I wonder a lot about Jobs’ spiritual and metaphysical beliefs, I read both the Isaacson bio and Becoming Steve Jobs and neither dug too deep into this aspect. Yet he was known for taking LSD, living with monks and yogis in India, visiting the Hari Krishna temples, visiting the Zen Buddhist temples, giving a copy of Autobiography of a Yogi to everyone who attended his funeral, and I’m just learning now that he wrote horoscope software. I suspect there was much more unexplored depth to his spiritual beliefs and that a lot of his thinking and principles could be traced back to what he learned from the monks and yogis, but for whatever reason he chose to never speak directly about it to anyone including his biographer and closest colleagues.
I was at Apple during the Jobs era and you could really see the Zen influence in how he ran things and his approach. I was slightly interested in Buddhism at the time but the Apple experience pushed me to dig a bit deeper. After I quit, I went and studied at a Zen monastery afterwards to try to and sort out and make sense of all that I had seen when I was there.
Steve was deep into a specific lineage that went from Kodo Sawaki (the 'Homeless Kodo') to Kobun Chino Otogawa, who was Steve’s long-time mentor and even did his wedding. Sawaki was famous for being a total rebel; he had a column in the Asahi Shimbun in the late '60s filled with these blunt aphorisms that basically told people to stop being so full of themselves. You can definitely see that 'no-BS' attitude in Steve's approach. He also used meditation as a way to work through problems.
>Yet he was known for taking LSD, living with monks and yogis in India, visiting the Hari Krishna temples, visiting the Zen Buddhist temples, giving a copy of Autobiography of a Yogi to everyone who attended his funeral, and I’m just learning now that he wrote horoscope software. I suspect there was much more unexplored depth to his spiritual beliefs
Does that sound like some real depth?
This part "known for taking LSD, living with monks and yogis in India, visiting the Hari Krishna temples, visiting the Zen Buddhist temples" basically describes any self-respecting hipster hippie in the late 60s/early 70s. There were even bus services that catered to the market, and many celebs at the time (most famously The Beatles) did the same:
Mckenna, too. And Jacobo Grinberg. And I still think that if these people deeped into Math and Physics instead of humanities they would reach to crazy conclusions on Cosmology.
If you're looking for role models I would not recommend Steve Jobs.
"""
Even after Jobs started paying more attention to Brennan-Jobs, her mother, Chrisann Brennan, apparently felt uncomfortable leaving him with her alone after an incident in which he questioned and teased the then-9-year-old Brennan-Jobs about her sexual attractions and proclivities.
When Brennan went to live with him as a teen, he forbade her from seeing her mother for 6 months. After moving in with them, Brennan told her stepmother, Laurene Powell-Jobs, that she felt lonely and asked that they tell her goodnight in the evenings... Powell-Jobs responded, "We're cold people."
Once, as Jobs groped his wife and pretended to be having sex with her, he demanded that Brennan stay in the room, calling it a "family moment." He repeatedly withheld money from her, told her that she would get "nothing" from his wealth — and even refused to install heat in her bedroom.
When she started to become active in her high school, Jobs got on Brennan for not spending more time with the family, telling her, "This isn't working out. You're not succeeding as a member of this family."
At one point, neighbors of the family were so worried about Brennan that they helped her move into their house. They also helped her pay for college.
Yes. Believe it or not, most people are not all star human beings in all facets of their lives. We can certainly still learn from them, instead of casually dismissing them when we find an instance that they don't live up to our pedestal.
If you want to learn more about those formative beliefs around the time that this horoscope program was written, I recommend the book The Bite in the Apple by his former girlfriend (and mother of his daughter) Chrisann Brennan: https://amzn.to/4aN2DQX
Also though, this was the 1970's. I was eleven years old in 1975 and can remember how much "the Age of Aquarius" had infused so much of culture. Horoscopes, biorhythms, transcendental meditation, "Chariots of the Gods?", etc.…
(And this was from the vantage point of Kansas. Christ, California must have been out of this world in the 70's.)
I'm 2 years younger than you and was in NJ. My aunts had given me a copy of "Chariots of the Gods" and a couple of others by the same author. I remember also having some books on pyramid power, reincarnation, Atlantis, and the Bermuda Triangle. Even then, it all seemed like fiction to me.
