Young Steve Jobs Gives IBM the Finger

This is a classic picture of a young Steve Jobs giving the finger to an IBM sign in 1983, it has been circulating again after all these years thanks to Macintosh co-creator Andy Hertzfeld who posted the high res copy to Google+.

Here’s the text that was posted by Hertzfeld along with the amusing image of a young Mr Jobs, explaining the story behind the photo of Steve Jobs giving IBM the middle finger:

“In memoriam for Steve Jobs as 2011 draws to a close, here’s one more rare photo that illustrates his rebellious spirit. In December 1983, a few weeks before the Mac launch, we made a quick trip to New York City to meet with Newsweek, who was considering doing a cover story on the Mac. The photo was taken spontaneously as we walked around Manhattan by Jean Pigozzi, a wild French jet setter who was hanging out with us at the time. Somehow I ended up with a copy of it. My editor begged me to include it in my book, but I was too timid to ask for permission, especially since IBM was still making CPUs for Apple at the time.“

The book is his “Revolution in The Valley: The Insanely Great Story of How the Mac Was Made, which tells the story of how the original Macintosh was created. That subject was briefly discussed in the recent Steve Jobs biography as well.

The picture demonstrates the competitive nature of Mr Jobs and early Apple, and although the image has been around a while this is the first higher resolution copy to surface.

In the early days of Apple, IBM was largely considered the companies biggest competitor and enemy of sorts, as is demonstrated in the Ghostbusters spoof and of course the classic 1984 Superbowl commercial that launched the first Mac.

This is obviously a fun part of Apple history, or any fan of the retro computing era. Though looking back now several decades later, Apple is the behemoth, with a market cap significantly larger than IBM.