He had few friends his own age, but he got to know some seniors who were immersed in the counterculture of the late 1960s. It was a time when the geek and hippie worlds were beginning to show some overlap. “My friends were the really smart kids,” he said. “I was interested in math and science and electronics. They were too, and also into LSD and the whole counterculture trip.”

他沒什么同齡的朋友，卻認識幾個沉浸在20世紀60年代晚期反主流文化浪潮中的高年級學生。那時候，極客和嬉皮士的世界開始顯現出一些重疊了。“我的朋友們都很聰明，”他說，“我對數學、科學和電子學感興趣，他們也是，而且大家都喜歡迷幻藥和反主流文化。”

His pranks by then typically involved electronics. At one point he wired his house with speakers. But since speakers can also be used as microphones, he built a control room in his closet, where he could listen in on what was happening in other rooms. One night, when he had his headphones on and was listening in on his parents’ bedroom, his father caught him and angrily demanded that he dismantle the system. He spent many evenings visiting the garage of Larry Lang, the engineer who lived down the street from his old house. Lang eventually gave Jobs the carbon microphone that had fascinated him, and he turned him on to Heathkits, those assemble-it-yourself kits for making ham radios and other electronic gear that were beloved by the soldering set back then. “Heathkits came with all the boards and parts color-coded, but the manual also explained the theory of how it operated,” Jobs recalled. “It made you realize you could build and understand anything. Once you built a couple of radios, you’d see a TV in the catalogue and say, ‘I can build that as well,’ even if you didn’t. I was very lucky, because when I was a kid both my dad and the Heathkits made me believe I could build anything.”

那時候，他的惡作劇一般都會用到電子設備。有一次，他在家中連接了幾個揚聲器。楊聲器也可以用做麥克風，他在自己的衣柜里建了一個控制室，這樣就可以偷聽其他房間的聲音了。有天晚上，他正戴著耳機偷聽父母房間的聲音，父親逮到了他，憤怒地要求他拆除整套系統。很多晚上他都會造訪他以前的工程師鄰居拉里·朗的車庫。朗最終把那只令喬布斯魂牽夢縈的碳精麥克風送給了他，還讓他迷上了希斯工具盒（Heathkits）一一當時廣受歡迎的用來制作無線電設備或其他電子裝備，但需要自己組裝的工具套裝。“希斯工具盒里面有各種各樣用不同顏色編號的插件板和零部件，還有解釋其使用原理的操作手冊。”喬布斯回憶，“它讓你意識到你能組裝并搞懂任何東西。你做完幾個無線電裝置后，就會在目錄里看到電視機，你會說，這個我也能做，目卩便你并不會真的去做。我很幸運，因為當我還是個孩子的時候，我的父親，還有希斯工具盒都讓我相信，我能做出任何東西。”

Lang also got him into the Hewlett-Packard Explorers Club, a group of fifteen or so students who met in the company cafeteria on Tuesday nights. “They would get an engineer from one of the labs to come and talk about what he was working on,” Jobs recalled. “My dad would drive me there. I was in heaven. HP was a pioneer of light-emitting diodes. So we talked about what to do with them.” Because his father now worked for a laser company, that topic particularly interested him. One night he cornered one of HP’s laser engineers after a talk and got a tour of the holography lab. But the most lasting impression came from seeing the small computers the company was developing. “I saw my first desktop computer there. It was called the 9100A, and it was a glorified calculator but also really the first desktop computer. It was huge, maybe forty pounds, but it was a beauty of a thing. I fell in love with it.”

朗還讓喬布斯加入了惠普探索者俱樂部，這是一個每周一次的聚會，每周二晚在公司餐廳進行，有大概15個學生參加。“他們會從實驗室里請來一個工程師，給我們講講他正在研究的東西，”喬布斯回憶，“我爸爸會開車送我去。我感覺那兒就是我的天堂。惠普當時是發光二極管（LED）行業的先鋒，所以我們就會討論發光二極管的一些問題。”因為當時父親為一家激光公司工作，所以喬布斯對發光二極管特別感興趣。有一天晚上，聚會結束之后，他攔住了惠普的一名激光工程師，獲得了參觀他們全息攝影實驗室的機會。但最讓他印象深刻的還是見到了當時惠普正在開發的小型計算機。“我在那里第一次見到了臺式計算機，它被稱為9100A,是一臺被神化了的計算器，但也確實是第一臺臺式計算機。它身形巨大，大概有40磅重，但它真的很美，我愛上了它。”

The kids in the Explorers Club were encouraged to do projects, and Jobs decided to build a frequency counter, which measures the number of pulses per second in an electronic signal. He needed some parts that HP made, so he picked up the phone and called the CEO. “Back then, people didn’t have unlisted numbers. So I looked up Bill Hewlett in Palo Alto and called him at home. And he answered and chatted with me for twenty minutes. He got me the parts, but he also got me a job in the plant where they made frequency counters.” Jobs worked there the summer after his freshman year at Homestead High. “My dad would drive me in the morning and pick me up in the evening.”

