Background
Hoffman was born in Poland, the daughter of the Polish-Jewish film director Jerzy Hoffman and his Armenian former wife Marlene. She lived with her mother in the Soviet Union until age 10, when she went to live with her father in Warsaw, Poland. Around age 12 in 1967, her mother married an American and moved to Buffalo, New York, and she got her visa and soon joined them in the United States.
She became estranged from her father, who has directed several notable films, including The Deluge (1974), which was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film for Poland.
Education
She has a background in anthropology, physics, and linguistics, a Bachelor of Science in Humanities and Science from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and pursued a doctorate (which she did not complete) in archaeology at the University of Chicago at the Oriental Institute.
Career
Hoffman quickly became fluent in English and excelled in school. Her family suffered during World World War II and her great-grandparents died in the Holocaust. Her father was deported to Siberia, but survived.
In 1979, she was scheduled to travel to Iran for an archaeology dig.
Hoffman was on a leave of absence from the University of Chicago when she was encouraged by her friends to attend a lecture at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center in California. While there, she had "a heated discussion after the lecture" with Jef Raskin.
The discussion focused on "what computers should look like and how they should improve people"s lives." Raskin was so impressed with Hoffman, that he asked her to interview for a position at Apple. She began on the Macintosh project in October 1980 as part of Raskin"s initial team of Burrell Smith, Bud Tribble, and Brian Howard.
At the time she began, the Mac was "still a research project" Her position "constituted the entire Macintosh marketing team for the first year and a half of the project" She also wrote the "first draft of the Macintosh User Interface Guidelines." Hoffman would eventually run the International Marketing Team which brought the Mac to Europe and Asia.
She later followed Steve Jobs to NeXT, as one of its original members. Hoffman had a reputation at both Apple and NeXT as one of the few who could successfully engage with Jobs. (Jobs was aware of the award and liked it).
During the early 1990s, Hoffman was vice president of Marketing at General Magic, retiring in 1995 to spend more time with her family.
On occasion she has given public lectures discussing her early life at Apple and working with Steve Jobs. British actress Kate Winslet portrayed Hoffman in the 2015 film Steve Jobs.
Membership
She was one of the original members of both the Apple Computer Macintosh team and the NeXT team