Chrisann Brennan named her daughter Lisa, and Steve Jobs named a computer the same
In 1978 Chrisann Brennan chose the name Lisa for her baby daughter, and Steve Jobs, then denying he was the father, was strongly attached to it. Apple soon unveiled a computer called the Lisa, officially an acronym. Decades later Jobs admitted to his biographer that it was obviously named for his daughter.
Brennan, born in Dayton, Ohio, in 1954 and named after the chrysanthemum, met Jobs at high school in Cupertino in 1972. Their relationship ran on and off for years, taking in an Oregon commune called the All One Farm, a Zen Buddhist community in Los Altos, and her own year travelling in India. When they reconnected, Jobs showed her and his parents a prototype Apple in the family living room.
In 1977 she worked in Apple's shipping department, testing, assembling and sending out Apple II computers, and was offered an apprenticeship drawing blueprints. Then she learned she was pregnant. She turned the job down, left Apple, went on welfare and cleaned houses, and gave birth to Lisa at the All One Farm on 17 May 1978. Jobs was not there.
A court-ordered paternity test confirmed Jobs as the father, and he was told to pay $385 a month in child support; after Apple went public he paid $500. Time magazine interviewed Brennan in 1982 for a planned profile of Jobs as Person of the Year, and she believes her candour played a part in the magazine naming the computer Machine of the Year instead. After Jobs was forced out of Apple the two learned to co-parent, and he eventually changed Lisa's surname to Brennan-Jobs.
In the late 1980s Brennan returned to art school, enrolling at the California College of Arts and Crafts with Jobs covering tuition, and later at the San Francisco Art Institute. She now works as a painter in Monterey, mostly on commission, and has painted murals for several children's hospitals. Her 2013 memoir, The Bite in the Apple, tells her side of the story, and she has been portrayed on screen by three actresses.
Source: Chrisann Brennan
