In 1976, Steve Jobs cofounded Apple Computer Inc. with Steve Wozniak. Under Jobs’ guidance, the company pioneered a series of revolutionary technologies, including the iPhone and iPad.

steve jobs smiles and looks past the camera, he is wearing a signature black turtleneck and circular glasses with a subtle silver frame, behind him is a dark blue screen

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Steve jobs’ parents and adoption, early life and education, founding and leaving apple computer inc., creating next, steve jobs and pixar, returning to and reinventing apple, wife and children, pancreatic cancer diagnosis and health challenges, death and last words, movies and book about steve jobs, who was steve jobs.

Steve Jobs was an American inventor, designer, and entrepreneur who was the cofounder, chief executive, and chairman of Apple Inc. Born in 1955 to two University of Wisconsin graduate students who gave him up for adoption, Jobs was smart but directionless, dropping out of college and experimenting with different pursuits before cofounding Apple with Steve Wozniak in 1976. Jobs left the company in 1985, launching Pixar Animation Studios, then returned to Apple more than a decade later. The tech giant’s revolutionary products, which include the iPhone, iPad, and iPod, have dictated the evolution of modern technology. Jobs died in 2011 following a long battle with pancreatic cancer.

FULL NAME: Steven Paul Jobs BORN: February 24, 1955 DIED: October 5, 2011 BIRTHPLACE: San Francisco, California SPOUSE: Laurene Powell (1991-2011) CHILDREN: Lisa, Reed, Erin, and Eve ASTROLOGICAL SIGN: Pisces

Steve Jobs was born on February 24, 1955, in San Francisco to Joanne Schieble (later Joanne Simpson) and Abdulfattah “John” Jandali, two University of Wisconsin graduate students. The couple gave up their unnamed son for adoption. As an infant, Jobs was adopted by Clara and Paul Jobs and named Steven Paul Jobs. Clara worked as an accountant, and Paul was a Coast Guard veteran and machinist.

Jobs’ biological father, Jandali, was a Syrian political science professor. His biological mother, Schieble, worked as a speech therapist. Shortly after Jobs was placed for adoption, his biological parents married and had another child, Mona Simpson. It was not until Jobs was 27 that he was able to uncover information on his biological parents.

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Jobs lived with his adoptive family in Mountain View, California, within the area that would later become known as Silicon Valley. He was curious from childhood, sometimes to his detriment. According to the BBC’s Science Focus magazine, Jobs was taken to the emergency room twice as a toddler—once after sticking a pin into an electrical socket and burning his hand, and another time because he had ingested poison. His mother Clara had taught him to read by the time he started kindergarten.

As a boy, Jobs and his father worked on electronics in the family garage. Paul showed his son how to take apart and reconstruct electronics, a hobby that instilled confidence, tenacity, and mechanical prowess in young Jobs.

Although Jobs was always an intelligent and innovative thinker, his youth was riddled with frustrations over formal schooling. Jobs was a prankster in elementary school due to boredom, and his fourth-grade teacher needed to bribe him to study. Jobs tested so well, however, that administrators wanted to skip him ahead to high school—a proposal that his parents declined.

While attending Homestead High School, Jobs joined the Explorer’s Club at Hewlett-Packard. It was there that he saw a computer for the first time. He even picked up a summer job with HP after calling company cofounder Bill Hewlett to ask for parts for a frequency counter he was building. It was at HP that a teenaged Jobs met he met his future partner and cofounder of Apple Computer Steve Wozniak , who was attending the University of California, Berkeley.

After high school, Jobs enrolled at Reed College in Portland, Oregon. Lacking direction, he withdrew from college after six months and spent the next year and a half dropping in on creative classes at the school. Jobs later recounted how one course in calligraphy developed his love of typography.

In 1974, Jobs took a position as a video game designer with Atari. Several months later, he left the company to find spiritual enlightenment in India, traveling further and experimenting with psychedelic drugs.

In 1976, when Jobs was just 21, he and Wozniak started Apple Computer Inc. in the Jobs’ family garage. Jobs sold his Volkswagen bus and Wozniak his beloved scientific calculator to fund their entrepreneurial venture. Through Apple, the men are credited with revolutionizing the computer industry by democratizing the technology and making machines smaller, cheaper, intuitive, and accessible to everyday consumers.

Wozniak conceived of a series of user-friendly personal computers, and—with Jobs in charge of marketing—Apple initially marketed the computers for $666.66 each. The Apple I earned the corporation around $774,000. Three years after the release of Apple’s second model, the Apple II, the company’s sales increased exponentially to $139 million.

In 1980, Apple Computer became a publicly-traded company, with a market value of $1.2 billion by the end of its first day of trading. However, the next several products from Apple suffered significant design flaws, resulting in recalls and consumer disappointment. IBM suddenly surpassed Apple in sales, and Apple had to compete with an IBM/PC-dominated business world.

steve jobs john sculley and steve wozniak smile behind an apple computer

Jobs looked to marketing expert John Sculley of Pepsi-Cola to take over the role of CEO for Apple in 1983. The next year, Apple released the Macintosh, marketing the computer as a piece of a counterculture lifestyle: romantic, youthful, creative. But despite positive sales and performance superior to IBM’s PCs, the Macintosh was still not IBM-compatible.

Sculley believed Jobs was hurting Apple, and the company’s executives began to phase him out. Not actually having had an official title with the company he cofounded, Jobs was pushed into a more marginalized position and left Apple in 1985.

After leaving Apple in 1985, Jobs personally invested $12 million to begin a new hardware and software enterprise called NeXT Inc. The company introduced its first computer in 1988, with Jobs hoping it would appeal to universities and researchers. But with a base price of $6,500, the machine was far out of the range of most potential buyers.

