In summer 1985, Apple co-founder Steve Jobs rebuffed three offers to become a professor. “I told all of the universities that I thought I would be an awful professor,” he later revealed in an interview with Newsweek. Yet he still wanted to make a big impact in the education sector.
Jobs was 30 years old and ready for a new challenge. He’d resigned from Apple following a reorganisation, but not before telling the board what he wanted to do next. Having previously visited Brown University, he’d been told academics sorely wanted a powerful, personal workstation capable of helping them with their research. His aim, he told the Apple board, was to create a computer for the higher education market that best suited them.
