Marilyn K. Yee/New York Times Co./Getty Images

Jan. 16, 1984: Steve Jobs, left, Chairman of Apple Computer, and John Sculley, Apple's president, pose with the new Macintosh personal computer

As the world remembers Steve Jobs, the image that comes to mind most readily is one of a leader at the top of his game. But before Jobs grew into a high-powered CEO, he was a young, brilliant entrepreneur, building on the experiences of the Silicon Valley trailblazers who had come before him. We talked to Leslie Berlin, the project historian at the Stanford Silicon Valley Archives' Apple collection, about the world Steve Jobs entered and how he changed it. The interview has been edited and condensed.

The Bay Citizen: Paint a picture of the early days of Silicon Valley.

Leslie Berlin: All the way until 1971, this area was called the Valley of the Heart’s Delight, and it was known for its orchards. It was just stunningly beautiful — these beautiful trees with these white blossoms just dotting the hillside.

During World War II, the government provided a lot of funding for research, and a lot of it came out here. After World War II, there was enormous population growth. The population of Santa Clara County doubles, and doubles again.

You had these young, educated engineers and scientists who were drawn here for two things: one was the weather, and one was the incredibly low cost of living [laughs]. [Intel founder] Robert Noyce’s mortgage payment on a house in Los Altos was less than his monthly rent on an apartment in central Philly.

By the time Steve Jobs comes in, in the ‘70s, there’s already this infrastructure — you can think of it as an entrepreneurship ecosystem. It got to the point where almost anything you needed to start a company, you could find here. Around the time he’s coming up, this whole infrastructure is also coming up.

TBC: What was Steve Jobs like in the early days?

Berlin: I’m not being flip when I say that he was very young. He was certainly no older than 20 when he was working for Atari. He was part of a generation that was looking the Vietnam war straight in the face.

There are a lot of interviews that I’ve read with people commenting on the fact that he had really long hair, bare feet, that sort of thing. But nobody ever doubted his brilliance. That showed through always.

TBC: How did Jobs evolve over time from that long-haired hippie into the powerful CEO that we think of now?

Berlin: He would tell you a big part of that actually came from having gotten fired from Apple [in 1985]. I think he called it losing success and starting all over again.

TBC: What happened after he was fired?

Berlin: He established this new company called NeXT. And then he was at NeXT for quite a while. But in 1996, Apple buys the company, and it becomes the heart of the Apple operating system. And Jobs comes back with it.

TBC: What do you see as Jobs’ mark on Silicon Valley business and culture?

Berlin: Jobs’ first chunk of time at Apple absolutely coincided with the introduction of advanced consumer electronics. When you look at what drives so much interest in the Valley right now, it’s not business applications or enterprise software. People love, and quite literally love, their personal electronic devices, their iPhones, their iPads, even their PCs — and even Facebook. It’s a shift, first about selling to the government, then selling to companies, and now it’s about selling to consumers.

It seems to me there’s a real era of elegance — elegant design — that gets ushered in as part of this consumer electronics wave. Especially after Jobs comes back to Apple. Do you remember those colored iMacs? Design is just hugely important. That wasn’t there before, and it’s part of this shift of really valuing the consumer as just the market to be pursuing.

I think there’s going to be a lot of talk about Jobs’ legacy in terms of being a symbol of the Valley, and I think there are a lot of ways you can talk about him in terms of metaphor. I mean he really seemed to personify the up-by-your-bootstraps, American success story: local boy, college dropout, makes good, makes very, very good, and I think that’s an important part of his legacy.

The other thing to remember is that he was a really, really good CEO. And there may be a temptation to start reducing him to legend or some sort of symbol. I think that he could have had great ideas and could have been the greatest design mind, but it wouldn’t have mattered so much if he hadn’t been so good at running companies.

TBC: What are some of your favorite Steve Jobs-related items in the Stanford Archives?

Berlin: I don’t think that I would really be able to pick one out, or even a handful. What the archive gives you is the chance to build history without the overlay of legend and myth that builds up, particularly that builds up around success. I think sometimes people expect that there’s the intellectual equivalent of some hidden treasure, and you can open it up and there’s your story. And I think what archives are really about is there’s hundreds or thousands of puzzle pieces, and you don’t even know what the picture is that you’re going to be assembling, but all of a sudden what you start to see is a coherent picture.

Leslie Berlin is the author of "The Man Behind the Microchip: Robert Noyce and the Invention of Silicon Valley" as well as a forthcoming history of early Silicon Valley to be published by Simon and Schuster.