The company’s operating system NeXTSTEP fared better, with programmers using it to develop video games like Quake and Doom . Tim Berners-Lee, who created the first web browser, used an NeXT computer. However, the company struggled to appeal to mainstream America, and Apple eventually bought the company in 1996 for $429 million.

In 1986, Jobs purchased an animation company from George Lucas , which later became Pixar Animation Studios. Believing in Pixar’s potential, Jobs initially invested $50 million of his own money in the company.

The studio went on to produce wildly popular movies such as Toy Story (1995), Finding Nemo (2003), The Incredibles (2004), Cars (2006), and Up (2009) . Pixar merged with Disney in 2006, which made Jobs the largest shareholder of Disney. As of June 2022, Pixar films had collectively grossed $14.7 billion at the global box office.

In 1997, Jobs returned to his post as Apple’s CEO. Just as Jobs instigated Apple’s success in the 1970s, he is credited with revitalizing the company in the 1990s.

With a new management team, altered stock options, and a self-imposed annual salary of $1 a year, Jobs put Apple back on track. Jobs’ ingenious products like the iMac, effective branding campaigns, and stylish designs caught the attention of consumers once again.

steve jobs smiling for a picture while holding an iphone with his right hand

In the ensuing years, Apple introduced such revolutionary products as the Macbook Air, iPod, and iPhone, all of which dictated the evolution of technology. Almost immediately after Apple released a new product, competitors scrambled to produce comparable technologies. To mark its expanded product offerings, the company officially rebranded as Apple Inc. in 2007.

Apple’s quarterly reports improved significantly that year: Stocks were worth $199.99 a share—a record-breaking number at that time—and the company boasted a staggering $1.58 billion profit, an $18 billion surplus in the bank, and zero debt.

In 2008, fueled by iTunes and iPod sales, Apple became the second-biggest music retailer in America behind Walmart. Apple has also been ranked No. 1 on Fortune ’s list of America’s Most Admired Companies, as well as No. 1 among Fortune 500 companies for returns to shareholders.

Apple has released dozens of versions of the iPhone since its 2007 debut. In February 2023, an unwrapped first generation phone sold at auction for more than $63,000.

According to Forbes , Jobs’ net worth peaked at $8.3 billion shortly before he died in 2011. Celebrity Net Worth estimates it was as high as $10.2 billion.

Apple hit a market capitalization of $3 trillion in January 2022, meaning Jobs’ initial stake in the company from 1980 would have been worth about $330 billion—enough to comfortably make him the richest person in the world over Tesla founder Elon Musk had he been alive. But according to the New York Post , Jobs sold off all but one of his Apple shares when he left the company in 1985.

Most of Jobs’ net worth came from a roughly 8 percent share in Disney he acquired when he sold Pixar in 2006. Based on Disney’s 2022 value, that share—which he passed onto his wife—is worth $22 billion.

steve jobs and wife laurene embracing while smiling for a photograph

Jobs and Laurene Powell married on March 18, 1991. The pair met in the early 1990s at Stanford business school, where Powell was an MBA student. They lived together in Palo Alto with their three children: Reed (born September 22, 1991), Erin (born August 19, 1995), and Eve (born July 9, 1998).

Jobs also fathered a daughter, Lisa Brennan-Jobs, with girlfriend Chrisann Brennan on May 17, 1978, when he was 23. He denied paternity of his daughter in court documents, claiming he was sterile. In her memoir Small Fry , Lisa wrote DNA tests revealed that she and Jobs were a match in 1980, and he was required to begin making paternity payments to her financially struggling mother. Jobs didn’t initiate a relationship with his daughter until she was 7 years old. When she was a teenager, Lisa came to live with her father. In 2011, Jobs said , “I’ve done a lot of things I’m not proud of, such as getting my girlfriend pregnant when I was 23 and the way I handled that.”

In 2003, Jobs discovered that he had a neuroendocrine tumor, a rare but operable form of pancreatic cancer. Instead of immediately opting for surgery, Jobs chose to alter his pesco-vegetarian diet while weighing Eastern treatment options.

For nine months, Jobs postponed surgery, making Apple’s board of directors nervous. Executives feared that shareholders would pull their stock if word got out that the CEO was ill. But in the end, Jobs’ confidentiality took precedence over shareholder disclosure.

In 2004, Jobs had successful surgery to remove the pancreatic tumor. True to form, Jobs disclosed little about his health in subsequent years.

Early in 2009, reports circulated about Jobs’ weight loss, some predicting his health issues had returned, which included a liver transplant. Jobs responded to these concerns by stating he was dealing with a hormone imbalance. Days later, he went on a six-month leave of absence.

In an email message to employees, Jobs said his “health-related issues are more complex” than he thought, then named Tim Cook , Apple’s then–chief operating officer, as “responsible for Apple’s day-today operations.”

After nearly a year out of the spotlight, Jobs delivered a keynote address at an invite-only Apple event on September 9, 2009. He continued to serve as master of ceremonies, which included the unveiling of the iPad, throughout much of 2010.

In January 2011, Jobs announced he was going on medical leave. In August, he resigned as CEO of Apple, handing the reins to Cook.

Jobs died at age 56 in his home in Palo Alto, California, on October 5, 2011. His official cause of death was listed as respiratory arrest related to his years-long battle with pancreatic cancer.

The New York Times reported that in his final weeks, Jobs had become so weak that he struggled to walk up the stairs in his home. Still, he was able to say goodbye to some of his longtime colleagues, including Disney CEO Bob Iger; speak with his biographer; and offer advice to Apple executives about the unveiling of the iPhone 4S.

