Steve Jobs: The Man Who Thought Different: A Biography

by Karen Blumenthal

wonderful fonts. Until then, computers had only one typeface, a boxy, jagged version that was easy to display on inexpensive monitors. Jobs pushed for the Macintosh to adopt the ability to let users choose from a menu of typefaces in different sizes, in bold and italic, all proportionately spaced. To make the typefaces even more special, he insisted that they be named after world-class cities—New York, London, Geneva, and Chicago. The decision drew on his experience at Reed College. There, because he wasn’t taking required classes, he had dropped into a class on calligraphy and the elements of beautiful typestyles. At the time, the studies seemed completely random. But now, in the early 1980s, they were useful again. Thanks in large part to that class at Reed, the Mac would be the first personal computer to give users the chance to write attractive business letters or make signs or flyers. It was an odd and unexpected chain of events: Jobs’s decision to quit college and drop in on a calligraphy class led to a new use for the personal computer that would be copied by others. He couldn’t have envisioned all that when he was just seventeen. That revelation, that experience, taught him a valuable lesson, he told the Stanford graduates. Because we can’t see what’s ahead, “you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.” In the same way, the company reorganization and the ejection from the Lisa project—similar connecting dots—led Jobs to the Macintosh. This,...