He gets the same basic respect from me that any of our dead would. As a computing personality, IMHO every moment of attention that he got and gets belongs to Dennis Ritchie, second in his case Wozniak.
Now point that to 12th August, 2026 to see it's there's some relation. The lower the Y point = the more the 'novelty'.
It's a bit of crackpot science but that would just mean most of the humanity behaviour from genomics it's highly predictable except for some cosmetics and newer knowledge.
You can see these patterns in big human gatherings. And under bird flocks.
The more people you connect, the less individuality you'll get, as
some unique behaviour will emerge from few leaders, as if they were tied to virtual strings/chains.
Also: this is entirely crazy:
Title:Matter-wave interference with particles selected from a molecular library with masses exceeding 10000 amu
The choice of AppleSoft BASIC for a recreation seems to be somewhat odd and deliberate, and doesn't represent the typical limitations of the time (AppleSoft BASIC does floating point math!): in August 1975, the MOS 6502 hadn't even been announced and the Apple ][ wasn't yet a dream. Even Microsoft 4K BASIC for the Altair hadn't been introduced, yet (this was to happen only later in October.) Meaning, none of the basic technology of choice would have been available.
Something along the lines of Intel 8080 assembly may have been more appropriate, given that the target platform would have probably been a coin-op machine. (Given that "Gun Fight", the first arcade video game utilising a microprocessor, wasn't yet released, even this would have been an ambitious choice. Atari doing research for something that required an ALU may be even more interesting than the involvement of the young Steve Jobs.)
PS: This is just to give some truth to "this is where the hackersnews jerks will say this is an ad". ;-)
Yeah... it's a bit unclear to me what hardware this was even supposed to run on? The home and arcade video games Atari was producing at the time (Pong and later Breakout) were based on discrete logic chips, so weren't "programmable" in any modern sense of the word. As you wrote, the 6502 was only introduced later in 1975, and designs using it came even later.
Notably, Dave Nutting Associates (Bushnell's former employer, who also distributed Computer Space) had played around with an Intel 4004 in 1974 and then demonstrated (to Bally) a CPU based system with a frame buffer in September, which evolved into the Intel 8080-based board that ran Midway's Gun Fight. Atari would have probably been aware of this (Nutting Associates had filed a patent.) So, something along the lines of Intel 4004 or 8080 machine code, maybe M6800.
> made a program you can actually run, on an apple ii, or an emulator, or the open-source adafruit fruit jam – mini rp2350 computer, which does this and so much more (this is where the hackersnews jerks will say this is an ad and that cloudflare is on our blog).
As I read that sentence, before reaching the parenthesis, I actually thought it was cool and smart marketing. It feels like the author misunderstands what is typically called an ad, which are those blog posts which read like “has this ever happened to you” infomercials, inventing a problem and then publicising their product as the exact solution at the end.
This, on the other hand, is just for fun and the joy of hacking, and HN typically enjoys those. Heck, you even listed alternative ways to run it before your own.
The only thing that bothers me about the article is the poor formatting and the insistence on lower case, both of which make it unpleasant to read for me.
the aside was preemptive, not defensive. hackernews d00dz call anything touched by a company an ad, even when the project is reconstructing a 1975 atari curiosity for fun.
we listed multiple ways to run it because the goal was preservation and play, not funneling anyone anywhere.
the formatting and lowercase are deliberate, it's not meant to be modern content-optimized blog that hade ads or advertisers i need to make sure are happy. totally reasonable if that makes it unpleasant for you, but it is not accidental.
I understood that. I still maintain it seems misdirected, since this is not the type of post HN typically criticises for being an ad, for the reasons I mentioned above and you yourself pointed out:
> we listed multiple ways to run it because the goal was preservation and play, not funneling anyone anywhere.
Exactly. It is clear what the goal was, which is why I think you wouldn’t get the criticism (or, I believe, such criticism would’ve been downvoted in this instance).
> the formatting and lowercase are deliberate (…) it is not accidental.
Again, I understand that. I don’t think you’d have done that and published it by mistake.