In a eulogy for Jobs , sister Mona Simpson wrote that just before dying, Jobs looked for a long time at his sister, Patty, then his wife and children, then past them, and said his last words: “Oh wow. Oh wow. Oh wow.”

flowers notes and apples rest in front of a photograph of steve jobs

Jobs’ closest family and friends remembered him at a small gathering, then on October 16, a funeral for Jobs was held on the campus of Stanford University. Notable attendees included Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates ; singer Joan Baez , who once dated Jobs; former Vice President Al Gore ; actor Tim Allen; and News Corporation chairman Rupert Murdoch .

Jobs is buried in an unmarked grave at Alta Mesa Memorial Park in Palo Alto. Upon the release of the 2015 film Steve Jobs , fans traveled to the cemetery to find the site. Because the cemetery is not allowed to disclose the grave’s location, many left messages for Jobs in a memorial book instead.

Before his death, Jobs granted author and journalist Walter Isaacson permission to write his official biography. Jobs sat for more than 40 interviews with the Isaacson, who also talked to more than 100 of Jobs’ family, friends, and colleagues. Initially scheduled for a November 2011 release date, Steve Jobs hit shelves on October 24, just 19 days after Jobs died.

Jobs’ life has been the subject of two major films. The first, released in 2013, was simply titled Jobs and starred Ashton Kutcher as Jobs and Josh Gad as Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak. Wozniak told The Verge in 2013 he was approached about working on the film but couldn’t because, “I read a script as far as I could stomach it and felt it was crap.” Although he praised the casting, he told Gizmodo he felt his and Jobs’ personalities were inaccurately portrayed.

Instead, Wozniak worked with Sony Pictures on the second film, Steve Jobs , that was adapted from Isaacson’s biography and released in 2015. It starred Michael Fassbender as Jobs and Seth Rogen as Wozniak. Fassbender was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actor, and co-star Kate Winslet was nominated for Best Supporting Actress for her role as Apple and NeXT marketing executive Joanna Hoffman.

In 2015, filmmaker Alex Gibney examined Jobs’ life and legacy in the documentary Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine .

  • Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water, or do you want a chance to change the world? [Jobs inviting an executive to join Apple]
  • It’s better to be a pirate than join the Navy.
  • In my perspective... science and computer science is a liberal art. It’s something everyone should know how to use, at least, and harness in their life.
  • It’s in Apple’s DNA that technology alone is not enough. It’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities that yields us the result that makes our hearts sing.
  • There’s an old Wayne Gretzky quote that I love—‘I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been’—and we’ve always tried to do that at Apple.
  • You can’t just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them. By the time you get it built, they’ll want something new.
  • I think humans are basically tool builders, and the computer is the most remarkable tool we’ve ever built.
  • You just make the best product you can, and you don’t put it out until you feel it’s right.
  • With iPod, listening to music will never be the same again.
  • Things don’t have to change the world to be important.
  • I would trade all of my technology for an afternoon with Socrates .
  • If you want to live your life in a creative way, as an artist, you have to not look back too much. You have to be willing to take whatever you’ve done and whoever you were and throw them away.
  • Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn’t matter to me. Going to bed at night saying we’ve done something wonderful—that’s what matters to me.
  • I like to believe there’s an afterlife. I like to believe the accumulated wisdom doesn’t just disappear when you die, but somehow, it endures. But maybe it’s just like an on/off switch and click—and you’re gone. Maybe that’s why I didn’t like putting on/off switches on Apple devices.
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Biography of Steve Jobs, Co-Founder of Apple Computers

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Steve Jobs (February 24, 1955–October 5, 2011) is best remembered as the co-founder of Apple Computers . He teamed up with inventor  Steve Wozniak to create one of the first ready-made PCs. Besides his legacy with Apple, Jobs was also a smart businessman who became a multimillionaire before the age of 30. In 1984, he founded NeXT computers. In 1986, he bought the computer graphics division of Lucasfilm Ltd. and started Pixar Animation Studios.

Fast Facts: Steve Jobs

  • Known For : Co-founding Apple Computer Company and playing a pioneering role in the development of personal computing
  • Also Known As : Steven Paul Jobs
  • Born : February 24, 1955 in San Francisco, California
  • Parents : Abdulfattah Jandali and Joanne Schieble (biological parents); Paul Jobs and Clara Hagopian (adoptive parents)
  • Died : October 5, 2011 in Palo Alto, California
  • Education : Reed College
  • Awards and Honors : National Medal of Technology (with Steve Wozniak), Jefferson Award for Public Service, named the most powerful person in business by Fortune  magazine, Inducted into the California Hall of Fame, inducted as a Disney Legend
  • Spouse : Laurene Powell
  • Children : Lisa (by Chrisann Brennan), Reed, Erin, Eve
  • Notable Quote : "Of all the inventions of humans, the computer is going to rank near or at the top as history unfolds and we look back. It is the most awesome tool that we have ever invented. I feel incredibly lucky to be at exactly the right place in Silicon Valley, at exactly the right time, historically, where this invention has taken form."

Jobs was born on February 24, 1955, in San Francisco, California. The biological child of Abdulfattah Jandali and Joanne Schieble, he was later adopted by Paul Jobs and Clara Hagopian. During his high school years, Jobs worked summers at Hewlett-Packard. It was there that he first met and became partners with Steve Wozniak.

As an undergraduate, he studied physics, literature, and poetry at Reed College in Portland, Oregon. Formally, he only attended one semester there. However, he remained at Reed and crashed on friends' sofas and audited courses that included a calligraphy class, which he attributes as being the reason Apple computers had such elegant typefaces.

After leaving Oregon in 1974 to return to California, Jobs started working for Atari , an early pioneer in the manufacturing of personal computers. Jobs' close friend Wozniak was also working for Atari. The future founders of Apple teamed up to design games for Atari computers.

