Journalist Finds Lost Tapes From Steve Jobs' 'Wilderness Years'

Brent Schlender, a journalist who spent years covering Steve Jobs, has found lost tapes of interviews conducted during Steve Jobs' 1985 to 1996 hiatus from Apple known as the Wilderness Years.

I had covered Jobs for Fortune and The Wall Street Journal since 1985, but I didn't come to fully appreciate the importance of these "lost" years until after his death last fall. Rummaging through the storage shed, I discovered some three dozen tapes holding recordings of extended interviews--some lasting as long as three hours--that I'd conducted with him periodically over the past 25 years. (Snippets are scattered throughout this story.) Many I had never replayed--a couple hadn't even been transcribed before now. Some were interrupted by his kids bolting into the kitchen as we talked. During others, he would hit the pause button himself before saying something he feared might come back to bite him. Listening to them again with the benefit of hindsight, the ones that took place during that interregnum jump out as especially enlightening.

Schlender digs into the tapes and shares some interesting stories of the Apple co-founders experiences through those years. Notably he states, "Steve Jobs did not wander aimlessly into the wilderness."


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