> it's not meant to be modern content-optimized blog that hade ads or advertisers
This I don’t get. Using proper letter cases isn’t being “modern content-optimized [for] ads”, it’s simply good writing and respecting readers. Letter cases serve a function, they help with readability, comprehension, disambiguation… As the joke goes: “capitalisation is the difference between helping your Uncle Jack off a horse, and helping your uncle jack off a horse”.
And when I mention formatting I’m also referencing the seemingly random line breaks, the tiny headers, the lack of spacing between headers and text, the inconsistent spacing between paragraphs and lists… Everything is all over the place, inconsistent, hard to read and follow. A basic HTML page with no CSS has better formatting by default. Of course, you’re free to have it however you like, I don’t dispute that at all, but you’ll also lose serious readers because of it and that’s a shame.
After reading, it is not the horoscope in the common meaning of astrology but as a star chart but in the meaning of sky chart (albeit limited to planets)
Jobs was actually a technician at Atari, assembling circuit boards during the night shift. Jobs was later paid by Atari to make Breakout, but basically subcontracted it to Wozniak for 50% of the contract. Jobs ended up paying Wozniak less than 1/10 of how much Atari paid him.
Calling him an engineer would be a stretch. As others aid, he was a hardware technician on an assembly line.
That said, that experience, and this article, that Jobs had an understanding of computers and electronics when founding Apple beyond the "Woz = engineer, Jobs = sales guy" oversimplification. It's just that compared to Woz—one of the century's greatest engineering minds—anyone would look third-rate.
"[a] mini rp2350 computer, which does this and so much more (this is where the hackersnews jerks will say this is an ad and that cloudflare is on our blog)."
I wonder a lot about Jobs’ spiritual and metaphysical beliefs, I read both the Isaacson bio and Becoming Steve Jobs and neither dug too deep into this aspect. Yet he was known for taking LSD, living with monks and yogis in India, visiting the Hari Krishna temples, visiting the Zen Buddhist temples, giving a copy of Autobiography of a Yogi to everyone who attended his funeral, and I’m just learning now that he wrote horoscope software. I suspect there was much more unexplored depth to his spiritual beliefs and that a lot of his thinking and principles could be traced back to what he learned from the monks and yogis, but for whatever reason he chose to never speak directly about it to anyone including his biographer and closest colleagues.
I was at Apple during the Jobs era and you could really see the Zen influence in how he ran things and his approach. I was slightly interested in Buddhism at the time but the Apple experience pushed me to dig a bit deeper. After I quit, I went and studied at a Zen monastery afterwards to try to and sort out and make sense of all that I had seen when I was there.
Steve was deep into a specific lineage that went from Kodo Sawaki (the 'Homeless Kodo') to Kobun Chino Otogawa, who was Steve’s long-time mentor and even did his wedding. Sawaki was famous for being a total rebel; he had a column in the Asahi Shimbun in the late '60s filled with these blunt aphorisms that basically told people to stop being so full of themselves. You can definitely see that 'no-BS' attitude in Steve's approach. He also used meditation as a way to work through problems.
I would recommend this book, 'The Zen Teaching of Homeless Kodo,' which features Kodo's aphorisms and various levels of commentary:https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Zen-Teaching-of-Homel...
>Yet he was known for taking LSD, living with monks and yogis in India, visiting the Hari Krishna temples, visiting the Zen Buddhist temples, giving a copy of Autobiography of a Yogi to everyone who attended his funeral, and I’m just learning now that he wrote horoscope software. I suspect there was much more unexplored depth to his spiritual beliefs
Does that sound like some real depth?
This part "known for taking LSD, living with monks and yogis in India, visiting the Hari Krishna temples, visiting the Zen Buddhist temples" basically describes any self-respecting hipster hippie in the late 60s/early 70s. There were even bus services that catered to the market, and many celebs at the time (most famously The Beatles) did the same:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hippie_trail
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NtPFdgZw1R0
Mckenna, too. And Jacobo Grinberg. And I still think that if these people deeped into Math and Physics instead of humanities they would reach to crazy conclusions on Cosmology.
If you're looking for role models I would not recommend Steve Jobs.
"""
"""
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/memoir-steve-jobs-apos-daught...
Yes. Believe it or not, most people are not all star human beings in all facets of their lives. We can certainly still learn from them, instead of casually dismissing them when we find an instance that they don't live up to our pedestal.