Jobs and Wozniak proved their skills as hackers by designing a telephone blue box. A blue box was an electronic device that simulated a telephone operator's dialing console and provided the user with free phone calls. Jobs spent plenty of time at Wozniak's Homebrew Computer Club, a haven for computer geeks and a source of invaluable information about the field of personal computers.

Out of Mom and Pop's Garage

By the late 1970s, Jobs and Wozniak had learned enough to try their hand at building personal computers. Using Jobs' family garage as a base of operation, the team produced 50 fully assembled computers that were sold to a local Mountain View electronics store called the Byte Shop. The sale encouraged the pair to start Apple Computer, Inc. on April 1, 1979.

The Apple Corporation was named after Jobs' favorite fruit. The Apple logo was a representation of the fruit with a bite taken out of it. The bite represented a play on words: bite and byte.

Jobs co-invented the  Apple I  and Apple II computers together with Wozniak, who was the main designer, and others. The Apple II is considered to be one of the first commercially successful lines of personal computers. In 1984, Wozniak, Jobs, and others co-invented the  Apple Macintosh  computer, the first successful home computer with a mouse-driven graphical user interface. It was, however, based on (or, according to some sources, stolen from) the Xerox Alto, a concept machine built at the Xerox PARC research facility. According to the Computer History Museum, the Alto included:

A mouse. Removable data storage. Networking. A visual user interface. Easy-to-use graphics software. “What You See Is What You Get” (WYSIWYG) printing, with printed documents matching what users saw on screen. E-mail. Alto for the first time combined these and other now-familiar elements in one small computer.

During the early 1980s, Jobs controlled the business side of the Apple Corporation. Steve Wozniak was in charge of the design side. However, a power struggle with the board of directors led to Jobs leaving Apple in 1985.

After leaving Apple, Jobs founded NeXT, a high-end computer company. Ironically, Apple bought NeXT in 1996 and Jobs returned to his old company to serve once more as its CEO from 1997 until his retirement in 2011.

The NeXT was an impressive workstation computer that sold poorly. The world's first web browser was created on a NeXT, and the technology in NeXT software was transferred to the Macintosh and the iPhone .

In 1986, Jobs bought "The Graphics Group" from Lucasfilm's computer graphics division for $10 million. The company was later renamed Pixar. At first, Jobs intended for Pixar to become a high-end graphics hardware developer, but that goal was never met. Pixar moved on to do what it now does best, which is make animated films. Jobs negotiated a deal to allow Pixar and Disney to collaborate on a number of animated projects that included the film "Toy Story." In 2006, Disney bought Pixar from Jobs.

After Jobs returned to Apple as its CEO in 1997, Apple Computers had a renaissance in product development with the iMac, iPod , iPhone, iPad, and more.

Before his death, Jobs was listed as the inventor and/or co-inventor on 342 United States patents, with technologies ranging from computer and portable devices to user interfaces, speakers, keyboards, power adapters, staircases, clasps, sleeves, lanyards, and packages. His last patent was issued for the Mac OS X Dock user interface and was granted the day before his death.

Steve Jobs died at his home in Palo Alto, California, on October 5, 2011. He had been ill for a long time with pancreatic cancer, which he had treated using alternative techniques. His family reported that his final words were, "Oh wow. Oh wow. Oh wow."

Steve Jobs was a true computer pioneer and entrepreneur whose impact is felt in almost every aspect of contemporary business, communication, and design. Jobs was absolutely dedicated to every detail of his products—according to some sources, he was obsessive—but the outcome can be seen in the sleek, user-friendly, future-facing designs of Apple products from the very start. It was Apple that placed the PC on every desk, provided digital tools for design and creativity, and pushed forward the ubiquitous smartphone which has, arguably, changed the ways in which humans think, create, and interact.

  • Computer History Museum. " What Was The First PC? "
  • Gladwell, Malcolm, and Malcolm Gladwell. “ The Real Genius of Steve Jobs .”  The New Yorker , 19 June 2017.
  • Levy, Steven. “ Steve Jobs .”  Encyclopædia Britannica , 20 Feb. 2019.
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steve paul jobs biography

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The life and times of Steven Paul Jobs, Part One

From grade-school hellion to imac redemption.

When sober, F. Scott Fitzgerald may have been devastatingly intelligent, but he got it dead wrong when he wrote "there are no second acts in American lives".

Think Elvis , for example. Or lefty sinkerballer Tommy John of the eponymous surgery. Or, for that matter, Grover Cleveland , whose two acts as US president were separated by a four-year intermission.

In the business world, however, second acts are rare. In the corporate rat race, if you slip in Act I, you're trampled by your fellow rodents – there's no "Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow" on that unforgiving stage.

Except for Steve Jobs.

steve paul jobs biography

The career of Apple's cofounder and savior not only had a second act, but a long and successful third act that spanned from his return to Apple in 1997 to his resignation this August.

And to further give the lie to Mr Fitzgerald, Jobs' second act held true to the dramaturgical dictum that as the curtain closes on Act II, our protagonist should be at the end of his rope, facing seemingly insurmountable odds.

Think The Empire Strikes Back , Act II of the original Star Wars trilogy. Think the Red Sox being down three games to zip against the Yankees in 2004. Think Steve Jobs at the end of 1993, with NeXT's hardware business sold at fire-sale prices and Disney stopping the development of Pixar's salvation, Toy Story .

Steve Jobs on the Cover of Time magazine, April 12, 2010

Steve Jobs in April 2010

His death on Wednesday marked the end of Jobs' redemptive and triumphant Act III, potentially turning his drama into a tragedy – but possibly more from our point of view than from his. By all accounts, he retained throughout his life the sense of light mortality that he gained when studying eastern philosophies in his youth.

"We're born, we live for a brief instant, and we die," he told Wired in 1996. "It's been happening for a long time."

Speaking at Stanford University in 2005, he said : "No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because death is very likely the single best invention of life. It is life's change agent."

