Meet Steven (Rhymes with Lobs) Jobs, Circa 1983

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Our pals at kottke.org did some digging in the TIME magazine archives and came up with this tasty find: a profile from January 3, 1983, of a young tech whippersnapper named Steven Jobs. Let’s have a read, shall we?

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. . .

Some excellent quotes in this, rendered more potent or poignant by the passage of time.

“He should be running Walt Disney,” says a onetime Apple manager. “That way, every day when he’s got some new idea, he can contribute to something different.”

One interesting footnote: the article was reported from Cupertino by an enterprising young scribe named Michael Moritz, who parlayed his knowledge of the tech industry into a billion-dollar venture capital fortune.