many hours at his dad ’ s side learning about mechanics , electronics , and business . He recalls :
I was very lucky . My father , Paul , was a pretty remarkable man . . . He was a machinist by trade and worked very hard and was kind of a genius with his hands . He had a workbench out in the garage where , when I was about five or six , he sectioned off a little piece of it and said “ Steve this is your workbench now .” And he gave me some of his smaller tools and showed me how to use a hammer and saw and how to build things . It was really good for me . He spent a lot of time with me teaching me how to build things , how to take things apart , put things back together . One of the things he touched upon was electronics . He did not have a deep understanding of electronics himself but he ’ d encountered electronics a lot in automobiles and other things he would fix . He showed me the rudiments of electronics and I got very interested in that . 7
Many of the Jobs ’ s neighbors were engineers who had garage workshops where they tinkered with electronic projects . One man in particular , Larry Lang , an electrical engineer , took Steve under his wing . Lang had a carbon microphone , which produced sound without an amplifier . The device fascinated Steve . He spent hours questioning Lang about how the device worked . Steve was so single-minded in his interest , that Lang eventually gave Steve the microphone so he could take it apart and study it .
Lang also got Steve interested in building Heathkits . These were kits that provided electronic hobbyists with easy to follow instructions and parts so that they could build their own radios , hi-fi equipment , oscilloscopes , and other electronic devices . Jobs recalls :
Heathkits were really great . . . These Heathkits would come with these detailed manuals about how to put this thing together and all the parts would be laid out in a certain way and color coded . You ’ d actually build this thing yourself . I would say that this gave one several things . It gave one an
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