And in 2008 he told Fortune : "We don't get a chance to do that many things, and every one should be really excellent. Because this is our life.

"Life is brief, and then you die, you know? So this is what we've chosen to do with our life."

And so here's a recounting of the life that Steve Jobs chose – and the life that chose him.

The early years

Jobs was born in San Francisco on February 24, 1955. Shortly thereafter he was adopted by Paul and Clara Jobs of the same city, who had married in 1946 but had been unable to have a child of their own. They named their new son Steven Paul Jobs.

Jobs' biological parents were Joanne Schieble of Green Bay, Wisconson, and Syrian-born Abdulfattah Jandali, unmarried, both 23, and both students at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. It being the straight-laced mid-1950s, for the birth they secretly travelled to San Francisco, a few miles north of a sleepy, orchard-filled patch of Northern California that Jobs would one day help transform into Silicon Valley.

Adoptive father Paul, described by son Steve as "a sort of genius with his hands" in a 1985 Playboy interview , "used to get me things I could take apart and put back together".

Just as, in his later years, he took apart and put back together the company he founded, Apple Computer: he returned to it in 1997 after a palace coup in 1985 had forced him out of the company that he had founded on April Fools' Day 1976 with Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne.

But we're getting ahead of ourselves.

Steve Jobs as a boy

Steve Jobs as a boy

The Jobs family moved to 2066 Crist Drive in Los Altos in the heart of pre-silicon Silicon Valley when Steve was five years old. As a kid, Jobs admitted, he was "a little terror". Today he might have been diagnosed as showing symptoms of ADHD – attention deficit hyperactivity disorder – and have been Adderalled or Ritalinned into submission.

"You should have seen us in third grade," Jobs described himself and his pint-sized co-revolutionaries. "We basically destroyed our teacher. We would let snakes loose in the classroom and explode bombs."

The 1950s may not have been enlightened enough to have accepted Schieble and Jandali's out-of-wedlock child, but neither was it a time when exploding bombs in a public school would call down the wrath of the Department of Homeland Security. In those days, Jobs' behavior was merely part of the "boys will be boys" ethos.

A fourth-grade teacher, Imogene Hill, who Jobs described as "one of the saints in my life", helped tame his rambunctiousness – partially by bribing him with cash if he'd finish his work, according to Anthony Imbimbo's biography written for young adults, Steve Jobs: The Brilliant Mind Behind Apple .

At age 12, Jobs met his first computer. HP engineer and neighbor Larry Lang took Jobs under his wing and, according to Jobs, "spent a lot of time with me, teaching me stuff". Lang took Jobs and other kids to HP for lectures. "They showed us one of their new desktop computers and let us play on it. I wanted one badly."

When in junior high, Jobs hung out with his friend and fellow geek Bill Fernandez, who – fortunately for the future of personal computing – lived across the street from the Wozniak family, whose son Steven was an inveterate electronics tinkerer.

Steve Wozniak was born in August 1950, making him five years older than Jobs. Despite their age difference, they bonded over their shared love of both electronics and pranks.

In 2007, when giving a Macworld Expo presentation, Jobs' slide-changing clicker malfunctioned. To fill time, he told his audience about one stunt that he and Wozniak pulled when the older prankster was a student at the University of California at Berkeley:

When he was in his mid-teens, Jobs and Wozniak met the infamous phone phreaker John Draper (aka Cap'n Crunch, so named after he discovered that a whistle given away in the eponymous cereal could phool fool AT&T's phone system). Inspired by the good Cap'n's success, Wozniak built what was then called a "blue box" – an electronic device that enabled him and friend Jobs to make free phone calls worldwide.

"The famous story about the boxes is when Woz called the Vatican and told them he was Henry Kissinger," Jobs told Playboy . "They had someone going to wake the Pope up in the middle of the night before they figured out it wasn't really Kissinger."

The blue box was Wozniak and Jobs' first commercial product, and established the relationship that would eventually result in the creation of Apple Computer: Wozniak would design, and Jobs would sell.

After high school – and after he had abandoned the blue-box business – Jobs headed off to Reed College in Portland, Oregon, then a notorious hippie haven, well-suited to increasingly hippified Jobs.

He lasted one semester, but continued to live on-campus – not a problem at Reed, nor for that matter at any number of schools during the laid-back early 1970s.

Steve Jobs in high school

Don't laugh – you went to high school, too

After returning to his family home in 1974, Jobs talked himself into a job at Atari, the pioneering video game firm that was rolling in cash due to the wild success of its pioneering arcade game, Pong .

His position at Atari got him a tech-troubleshooting trip to Germany, which he extended into a classic hippie pilgrimage to India, where he wandered as an alms-begging mendicant, and famously had his head shaved by a highly amused Indian holy man.

After returning to California – shaved head and all – Jobs was rehired by Atari, and hooked back up with Wozniak. At that point, Wozniak was working at HP, but he would visit Jobs at night at Atari to play that company's Gran Track game for free.

"Woz was a Gran Track addict," Jobs told Playboy . "He would put great quantities of quarters into these games to play them, so I would just let him in at night and let him onto the production floor and he would play Gran Track all night long." But Jobs wasn't being merely magnanimous: "When I came up against a stumbling block on a project, I would get Woz to take a break from his road rally for ten minutes and come and help me."

Jobs also used Wozniak's smarts to design that company's Breakout game. According to Jeffrey Young and William Simon in their unauthorized biography, iCon Steve Jobs , along with other sources , Jobs took credit for the design and snookered Wozniak out of his rightful share of the pay and bonus that Jobs was given for "his" work.

The "Good Steve" versus "Bad Steve" dynamic that would mark Jobs' persona for the rest of his life was already in place.

