Daniel Kottke

In addition, in 1982 when Time magazine featured a major, but unflattering, profile of Jobs, he publicly "berated" Kottke for confirming the fact to Time that he had a daughter, Lisa Brennan.

In 1977, after graduating from Columbia, Kottke joined Apple as full-time employee #12. It was at that time that Jobs, Kottke, and Jobs's girlfriend Chrisann Brennan shared a house near the Apple office in Cupertino.

During his junior year at Columbia in 1976, Kottke was asked by Jobs to become involved in a hobbyist computer project where he assembled and tested the boards during the summer. He also arranged for Kottke to work "for an hourly rate part-time assembling circuit boards for a company called Call Computer" that didn't require technical expertise. It was during that summer that Kottke realized his own interest in computers. Kottke stated in an interview with KQED/PBS that both he and Jobs's sister Patty (who was also assembling boards while watching TV) were the first part-time employees of Apple, while Bill Fernandez was the first full-time employee.

After returning from India, Kottke transferred to Columbia University in 1975 as a literature and music major. He stayed in touch with Jobs and they traveled together to fellow Reed College classmate Robert Friedland's All One Farm.

Kottke first met Steve Jobs when they were both undergraduates at Reed College in 1972. In 1974, Kottke and Jobs made a trek in search of spiritual enlightenment to India to visit Neem Karoli Baba at his Kainchi ashram. When they got to the Neem Karoli ashram, it was almost deserted because Neem Karoli Baba had died in September 1973. They then made a long trek up a dry riverbed to an ashram of Haidakhan Babaji.

Kottke spent an additional eight years with Apple debugging Apple II printed circuit boards and building Apple III and Macintosh prototypes as well as working on the design for the Macintosh keyboard. The Apple II gained a sizable amount of popularity, eventually becoming one of the best selling personal computers of the 1970s and early 1980s. Kottke was also one of the original members of the Macintosh development team and his signature can be found embossed on the internal wall of early production Macintosh computers.

Kottke was born on April 4, 1954, in Bronxville, New York.