The man who put a dent in the universe

The worldwide accolades and outpouring of grief are at the core of a 'reality distortion field'.

Not wishing to speak ill of the dead but Steve Jobs was a manipulative liar and a tyrannical bully. His bilious put-downs were targeted at friends and foes alike and he had no qualms about publicly humiliating anyone he deemed to be a ''bozo'' or a ''B player''.

So says Walter Isaacson, Jobs's biographer and father confessor, who captures in seat-squirming detail the highs and lows of a remarkable life in his opus Steve Jobs.

It was a life that ended prematurely on October 5 and led to an outpouring of grief the likes of which were witnessed only with the untimely deaths of Michael Jackson, Princess Diana, John Lennon and JFK.

Condolences and tributes swamped the digital ether and, outside Apple stores around the world, makeshift shrines sprouted on pavements and Post-it notes honouring Jobs's memory were pinned on the shops' glass facades.

At the same time as the anti-corporate Occupy Wall Street movement was going global, here was the sight of fans grieving for a man who had only just recently stepped down as the chief executive of the world's biggest company.

To explain this and many of the other contradictions that Jobs and Apple present, you need to know about the ''reality distortion field''. It was a term coined by an Apple software designer, Bud Tribble, in 1981 that described Jobs's ability to use his considerable powers of persuasion to convince people black was white.

The concept comes from a Star Trek episode in which the aliens create their own world using sheer mental force. Isaacson quotes a former Apple employee describing it as a ''confounding melange of charismatic rhetorical style, indomitable will and eagerness to bend any fact to fit the purpose at hand''.

Usually, it can take years before a revisionist history emerges revealing this or that hero was actually a ''scumbag''. In the case of Jobs, the reality distortion field was powered down just weeks after he passed away with the release of the biography. It was as if he held on to life so that he could have the last say - through Isaacson - and reveal his own foibles and triumphs before others had a chance to dredge them up.

Isaacson spent 2½ years completing his work, a task that was undertaken with the co-operation of Jobs, his family and past and present Apple employees.

Jobs's only interference was with the cover - a small miracle in itself given his history of pedantry. He hated the one the publisher proposed and designed his own. For everything else, Isaacson was given carte blanche.

Being a ''scumbag'' does not detract from a series of remarkable achievements that began in 1976 when Jobs and his partner, Steve Wozniak, started up a small business in the Jobs family garage in Silicon Valley making kit computers for hobbyists.

Isaacson reminds us that while Jobs had gumption and vision, he was not always successful. And when Jobs hit the jackpot, it was often because of an appropriated idea or because of the brilliance of those who surrounded him.

He was fortunate to team up with Wozniak, who was the more technically gifted of the pair. When Jobs bought Pixar in 1986, it came with John Lasseter, the man behind all of the animation studio's subsequent blockbusters, starting with Toy Story. And in Apple's chief designer, Jony Ive, Jobs found his aesthetic soul mate and the design brainiac behind the iMac, the iPod, the iPhone and, most recently, the iPad.

Isaacson's epic biography joins all the dots in Jobs's fascinating journey and weaves an inspiring - and disturbing - story about the man who was determined to leave his mark and ''put a dent in the universe''.

STEVE JOBS

Walter Isaacson

Little, Brown, 656pp,

$45

Stephen Hutcheon is the editor of the Herald’s tablet (iPad) edition and has reported about Apple off and on since the 1980s.