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Chm Blog Remarkable People

Steve jobs: from garage to world’s most valuable company, by dag spicer | december 02, 2011.

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So we’re sitting in the payphone trying to make a blue box call. And the operator comes back on the line. And we’re all scared and we’d try it again. … And she comes back on the line; we’re all scared so we put in money. And then a cop car pulls up. And Steve was shaking, you know, and he got the blue box back into my pocket. I got it– he got it to me because the cop turned to look in the bushes for drugs or something, you know? So I put the box in my pocket. The cop pats me down and says, “What’s this?” I said, “It’s an electronic music synthesizer.” Wasn’t too musical. Second cop says, “What’s the orange button for?” “It’s for calibration,” says Steve.

— steve wozniak, lecture at computer history museum, 2002.

steve paul jobs biography

So begins one of the earliest chapters in the life of two remarkable young men whose youth, energy and enthusiasm transformed the world.

The “Blue Box” was a simple electronic gizmo that bypassed telephone company billing computers, allowing anyone to make free telephone calls anywhere in the world. The Blue Box was illegal, but the specifications for hacking into the telephone network were published in a telephone company journal and many youngsters with a flair for electronics built them. The “two Steves” had a great deal of fun building and using them for “ethical hacking,” with Wozniak building the kits and Jobs selling them—a pattern which would emerge again and again in the lives of these two innovators. (Wozniak once telephoned the Vatican, pretended to be Henry Kissinger and asked to speak to the Pope—just to see if he could. When someone answered, Woz got scared and hung up.)

steve paul jobs biography

Wozniak and Jobs Blue Box, ca. 1972. The Blue Box allowed electronics hobbyists to make free telephone calls. CHM #X727.86

These early playful roots are what Wozniak remembers most fondly of Jobs. As columnist Mike Cassidy recalled in a San Jose Mercury News interview, what these two friends most remembered was “not bringing computers to the masses … or the many ‘aha’ moments designing computers. Instead, it’s the time the two tried to unfurl a banner depicting a middle finger salute from the roof of Homestead High School…” or their many Blue Box exploits. Walter Isaacson, Jobs’s official biographer, cites Jobs reflecting on the Blue Box:

If it hadn’t been for the Blue Boxes, there would have been no Apple. I’m 100% sure of that. Woz and I learned how to work together, and we gained the confidence that we could solve technical problems and actually put something into production.

— (isaacson, p. 30).

steve paul jobs biography

Steve Jobs (circled) at Homestead High School Electronics Club, Cupertino, California ca. 1969

Jobs, like Wozniak before him, attended Homestead High School in Cupertino, California, a solidly middle-class school in the suburbs of Silicon Valley. Homestead was progressive, with an innovative electronics program that shaped Wozniak’s life. Jobs and Wozniak had been friends for some time. They met in 1971 when their mutual friend, Bill Fernandez, introduced then 21-year-old Wozniak to 16-year-old Jobs. After hours, the two Steves would often meet at Hewlett-Packard lectures in Palo Alto, and both were hired by HP for a summer. Jobs graduated high school in 1972 and attended Reed College in Portland, Oregon for a semester, during which he collected Coke bottles for money and ate free meals at the local Hare Krishna temple. After drifting from class to class, Jobs left for India on a spiritual quest with Reed College friend Dan Kottke (who later became Apple employee #12). Jobs returned as a Buddhist and in 1974 began working at the legendary gaming company Atari as a technician.

The Homebrew Computer Club newsletter was a forum for hobbyists to exchange information and ideas.

The Homebrew Computer Club newsletter was a forum for hobbyists to exchange information and ideas.

The next year, Jobs began attending meetings of the Homebrew Computer Club, a group of electronics and computer hobbyists in Silicon Valley who got together to explore the latest in a new technology, the microcomputer.

Wozniak, who had no formal engineering training, designed the Apple-1 computer as a way of “showing off” to the people at the Homebrew Club. Based on an inexpensive 6502 microprocessor, the Apple-1 came as a kit and was aimed squarely at hobbyists who wanted to own their own computer, even if they weren’t quite sure what they could do with it. The Apple-1 was a masterpiece of circuit design and its elegance impressed all who could appreciate its simple but powerful conception. Ever the salesman, Jobs quickly appreciated that there might be a demand for the Apple-1 beyond the geeky members of the Homebrew Club. Jobs showed an Apple-1 to Paul Terrell, owner of the local Byte Shop computer store, who placed an order for 50 of the machines—so long as they came pre-assembled. To obtain funds to purchase parts for the Apple-1, Jobs had obtained 30 days’ credit from suppliers—just long enough to enable Wozniak and Jobs to build the computers (mostly in Jobs’s parents’ garage) and get paid for them. To fund the circuit board layout of the Apple-1, Wozniak sold his beloved HP-65 calculator and Jobs his Volkswagen van. The Byte Shop order brought in $50,000, a “total shock” to Wozniak, who was earning one-tenth of that as an engineer at HP. The sale spurred Jobs into thinking about a new computer that anyone—not just those handy with a soldering iron—could afford and use.

steve paul jobs biography

Homebrew Computer Club meeting, 1978 Courtesy of Lee Felsenstein

steve paul jobs biography

Steve Jobs and Wozniak using Apple-1 system, ca. 1976 ©Apple, Inc. / Joe Melena

steve paul jobs biography

The Apple-1 kit computer introduced in 1976 Photo: ©Mark Richards

Early ad for the Apple-1 computer system, ca. 1976

Early ad for the Apple-1 computer system, ca. 1976

Funding this vision presented some challenges: the idea of people having their own computers was viewed as absurd at the time. Banks were unwilling to loan the two Steves money. After several unsuccessful visits with venture capitalists, Jobs met Mike Markkula, who, at 32, was already retired from Intel. Markkula was an electrical engineer with solid management skills who would provide “adult supervision” to the young company as well as something else: he personally invested $250,000. The three founded Apple Computer in January, 1977.

