Untold Stories of Steve Jobs, One Year After His Death

A year after Steve Jobs died on October 5, 2011, the tributes had mostly been written — and yet the stories kept coming. The Guardian invited readers to share their own encounters and lesser-known tales, and the thread filled with the human details the obituaries had smoothed over.

The well-worn ones deserve retelling because they explain the products. In 1974, the young Jobs traveled to India with his Reed College friend Daniel Kottke, seeking spiritual enlightenment — he came back a Buddhist with a shaved head, and with a lifelong suspicion of material excess that sat oddly beside the fortune he would build. At Reed, he dropped in on a calligraphy class after dropping out, and credited it years later with the Mac's beautiful typography: "If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces."

There was the reality distortion field — the famous phrase his colleagues coined for his ability to bend people to impossible deadlines through sheer force of belief. And the bluntness that made him both revered and feared: products were either "insanely great" or "shit," with little in between. He named the Apple Lisa for his daughter Lisa Brennan-Jobs, a paternity he first denied and later acknowledged.

What the anniversary stories shared was a theme: Jobs was impossible, and the impossibility was the point. The man who slept on floors in India and wept at product launches built a company that treated taste as a technical specification. A year on, the untold stories weren't really about technology at all. They were about what one person's obsessions can do to the world.

This is an archive of the original 2012 post, completed from the truncated draft.