2 replies →
Amazing. Nearly all rich business owners are the same: too much dopamine and leaks of sociopathy.
That's why they win.
3 replies →
If you want to learn more about those formative beliefs around the time that this horoscope program was written, I recommend the book The Bite in the Apple by his former girlfriend (and mother of his daughter) Chrisann Brennan: https://amzn.to/4aN2DQX
Also note the byline of his company stamp's on the invoice with the auctioned documents:
"gate gate paragate parasamgate bodhi svaha"
https://www.rrauction.com/auctions/lot-detail/35081740734601...
Also though, this was the 1970's. I was eleven years old in 1975 and can remember how much "the Age of Aquarius" had infused so much of culture. Horoscopes, biorhythms, transcendental meditation, "Chariots of the Gods?", etc.…
(And this was from the vantage point of Kansas. Christ, California must have been out of this world in the 70's.)
I'm 2 years younger than you and was in NJ. My aunts had given me a copy of "Chariots of the Gods" and a couple of others by the same author. I remember also having some books on pyramid power, reincarnation, Atlantis, and the Bermuda Triangle. Even then, it all seemed like fiction to me.
He gets the same basic respect from me that any of our dead would. As a computing personality, IMHO every moment of attention that he got and gets belongs to Dennis Ritchie, second in his case Wozniak.
See the spiritual mentor in the series Silicon Valley. ;-)
You could be surprised when Science, IT and metaphysics meet:
https://github.com/kl4yfd/timewave_z3r0
https://github.com/jasondrawdy/Omniwave
Now point that to 12th August, 2026 to see it's there's some relation. The lower the Y point = the more the 'novelty'.
It's a bit of crackpot science but that would just mean most of the humanity behaviour from genomics it's highly predictable except for some cosmetics and newer knowledge.
You can see these patterns in big human gatherings. And under bird flocks.
The more people you connect, the less individuality you'll get, as some unique behaviour will emerge from few leaders, as if they were tied to virtual strings/chains.
Also: this is entirely crazy:
Title:Matter-wave interference with particles selected from a molecular library with masses exceeding 10000 amu
https://arxiv.org/abs/1310.8343
TL;DR: Apparenting separate system behaving as a single one. Like birds without colliding into themselves while flying.
The choice of AppleSoft BASIC for a recreation seems to be somewhat odd and deliberate, and doesn't represent the typical limitations of the time (AppleSoft BASIC does floating point math!): in August 1975, the MOS 6502 hadn't even been announced and the Apple ][ wasn't yet a dream. Even Microsoft 4K BASIC for the Altair hadn't been introduced, yet (this was to happen only later in October.) Meaning, none of the basic technology of choice would have been available.
Something along the lines of Intel 8080 assembly may have been more appropriate, given that the target platform would have probably been a coin-op machine. (Given that "Gun Fight", the first arcade video game utilising a microprocessor, wasn't yet released, even this would have been an ambitious choice. Atari doing research for something that required an ALU may be even more interesting than the involvement of the young Steve Jobs.)
PS: This is just to give some truth to "this is where the hackersnews jerks will say this is an ad". ;-)
Yeah... it's a bit unclear to me what hardware this was even supposed to run on? The home and arcade video games Atari was producing at the time (Pong and later Breakout) were based on discrete logic chips, so weren't "programmable" in any modern sense of the word. As you wrote, the 6502 was only introduced later in 1975, and designs using it came even later.
Yes, someone cramming code into 4K ROMs in 1975 would very likely have been writing in assembly language. With you on that one.
Notably, Dave Nutting Associates (Bushnell's former employer, who also distributed Computer Space) had played around with an Intel 4004 in 1974 and then demonstrated (to Bally) a CPU based system with a frame buffer in September, which evolved into the Intel 8080-based board that ran Midway's Gun Fight. Atari would have probably been aware of this (Nutting Associates had filed a patent.) So, something along the lines of Intel 4004 or 8080 machine code, maybe M6800.
Anyone could in a Apple I from the monitor, even from the Kim-I and a serial adapter.