Steve and I get a lot of credit, but Mike Markkula was probably more responsible for our early success, and you never hear about him.

— steve wozniak, failure magazine, july 2000.

steve paul jobs biography

The original Apple II personal computer, the machine that propelled Apple into a global company (1977) Photo: ©Mark Richards

Jobs and Wozniak immediately moved forward with their new machine, the Apple II. It was a big improvement over the Apple-1. It had an integrated keyboard and case, could plug into a TV set for display, and was ready to run right out of the box. It also had color graphics, which made it unique among similar computers at the time such as the Radio Shack TRS-80 and the Commodore PET. It was a consumer item, not a kit for hobbyists.

If the Apple II featured typically brilliant Wozniak design, the marketing was vintage Jobs. This was Apple’s first mass-produced product, and Jobs sold it as a computer for everyone, from students to business professionals. The Apple II’s success was unprecedented, in part because, under Markkula’s urging, Apple donated or gave huge discounts to schools—ensuring that a new generation of students would learn about computers on an Apple. But the Apple II also enjoyed a business windfall with the arrival of the spreadsheet program VisiCalc in 1979. Powered by demand from both the education and business markets, Apple II sales soared. The Apple II would live on in various models until 1993—an astonishing 16 years. Early chants of “Apple II Forever” among the Apple faithful rang long and clear.

steve paul jobs biography

Apple Macintosh, 1984. The Mac revolutionized personal computing by introducing the graphical user interface (GUI), allowing anyone to use a computer CHM# 102633564 Photo: ©Mark Richards

Jobs’s greatest triumph, however, was the 1984 Macintosh, “the computer for the rest of us.” Macintosh offered users an entirely new way of interacting: the graphical user interface (GUI). No longer would people have to learn special commands or have specialized training to use a computer. Now everyone who could point and click a mouse (even children) could run a computer. The Macintosh kicked off a new personal computer revolution, one that stressed intuition and use of a common graphical look and feel over memorization of computer codes.

Apple launched the Macintosh with a revolutionary television commercial produced by science fiction filmmaker Ridley Scott. The commercial aired only once—during the 1984 Super Bowl broadcast. Even with its splashy introduction and its breakthroughs in usability and design, however, the Mac started slowly in the marketplace and sales were modest in the first year. Moreover, Jobs’s intense personality, drive for perfection and difficult management style frequently clashed with others at Apple. In 1985, he suffered the same fortune as many Silicon Valley founders: he was fired by the board of directors. Jobs’s departure marked the end of an era and the beginning of a period of massive hits and equally big misses for him. That period would last for a decade.

Explore further

  • Learn more about the Homebrew Computerr Club in a CHM interview with Steve Wozniak
  • Look inside the Apple-1 manual
  • Learn about Apple’s vision for the Apple-II computer: Apple Computer Inc. Preliminary Confidential Offering Memorandum – 102712693
  • Learn about early Macintosh market plans: Preliminary Macintosh Business Plan, CHM# 102712692
  • Watch The Macintosh Marketing Story: Fact and Fiction, 20 Years Later, 102703180
  • The Changing Face of the Macintosh, Marcin Wichary

Watch vintage Steve Jobs footage on Apple

Two years ago we made a decision. We saw some new technology and we made a decision to risk our company.

— steve jobs’s next presentation, october 12, 1988, san francisco symphony hall.

steve paul jobs biography

Pixar Image Computer, 1986. This computer was used for generating images from complex data sets such as CAT scans, oil exploration or scenes from a virtual world. Disney purchased several dozen for use in animation. CHM# 102621974 Photo: ©Mark Richards

Jobs spent the next ten years away from Apple but was by no means taking time off. In 1986, he bought the computer graphics division of Lucasfilm, renaming it Pixar. Pixar had started as a manufacturer of high-performance graphics hardware. Its main product was the Pixar Image Computer, a rendering engine for animation. While the computer was technically sophisticated, its high cost (about $130,000) made it appealing only to well-funded customers such as advanced medical research institutions and government laboratories. There was one exception: Disney. The legendary studio bought several dozen of the systems for use in animation.

steve paul jobs biography

Scene from Pixar’s computer-generated feature-length film Toy Story ©Pixar

Disney’s interest in Pixar’s hardware, however, was not enough to save the company from lackluster sales. Pixar finally sold its hardware division in 1990. Jobs shifted Pixar’s focus and concentrated it on producing short film sequences and commercials. The next year, partly due to the success of Pixar’s Oscar-winning “Tin Toy” short film, Pixar and Disney agreed to produce a computer generated film called “A Tin Toy Christmas.” Hollywood had met computing, and together Pixar and Disney would move computer-generated graphics from the niche of special effects to the heart of filmmaking itself.

steve paul jobs biography

Pixar brain trust: Ed Catmull, Steve Jobs, John Lasseter ©Pixar

Using groundbreaking computer technology and some of the most skilled animators and storytellers in the world, Pixar produced the blockbuster film Toy Story, released in 1995. Toy Story proved that a feature-length motion picture could be entirely animated by computer and also made wildly entertaining. Pixar exploded as a Hollywood powerhouse, and its partnership with Disney produced some of the biggest box office hits of the decade. Jobs sold Pixar to Disney in 2006, earning more than $7 billion from his initial $10 million investment and becoming Disney’s largest single shareholder.

steve paul jobs biography

The NeXT Cube (1990) was a masterpiece of engineering… but was too expensive. NeXT evolved into a software company after the Cube and several other NeXt hardware products failed in the marketplace. NeXT’s greatest innovation was the NeXTSTEP operating environment CHM# 102626734

