When Steve Jobs, founder of Apple Computers, decided the required courses in his first year at Reed College were "meaningless" to him, he dropped out of school.
He didn't tell his parents, so, he still hung out on campus in Portland, Oregon. Jobs would sleep on floors in the dorm rooms of his friends. He'd return glass bottles for food money and the nearby pagan temple served him a free weekly meal.
Still, he claimed that dropping out was the best thing he ever did.
Even though he wasn't enrolled at Reed, Jobs still "dropped in" on courses that interested him. One was calligraphy.
"Calligraphy was fascinating and interesting," said Jobs.
In a 2005 commencement address at Stanford University, Jobs claimed this calligraphy course was responsible for the fonts used in our computers today.
"If I had never dropped in on that single calligraphy course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts."
As always,
Brian
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