In his now famous 2005 Stanford commencement speech, Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, in a rare, poignant moment, described death as the single best invention of life.
He urged audiences to have the courage to follow their “heart” and “intuition”, and not be trapped by dogma “which is living with the results of other people's thinking”.
In his storied career, Jobs seemed to have followed every bit of this belief right till the end, as he created, was ousted, and then returned to steer the company that has changed the way the world computes, listens to music, or enjoys movies, videos, and books.
A charismatic inventor, entrepreneur and tech visionary behind iconic products like iPod, iPhone and iPad – Jobs lived his life under constant media glare even as he battled pancreatic cancer for seven years. Here is a glimpse of some less-publicised facets of his life:
Jobs' biological mother Joanne Simpson was a young, unwed college graduate, who decided to put him up for adoption. But when she found out that Jobs' new parents were college and high-school dropouts – Paul Jobs and his wife – she initially refused to sign the papers, and gave in only after the latter promised to send him to college when he grew up.
Jobs graduated from Homestead High School in Cupertino in 1972. He went on to attend Reed College in Portland, Oregon, only to drop out after one semester. But he hung around the campus for another year and a half, sleeping on the floors of his friends' rooms, returning coke bottles for the five-cent deposits to buy food, and walking seven miles across town every Sunday night to get the one good weekly meal at the Hare Krishna temple.
At Reed College, he decided to take a calligraphy course and learned about serif and san serif typefaces. Ten years down the line, all that knowledge went into designing the Mac. “If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do,” he later said.
The story has it that Jobs sold his Volkswagen micro-bus and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak his Hewlett-Packard scientific calculator to raise $1,300 for starting their new venture and setting up the first production lines. They made their first big sale when the Byte Shop in Mountain View bought their first 50 fully-assembled computers.
Jobs' spiritual quest brought him to Indian shores in early 1970s, before he co-founded Apple. Details of his India visit with a friend from Reed College, Dan Kottke, remain sketchy, though tales abound over his flings with psychedelic substances and a more abiding relationship with Buddhism.
Jobs' wedding to Laurene Powell, in March 1991 was presided over by Zen Buddhist monk Kobun Chino Otogawa.