> made a program you can actually run, on an apple ii, or an emulator, or the open-source adafruit fruit jam – mini rp2350 computer, which does this and so much more (this is where the hackersnews jerks will say this is an ad and that cloudflare is on our blog).
As I read that sentence, before reaching the parenthesis, I actually thought it was cool and smart marketing. It feels like the author misunderstands what is typically called an ad, which are those blog posts which read like “has this ever happened to you” infomercials, inventing a problem and then publicising their product as the exact solution at the end.
This, on the other hand, is just for fun and the joy of hacking, and HN typically enjoys those. Heck, you even listed alternative ways to run it before your own.
The only thing that bothers me about the article is the poor formatting and the insistence on lower case, both of which make it unpleasant to read for me.
the aside was preemptive, not defensive. hackernews d00dz call anything touched by a company an ad, even when the project is reconstructing a 1975 atari curiosity for fun.
we listed multiple ways to run it because the goal was preservation and play, not funneling anyone anywhere.
the formatting and lowercase are deliberate, it's not meant to be modern content-optimized blog that hade ads or advertisers i need to make sure are happy. totally reasonable if that makes it unpleasant for you, but it is not accidental.
> the aside was preemptive, not defensive.
I understood that. I still maintain it seems misdirected, since this is not the type of post HN typically criticises for being an ad, for the reasons I mentioned above and you yourself pointed out:
> we listed multiple ways to run it because the goal was preservation and play, not funneling anyone anywhere.
Exactly. It is clear what the goal was, which is why I think you wouldn’t get the criticism (or, I believe, such criticism would’ve been downvoted in this instance).
> the formatting and lowercase are deliberate (…) it is not accidental.
Again, I understand that. I don’t think you’d have done that and published it by mistake.
> it's not meant to be modern content-optimized blog that hade ads or advertisers
This I don’t get. Using proper letter cases isn’t being “modern content-optimized [for] ads”, it’s simply good writing and respecting readers. Letter cases serve a function, they help with readability, comprehension, disambiguation… As the joke goes: “capitalisation is the difference between helping your Uncle Jack off a horse, and helping your uncle jack off a horse”.
And when I mention formatting I’m also referencing the seemingly random line breaks, the tiny headers, the lack of spacing between headers and text, the inconsistent spacing between paragraphs and lists… Everything is all over the place, inconsistent, hard to read and follow. A basic HTML page with no CSS has better formatting by default. Of course, you’re free to have it however you like, I don’t dispute that at all, but you’ll also lose serious readers because of it and that’s a shame.
I might just be getting old, but that post is mainly code and images so using AI to write the very limited amount of text just screams lazy to me.
Makes you wonder if they are as lazy in the rest of their products.
The We in 'We recreated' was Claude wasn't it...
After reading, it is not the horoscope in the common meaning of astrology but as a star chart but in the meaning of sky chart (albeit limited to planets)
That’s exactly what “horoscope” means in western astrology, which only uses solar system’s planets + the sun.
The commonest meaning is a prediction based on this.
It can also mean just the positions of planets moon and sun relative to constellations but that is a much less common usage.
Did Jobs get Woz to write it for him?
It would be a huge surprise to me if Jobs crunched the trig on this one.
I wonder if he did get it ghost written. I would suspect yes.
Could have been Allan Baum. They were roommates for a summer.
Jobs was an engineer too. :)
Jobs was actually a technician at Atari, assembling circuit boards during the night shift. Jobs was later paid by Atari to make Breakout, but basically subcontracted it to Wozniak for 50% of the contract. Jobs ended up paying Wozniak less than 1/10 of how much Atari paid him.
6 replies →
An "engineer" that out sourced his work to Wozniak while at Atari
2 replies →
Calling him an engineer would be a stretch. As others aid, he was a hardware technician on an assembly line.
That said, that experience, and this article, that Jobs had an understanding of computers and electronics when founding Apple beyond the "Woz = engineer, Jobs = sales guy" oversimplification. It's just that compared to Woz—one of the century's greatest engineering minds—anyone would look third-rate.
"[a] mini rp2350 computer, which does this and so much more (this is where the hackersnews jerks will say this is an ad and that cloudflare is on our blog)."
haha, brillant.
Still not get Steve can program. Always think it is one of his key to his success is do not know this. Oh. It is a myth.