If anyone can be said to represent the spirit of an entrepreneurial generation, the man to beat for now is the charismatic cofounder and chairman of Apple Computer, Inc., Steven Jobs. He transformed a small business begun in a garage in Los Altos, California, into a revolutionary billion-dollar company--one that joined the ranks of the Fortune 500 in just five years, faster than any other company in history. And what's most galling about it is that the guy is only 29 years old.Jobs's company introduced personal computers into the American home and workplace. Before the founding of Apple in 1976, the image most people had of computers was of machines in science-fiction movies that beeped and flashed or of huge, silent mainframes that brooded ominously behind the closed doors of giant corporations and Government agencies. But with the development of the transistor and then the microprocessor chip, it became possible to miniaturize the technology of the computer and make it accessible to personal users. By the mid-Seventies, a starter computer kit, of interest mainly to hobbyists, was available for about $375, plus assorted parts.

In a valley south of San Francisco already known for a concentration of electronics firms and youthful start-up companies, two friends who shared a penchant for mischief and electronics set out to create a small computer of their own. Jobs, then 21, the adopted son of a machinist, had taken a job designing video games at Atari after dropping out of Reed College, while Stephen Wozniak, 26, worked as an engineer at Hewlett-Packard, one of the largest firms in the area known as Silicon Valley. In their spare time, the friends designed and built a makeshift computer--a circuit board, really--which they whimsically called the Apple I. It didn't do much, but when they found that they had stacked up orders for 50 of the contraptions, it dawned on Jobs that there might be an actual grown-up market for personal computers.Wozniak's interest was primarily technical; Jobs set about making the computer accessible to people. Together, they added a keyboard and memory (the capability of storing information) to the Apple I, and Wozniak developed the disk drive (a device to read and store information permanently) and added a video terminal. Jobs hired experts to design an efficient power supply and a fancy casing and, thus, the Apple II was born--along with an entire industry.Apple's rise was meteoric. From sales of $200,000 that first year in Jobs's garage (the Silicon Valley version of Lincoln's log cabin), the company grew into a giant firm with 1.4 billion dollars in revenues in 1984. Its founders became multimillionaires and folk heroes. Wozniak, who effectively retired from Apple in 1979 to go back to college and to sponsor music festivals, had relatively little to do after his creative contribution to the technology. It was Jobs who stayed on to run the company, to see 70 percent of home and school computers bear the Apple mark, to fend off efforts within Apple to unseat him and, most of all, to do battle with IBM when Big Blue, as the 40-billion-dollar colossus is unaffectionately known, decided to move in on the personal-computer business.With an estimated net worth of $450,000,000, mostly in Apple stock, Jobs was by far the youngest person on Forbes's list of richest Americans for several years running. (It is also worth noting that of the 100 Americans named by Forbes, Jobs is one of only seven who made their fortunes on their own.) Recently, with the drop in the value of Apple stock during troubled times in 1983, he lost nearly a quarter of a billion dollars on paper, so his net worth is today estimated at about $200,000,000.

But to hear Jobs tell it, the money isn't even half the story, especially since he does not spend it very lavishly--and, indeed, claims to have very little time for social life. He is on a mission, preaching the Gospel of salvation through the personal computer--preferably one manufactured by Apple. He is an engaging pitchman and never loses an opportunity to sell his products, eloquently describing a time when computers will be as common as kitchen appliances and as revolutionary in their impact as the telephone or the internal-combustion engine. Hype aside, it is a fact that there are now more than 2,000,000 Apple computers--and an estimated 16,000 software programs--in classrooms, suburban living rooms, farmhouses, missile-tracking stations and small and large business offices throughout America.In creating the vast market for computers, Apple also created an environment for competition, and companies by the score have entered the fray to capture the market Apple dominated from 1977 to 1982. But no other product has been as successful as the IBM PC, which quickly took 28 percent of the market, establishing a new standard. With its market share dropping, Apple introduced two new computers, the Lisa and the Apple III, to an unenthusiastic reception. By mid-1983, analysts were wondering aloud if Apple would survive.Amid corporate infighting, Jobs took over the division of Apple that was building an entirely new computer, which he saw as Apple's last, best hope. It wasn't just parochial, he said; if they failed, "IBM would be left to dominate--and destroy--the industry." After three years, the Macintosh was released with a $20,000,000 advertising campaign. Billed as a computer "for the rest of us," it was hailed as a giant step toward making computers easy to use. With a paperwhite screen, small pictures to represent program choices and a "mouse" (a small rolling box with a button on it) to make selections on the screen, the Mac was certainly the least threatening computer ever built. It was also criticized as being too much of a toy, unsuitable for serious business use. Although the arguments rage on, Apple has been busily manufacturing 40,000 Macintoshes a month and has plans to double that figure this year.

Depending on whom one talks to, Jobs is a visionary who changed the world for the better or an opportunist whose marketing skills made for an incredible commercial success. In jeans and worn sneakers, running a company that prides itself on having a mixture of Sixties idealism and Eighties business savvy, Jobs is both admired and feared. "He's the reason I'll work 20 hours a day," says one engineer. Or, as Michael Moritz reports in The Little Kingdom, Jobs's capriciousness--praise one day, scorn the next--nearly drove members of the Macintosh team to distraction. He also asked a wavering president of Pepsi-Cola, John Sculley, to take administrative charge of Apple, saying, "Are you going to keep selling sugar water to children when you could be changing the world?" Sculley accepted the offer.To explore life and technology with the young (Jobs will turn 30 next month) father of the computer revolution, Playboy sent free-lance journalist David Sheff to the heart of Silicon Valley.