Steve Jobs Facts You Never Knew

Many great minds come from humble beginnings, and Steve Jobs is no exception. After graduating from Homestead High School in Cupertino, young Jobs enrolled in Oregon's Reed College. Finding higher education stifling, Jobs dropped out after a single semester, but he kept going to class by exploiting a system known as "auditing," where prospective students can sit in on lectures for free. Jobs also ate free meals courtesy of the Hare Krishna temple and collected Coke bottles for the deposit to pay for the rest of his material needs.

Serious nerds know that Steve Wozniak was the technological powerhouse behind Apple's early development - the two Steves had met in high school and their paths crossed several times afterward. Jobs was working at Atari when he was tasked with building a prototype for the arcade game Breakout. His original design was functional, but Atari brass wanted chips removed to save costs. They offered Jobs $100 for every silicon chip he could remove from the prototype. Jobs brought in Wozniak, who managed to cut a staggering fifty chips from the machine without compromising functionality, and Atari paid Jobs $5000. Jobs paid Wozniak $375 and kept the bonus amount secret.

Jobs' legendary ego has been the subject of many a screed, but this interesting tale from the early days of Apple is very telling. After Jobs and Wozniak founded the company with Ronald Wayne, the initial Board of Directors decreed that every employee needed to be issued a name badge and an employee number based on their date of hire. Wozniak got number one, which left Jobs with number two. Needless to say, he wasn't very happy about that, and made so much of a stink that the number two badge was retired and he was issued a new one... number zero.

Okay, not really, but bear with us here.

Steve Jobs was born out of wedlock to a man named Abdulfattah Jandali and Joanne Simpson. He was adopted by Paul and Clara Jobs.

He has, however, a biological sister named Mona Jandali, an author and professor at UCLA. She goes by the name Mona Simpson. One of her novels, Anywhere But Here, was made into a film directed by Wayne Wang and starring Natalie Portman and Susan Sarandon.

Simpson was at one time married to Richard Appel, a television writer who used to work on (guess what?) The Simpsons! He was the one who got to name Homer's mom in the episode "Mother Simpson."

She is far to young to be a 1960s radical on the run, so the similarities between her and Springfield's favorite cartoon dad's mother end there.