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Profile of Steve Jobs from 1983

From the January 3, 1983 issue of Time magazine, an early mainstream profile of Steve Jobs.

He is 27 years old. He lives in Los Gates, Calif., and works 20 minutes away in Cupertino, a town of 34,000 that his company has so transformed that some San Franciscans, about 35 miles to the north, have taken to calling it Computertino. There is no doubt in any case that this is a company town, although the company, Apple, did not exist seven years ago. Now, Apple just closed its best year in business, racking up sales of $583 million. The company stock has a market value of $1.7 billion. Jobs, as founder of Apple, chairman of the board, media figurehead and all-purpose dynamo, owns about 7 million shares of that stock. His personal worth is on the balmy side of $210 million. But past the money, and the hype, and the fairy-tale success, Jobs has been the prime advanceman for the computer revolution. With his smooth sales pitch and a blind faith that would have been the envy of the early Christian martyrs, it is Steven Jobs, more than anyone, who kicked open the door and let the personal computer move in.

The article contains some really interesting stuff: perhaps the first mention of Jobs’ “reality-distortion field”, a prescient comment that Jobs “should be running Walt Disney”, and a description of Steve Wozniak as “a Steiff Teddy bear on a maintenance dose of marshmallows”.