Steve Jobs: > I got to know this man, whose name was Larry Lang, and he taught me a lot of electronics. He was great. He used to build Heathkits. Heathkits wer

Steve Jobs: > I got to know this man, whose name was Larry Lang, and he taught me a lot of electronics. He was great. He used to build Heathkits. Heathkits were really great. Heathkits were these products that you would buy in kit form. You actually paid more money for them than if you just went and bought the finished product, if it was available. These Heathkits would come with these detailed manuals about how to put this thing together, and all the parts would be laid out in a certain way and color coded. You’d actually build this thing yourself. > I would say that gave one several things. It gave one an understanding of what was inside a finished product and how it worked, because it would include a theory of operation. But maybe even more importantly, it gave one the sense that one could build the things that one saw around oneself in the universe. These things were not mysteries anymore. I mean, you looked at a television set, and you would think, “I haven’t built one of those—but I could. There’s one of those in the Heathkit catalog, and I’ve built two other Heathkits, so I could build a television set.” Things became much more clear that they were the results of human creation, not these magical things that just appeared in one’s environment that one had no knowledge of their interiors. It gave a tremendous degree of self-confidence that, through exploration and learning, one could understand seemingly very complex things in one’s environment. My childhood was very fortunate in that way.