9781422270462

students who were not married and unprepared for parenthood. In 2005, Jobs talked about his adoptive mother and why she wanted to adopt him. “My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me 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 a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking, ‘We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?’ They said, ‘Of course.’ Jobs’ birth mother was disappointed to learn that his new mother had never finished college, and his new father had never graduated from high school. Determined that her son would experience higher education, Jobs’ birth mother had second thoughts about the adoption. “She refused to sign the final adoption papers,” Jobs said. “She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.” Paul and Clara Jobs of Mountain View, California, adopted him. He was a machinist, and his wife was an accountant. They raised Jobs and saved money so they could one day send him to college, fulfilling their promise to their son’s birth mother. Jobs was an intelligent child, but he also had a hard time giving school his full attention. Interested in computers and technology, he grew up learning from the engineers in his town. He also frequently attended after-school lectures at the Hewlett-Packard Company in Palo Alto, California.

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To Infinity and Beyond