too. He wanted Dan Kottke to join him. To earn enough money
to make the trip, Steve left Reed and moved back home with his
parents. He got a job working for Atari, which at the time was
a small company that made video games for arcades. Steve’s job
was to examine newly designed games and make improvements
in them, such as adding sound and correcting glitches. It was
the type of work normally done by an engineer. According to
Wozniak, the job was “like modifying a program to do different
things, just barely a step under designing them yourself and a
step that all design engineers go through.” 26
Steve was not highly qualified for the job, but he managed to
talk his way into it. Al Alcorn, Atari’s cofounder, recalls that Jobs
was
dressed in rags, basically, hippie stuff. An eighteen-year-old
drop-out of Reed College. I don’t know why I hired him,
except that he was determined to have the job and there was
some spark. I really saw the spark in that man, some inner
energy, an attitude that he was going to get it done. And he
had a vision, too. You know the definition of a visionary is
“someone with an inner vision not supported by external
facts,” he had those great ideas without much to back them
up. Except that he believed in them. 27
An Outcast at Atari
The other engineers in the company did not like working with
Steve. They complained that he was strange and smelled, which
might have been because of his infrequent bathing. But Alcorn
insisted on keeping him and arranged it so that Steve worked at
night when no one else was present.
Jobs soon reconnected with Woz and often brought his friend
into work with him. Woz loved checking out the new games and
helped Jobs with his work just for the fun of it. “The best thing
about hiring Jobs,” Alcorn admits, “is that he brought along Woz
to visit a lot.” 28
Searching for Answers
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