.

The Apple archives also have handwritten financial records, of the period when Jobs unveiled the Apple II. Interestingly, the product registered low initial sales, although it shot up a few weeks later.