9781422287163

13

The Man Who Made I t Al l Possible

didn’t interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

Once he was free from the rigid structure of required courses, Steve began to really enjoy being a student. Now he could take classes that inter- ested him, regardless of whether they fell into a specific degree program. Still, despite being happy with his decision, that period in his life came with some struggles. “It wasn’t all romantic,” Steve told Stanford’s class of 2005. “I didn’t have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends’ rooms. I returned Coke bottles for the five-cent deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the seven miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple.” Despite those hardships, Steve was enjoying himself. “I loved it,” he said. “And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on.” One of the classes Steve most enjoyed was calligraphy . The Reed Col- lege campus was covered with examples of this art, from posters to labels. Steve was fascinated by the creativity and decided to join the class to learn how to do it himself. “I learned about serif and san-serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great,” Steve told the graduating students of Stanford. “It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating. None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life.” Or so he thought. A decade later, when Steve and his friends were bus- ily working to design the first Macintosh computer, he recalled this uncom- mon skill he’d picked up during his short time in college. “We designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography,” said Steve.