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Rare Apple photos: Cook in high school, Jobs back on the job

Vintage shots surface on the Web: Tim Cook during his high school days in Alabama in the mid '70s, and the fortuitous night Steve Jobs returned to Apple and set about engineering a legendary comeback.

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Edward Moyer is a senior editor at CNET and a many-year veteran of the writing and editing world. He enjoys taking sentences apart and putting them back together. He also likes making them from scratch. ¶ For nearly a quarter of a century, he's edited and written stories about various aspects of the technology world, from the US National Security Agency's controversial spying techniques to historic NASA space missions to 3D-printed works of fine art. Before that, he wrote about movies, musicians, artists and subcultures.
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Edward Moyer
2 min read
Cook should revisit the plaid trousers. They'd be every bit as distinctive as Jobs' trademark mock turtleneck. Whitbaker

OK, fanboys and -girls, it's time once again to haul out your digital scrapbooking materials and add to your collection of Apple-related odds and ends.

It's been a fun month for Apple miscellanea. We saw the surfacing of a rare video of Woz circa 1984, which was digitized from a videotape found in a basement. And earlier there was the Fast Company interview with Ying Hang "Hannah" Zhang, the young Starbucks employee who took the "prank" call Steve Jobs made during the unveiling of the iPhone in 2007 ("I'd like to order 4,000 lattes to go, please. No, just kidding. Wrong number. Thank you. Bye-bye!").

Now we get to check out Tim Cook's groovy plaid pants and moppy head of hair courtesy of images from his 1975 and '76 high school yearbooks, posted on Reddit last night by Redditor Whitbaker, who explained on the site:

"Tim Cook attended the same high school as my mother, and she spoke highly of him. These are pictures from the 1975 and 1976 yearbooks from Robertsdale High School in Robertsdale, Ala. She passed away in February 2011, but was following his success in Apple, and was quite proud (she was two years older). She served as editor of the yearbook her senior year, and he was part of the yearbook staff. Also, while in high school, he worked for my grandfather's independent pharmacy in town. He passed it down to my mother, and I am currently working there now."

Jobs and Gil Amelio. Let the turnaround begin. Tim Holmes

From the shots, we see that among other things Cook won "Most studious" two years running, and that he was already quite adept at using the Jobsian adjective "great." You can click through the full set of pictures here.

We also get a peek at the fortuitous night Steve Jobs returned to Apple, 11 years after his falling out with then CEO John Sculley. As reported earlier this week by blog TUAW (The Unofficial Apple Weblog), ex Apple staffer and Mac OS evangelist Tim Holmes posted the shots to Flickr with the following caption:

Working late on a Friday on December 20th at Apple Computer as Mac OS Evangelist, my manager came rushing past my office door saying to come with him to Town Hall, Apple's theater for announcements, company meetings and the like. It was clearly not a company meeting...

I called Mitch, my wife who also worked there at the time, and told her meet me there. We had no idea what was about to happen...

I tend to take a camera everywhere, so I had my Apple QuickTake camera, which Steve Jobs killed within the year. The colors are way off due to the poor quality of digital cameras in 1996, Steve's jacket was black in real life.

Jobs would of course go on to orchestrate one of the most spectacular comebacks in tech history. Peruse Holmes' photos here.