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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