Fire Alarm Companies

In 2005, a year after being diagnosed with cancer, Apple CEO Steve Jobs made a moving speech to graduate students at Stanford University. Here is the text, and our columnist John Naughton

provides its own annotations

is a prepared text of speech by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and Pixar Animation Studios, June 12, 2005.

** The graduation speech is one of the most venerable - and respectable - the American traditions of the academy, particularly in elite universities like Stanford and Harvard. Because Steve Jobs, has died at a relatively young age (56), it is to be considered a classic. But he faces stiff competition - such as

list maintained by humanity.org

testimony. Jobs The e-conference is facing Barack Obama at Wesleyan University in 2008, Elie Wiesel speaks at DePaul University in 1997, Vaclav Havel, a conference on "thin layer of civilization" at Harvard in 1995 and by George Marshall, at the same university in 1947 - to list only four. However, Jobs has an address at this time of unbearable intensity, especially for those who knew him well. John Gruber, technology commentator and blogger, I saw recently

and watched :. "He looked old non. Age in a way that could be measured in years or decades, but not impossible in the old tired eyes, but tired, sick or not sick .. but, somehow, not old, but its his bright eyes were small, their weapons intact intensity. "The address also reveals something of the humanity of employment, which tends to get lost in the glare of the surprising resurgence of Apple company. **

an honor to be with you today at your commencement of one of the best universities worldwide. I never obtained a college degree. In fact, it's closer than I've never been to a degree. Today, I want to tell you three stories from my life. That. Not much. Just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College [Portland, Oregon] after the first six months but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or more before I really quit smoking. So why did I drop?

started before I was born. My biological mother was a young student, single, college graduate, and decided to put me up for adoption. She firmly believed that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was arranged to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on the waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: "We were expecting a child, will you?" They said, "Sure." My biological mother found out that my mother had never graduated from university and my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the adoption papers. Yielded only a few months later, when my parents promised that I would one day go to college.

** What is interesting, because for many years, employment has been very reluctant to talk about his family background in public. Asked about the famous

Playboy interview in 1985

, for example, and refused point blank to .* *

And 17 years later I went to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all my savings from working-class parents have been spent on my college tuition. After six months, I could not see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and had no idea how college was going to help me solve it. And I spent all the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to give up and trust that everything would be fine. It was pretty scary at times, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. Minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that do not interest me and begin to fall in on those that looked interesting.

** One of the most interesting back stories of modern computing and the IT industry is the number of its pioneers were college dropouts. Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, for example, both left Harvard in the medium term, and one of the proudest boasts is that Gates was responsible for him to convince Steve Ballmer (now CEO of Microsoft) to leave the university Stanford.

list

continues with Larry Ellison, Oracle founder Michael Dell, founder of computer company that bears his name. And while the co-founders of Google, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, graduated, both left their doctoral programs. This time he goes against the conventional narrative - an expensive college education and a good degree is a prerequisite for success. **

was not all romantic. There was one room, so I slept on the floor in the rooms of friends, were bottles of Coca-Cola for 5 cents deposits to buy food, and I walk the seven miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I liked it. And much of what I found by following my curiosity and intuition has proven invaluable in the future. Let me give you an example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully handwritten in calligraphy. Because I had dropped out and had to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do that. I learned serif and sans serif types, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, which makes great typography. She was beautiful, historical, artistic subtle in a way that science can not capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of practical application in my life. But 10 years later, when we designed the first Macintosh computer, it all made sense to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. He was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in this one course at the university, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it is likely that no personal computer would have. If I had never retired, never would have attended this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course, it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

** One of the things that everybody knew that Steve Jobs said he was obsessed with the "taste". He was always rebelling against Microsoft because "

had no taste

" and one of its first ideas was the big computers becoming consumer products and as such should be an attractive and easy to use. **

I was lucky - I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz [Steve Wozniak] and I started Apple in my parents' garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years, Apple has increased from only two of us in a garage to a company $ 2 billion with over 4,000 employees. We had just released our finest creation - the Macintosh - a year before, and I just turned 30. And then I got fired. How do you get from a business you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the business with me, and during the first year things went well. However, our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had an altercation. When we did, our Board of Directors face with him. Thus, at 30 I was out. And very publicly. What had been the subject of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.