After being forced out of Apple in 1985, its founder spent 12 years running a floundering start-up. A new book claims this exile set the stage for Silicon Valley’s greatest comeback story

By Geoffrey Cain

For a generation, Steve Jobs was the figure in the black turtleneck on the keynote stage, holding up a rectangle he was about to convince you was the future. His colleagues had a name for his charisma: “the reality-distortion field.” It was his ability to convince a room that an impossible deadline was reachable or that a failing product was on the verge of greatness.

Jobs’s life has been told countless times. The authorized version goes like this: in 1985, he was driven out of Apple, the company he’d co-founded nine years earlier out of his parents’ garage, idled READ ON