An adoptee's perspective on Steve Jobs...

Steve and I went to the same high school, Homestead, on the border of Sunnyvale and Cupertino. He was a freshman when I was a sophomore. Wozniak was a senior. Steve dated my next door neighbor Marla and showed up in a satin white tux with top hat at the 5 year high school reunion (according to my sister Carolyn who was in the same graduating class of '72).

As I tell people, while I hung out with girls, he was more of a "shop" guy. Our paths never crossed. Or they did but I didn't know him from Adam. But later I met him twice, once when he entertained a group of us from SCO (the Unix on Intel company) at NeXT with the purpose of convincing SCO to ship "NeXTStep", a development environment that he was trying to make more pervasive in the Unix world.

It was there, at the NeXT offices near Redwood City off of 101, visiting Jobs with two SCO VPs where I learned what a crutch powerpoint presentations are as well as Jobs' commanding knowledge of the industry. After Steve and I shortly reminisced about the good old days at Homestead High, one of our VPs got up to give him a presentation of SCO and our 2-tier distribution model, of which we were very proud. About to display the 3rd slide, Steve waved him off, asked him to sit down and proceeded to summarize the SCO business model as well as I'd ever heard from our own people. I think it's fair to say that our guy was pretty devastated to be brought down to earth so quickly... especially given how much he probably had rehearsed the days before in order to impress Jobs about SCO's unique Unix-on-Intel business model.

At the end of the meeting, it was already clear to us that he was a little nuts and, in a way, totally out of his league. He was trying to build a consortium without forming a consortium. And consortiums are difficult to control. Steve had never given the world the impression that he was a "standards kind of guy" or capable of adapting to the committee-driven nature of Unix standards. At the end of the discussion when we were trying to understand his real motivations, he finally said (to paraphrase), "Well somebody's got to stop Microsoft!" I kind of shook my head and thought, "this poor guy... he's still driven by his personal quarrel with Gates."

I later interviewed at NeXT to run their product engineering group. I again had a casual conversation with Jobs, but my interview was with Avie Tevanian, the architect of the NeXTStep Mach operating system. He impressed me as a sweet, got-it-together kind of guy. I would have loved working for him. But they never called me back and I never called them because I couldn't see leaving my wonderful cocoon of Santa Cruz and resuming that commute to Redwood City, of which I was well familiar after 4 years of Santa Cruz-to-Sunnyvale-and-back. Makes new cars old very quickly.

I'm writing this because last night, when I inadvertently brought up my browser to cnn.com and saw the news, I was devastated. Shockingly devastated. Yeah, I have a few cute stories about Jobs, and no, there was no way I would have enjoyed working for him given the butterfly nature of my love for software development.

But, as I was telling a colleague at SAMBA this morning, like me, Jobs was an adoptee. Of course, he was also a fellow graduate of Homestead High and our silly allegiances to famous people feel quite real. But way back in the 80's when he became famous, I looked up to him as a fellow adoptee because I loved how he handled it. It gave being an adoptee real respect. He loved his parents and he didn't let the adoption thing hinder his life one bit. At the time, I thought it was kind of weird that I didn't have the slightest inclination to find out who my real parents were. My harsh self-appraisal was accented by what I'd been seeing on television at the time. Groups of adoptees were easy to find on day time talk shows, whining about how incomplete their lives were having no knowledge of their "real parents" and were confronting the fact that the adoption process was somehow overly secretive. It was strange to me that, in the same reaction, I was both repelled by these people and somewhat guilty that I didn't share their protest.

Jobs made me feel like I was normal. Better than that, he legitimized some of the crazy things I'd done along my career path. His unintended stamp of approval on how you can lead an adoptee's life without driving yourself nuts and, in fact, turn it into an outlaw'ishly productive and inspired life, was important to me. I had no idea how important his inspiration was, or how deeply I had internalized that message, until my reaction last night.

Thank you Steve,
David