探索者俱樂部的孩子們被鼓勵做一些項目，喬布斯決定做一臺頻率計數器，這是用來測量一個電子信號中每秒鐘的脈沖數量的。他需要一些惠普制造的零件，所以他拿起電話打給了惠普的CEO：“那個時候，所有的電話號碼都是登記在冊的，所以我在電話簿上尋找住在帕洛奧圖的比爾·休利特，然后打到了他家。他接了電話并和我聊了20分鐘，之后他給了我那些零件，也給了我一份工作，就在他們制造頻率計數器的工廠。”喬布斯髙中第一年的暑假就在那里工作。“我爸爸早上幵車送我去，晚上再把我接回家。”

His work mainly consisted of “just putting nuts and bolts on things” on an assembly line. There was some resentment among his fellow line workers toward the pushy kid who had talked his way in by calling the CEO. “I remember telling one of the supervisors, ‘I love this stuff, I love this stuff,’ and then I asked him what he liked to do best. And he said, ‘To fuck, to fuck.’” Jobs had an easier time ingratiating himself with the engineers who worked one floor above. “They served doughnuts and coffee every morning at ten. So I’d go upstairs and hang out with them.”

他的工作主要就是在一條流水線上“安裝基本元件”。一部分工友對這個愛出風頭的孩子有些不滿，因為他是通過給CEO打電話才得到了這份工作的。“我記得我告訴一個監督員：‘我喜歡這玩意兒，我喜歡這玩意兒。’然后我問他最喜歡做什么，他回答說：‘我喜歡鬼混，我喜歡鬼混。’”喬布斯與在樓上工作的工程師們相處甚歡。“每天早上10點，他們15兒都會供應甜甜圈和咖啡。我會跑上樓跟他們混在一起。”

Jobs liked to work. He also had a newspaper route—his father would drive him when it was raining—and during his sophomore year spent weekends and the summer as a stock clerk at a cavernous electronics store, Haltek. It was to electronics what his father’s junkyards were to auto parts: a scavenger’s paradise sprawling over an entire city block with new, used, salvaged, and surplus components crammed onto warrens of shelves, dumped unsorted into bins, and piled in an outdoor yard. “Out in the back, near the bay, they had a fenced-in area with things like Polaris submarine interiors that had been ripped and sold for salvage,” he recalled. “All the controls and buttons were right there. The colors were military greens and grays, but they had these switches and bulb covers of amber and red. There were these big old lever switches that, when you flipped them, it was awesome, like you were blowing up Chicago.”

喬布斯喜歡工作。他曾經送過報紙——下雨的時候父親會開豐送他——在他高中第二年的時候，周末和暑假他都在一家巨大的電子器材商店哈爾泰克（Haltek）做倉庫管理員。如同他父親那個堆滿汽車零件的廢品站一樣，這家到處都是電子設備的商店也是拾荒者的天堂。這家商店延伸了一整個街區，那些新的、舊的、回收的、過剩的部件塞滿了架子，未經分類就扔進了箱子，還有的就堆在戶外的院子里。“在倉庫后面靠近海灣的地方，他們用柵欄圍起了一塊區域，里面放著北極星潛艇的內部元件，都是從潛艇上扒下來當做廢品賣掉的，”他回憶說，“所有的操縱裝置和按鈕都在。它們都是軍綠色或灰色的，但是開關和螺栓蓋是琥珀色和紅色的。那些開關都是老式的大型的手柄式開關，當你打開開關的時候，那種感覺太棒了，就好像你要炸了芝加哥一樣。”

At the wooden counters up front, laden with thick catalogues in tattered binders, people would haggle for switches, resistors, capacitors, and sometimes the latest memory chips. His father used to do that for auto parts, and he succeeded because he knew the value of each better than the clerks. Jobs followed suit. He developed a knowledge of electronic parts that was honed by his love of negotiating and turning a profit. He would go to electronic flea markets, such as the San Jose swap meet, haggle for a used circuit board that contained some valuable chips or components, and then sell those to his manager at Haltek.

在店里堆滿了厚厚目錄的木制柜臺前，人們會為了開關、電阻、電容和最新的存儲芯片討價還價。喬布斯的父親以前也曾為汽車部件做過這樣的事情，因為他比店員還清楚零件的價格，所以每次都能還價成功。喬布斯在這點上學習了父親。他熱衷于談判并中獲得實惠，這也讓他對電子零件有了更充分的了解。他會去電子產品的跳蚤市場，比如圣何塞交換大會，為了一塊帶有值錢芯片的電路板跟人討價還價，然后把那些芯片賣給哈爾泰克商店的經理。