While Pixar was beginning to work its magic, Jobs was working in parallel on another computer startup. His new company, NeXT, set out to build high-performance UNIX workstations for the educational and scientific market. The machines, introduced in 1990, were prototypically Jobs: elegant, well-engineered and easy to use, but the NeXT “Cube” was too expensive for mass appeal. Although it had high-performance hardware, the NeXT delivered its greatest innovation in the form of its “object-oriented” operating system, NeXTStep. Yet despite its originality and power, the NeXT system struggled to find its place in the market. It did, however, have a significant claim to fame: a British scientist named Tim Berners-Lee would write the program for the World Wide Web on a NeXT. In 1996, Apple bought NeXT, mainly for its software and operating system, and Jobs returned to Apple as a consultant.

steve paul jobs biography

Jobs with the original iMac, 1998 ©Apple Inc. / Moshe Brakha

Jobs joined an Apple that was in no better shape than the company from which he had been unceremoniously fired. It was losing money at a catastrophic rate. Its product line was bloated and confusing. Its marketing was ineffective. Its innovations in user interfaces and software had long since been eclipsed by Microsoft’s Windows and applications for the Windows system, which had become the de facto standard for personal computing worldwide. And Apple seemingly had no strategy for capitalizing on the internet, which was exploding as a force in home and business computing.

A year after returning to Apple, Jobs was named interim CEO, replacing Gil Amelio in July 1997. Apple had lost more than $700 million the preceding quarter. It was running out of money and it looked as if it might not survive. Jobs quickly sought new financing, terminated languishing projects, fired hundreds of people and focused the company on just a desktop computer and a laptop for professionals and for consumers. The first desktop computer from the new Jobs era was the iMac (1998). Ultimately available in several colors of the rainbow, the iMac emphasized connection to the Internet and—Jobs’s mantra—simplicity. Out of the box, the iMac could be on the Internet in just two easy steps. “There is no Step 3,” Apple claimed. The iMac and its distinctive design also marked the first tangible collaboration between Jobs and Jonathan Ive, the British-born designer with whom he would form a legendary partnership.

  • Learn about the roots of Pixar. Watch the CHM lecture: Pixar: A Human Story of Computer Animation

One More Thing

The return of elvis would not have provoked a bigger sensation, — jim carlton, january 1997, the wall street journal, from “steve jobs,” by walter isaacson.

In 2000, the Apple board removed the term “interim” from Jobs’s CEO title, cementing his permanent return to the company he had co-founded. It must have seemed a glorious triumph for Jobs personally. For the Apple faithful, it represented a glimmer of hope that the resurgent company they loved might have a chance. Perhaps no one within or outside Apple—with the possible exception of Jobs himself—could foresee that the company was embarking on one of the most remarkable decades any company in any industry had ever experienced.

steve paul jobs biography

iPod Evaluation and Test Prototype (2001). The original iPod had a miniaturized 5GB hard disk drive and could “store 1,000 songs in your pocket.” CHM# 102633636 Photo: ©Mark Richards

Innovations came in rapid-fire succession. In 2001, Apple introduced OS X, the new operating system for the Mac platform. OS X marked the total redesign of the Mac operating system from the ground up. It was a direct result of Apple’s NeXT acquisition and was based on NeXT’s OPENSTEP environment and the BSD Unix system developed at UC Berkeley.

That same year Apple opened its first retail store, in Tysons Corner, Virginia. It was a daring step at a time when computer companies had long since abandoned their own branded retail outlets in favor of “big box” electronic superstores and internet shopping. Like Apple products themselves, the stores reflected an austere simplicity and were organized not by product category but by how Jobs believed people wanted to use them. Products were stylishly arranged for direct use by customers in a minimalist, almost laboratory-like zone of utilitarian consumerism. As usual, Jobs sweated the details, ensuring the marble floors were the right color and the washroom signs were not too obtrusive. A “Genius Bar” staffed by Apple experts answered customer problems on-site. The stores were hailed as a perfect blend of the products Apple made and the brand itself.

The most momentous event of 2001, however, was the introduction of the iPod digital music player. Although not a new idea, Apple’s take on the device featured an easy-to-use interface and, thanks to new miniaturized hard drive technology, a prodigious amount of music storage. Jobs announced the iPod with the slogan “1,000 songs in your pocket.” Music was sync’d to the iPod through the iTunes software application, another Apple innovation. As of October 2011, more than 300 million iPods had been sold worldwide.

In 2003, Jobs introduced an even more radical innovation: the iTunes store and music management system. The iTunes platform represented the successful integration of retail music, portable player, e-commerce, digital rights management and a simple desktop environment where users could manage their music libraries. Jobs convinced powerful and deeply skeptical music company executives that, together, the iPod and iTunes system represented a legitimate and profitable alternative to music piracy, which was then rampant through bootleg services such as Napster and LimeWire. In exchange, Jobs won a revolutionary concession from the music industry: flat-rate pricing of 99 cents per downloaded song. The iTunes concept revolutionized the retail music industry, and sounded the death knell for brick-and-mortar record stores. As of October 2011, the iTunes music store had sold more than 16 billion songs.

The iPod marked a turning point in Apple’s strategy. Jobs sought to move Apple beyond computers and into Apple-powered consumer devices. It was a very bold gamble, and the success of the iPod and iTunes showed that the strategy could win on two levels: it eroded traditional industry structures, and it catapulted Apple into a widely recognized global consumer brand.

steve paul jobs biography

iPhone, 2007 CHM# 102716304 Photo: ©Mark Richards

Steve Jobs unveiling iPhone to the world

Steve Jobs unveiling iPhone to the world

At the 2007 Macworld trade show, Jobs announced that Apple would drop the word “Computer” from its name and become simply “Apple Inc.” The move solidified the profound shift in the company’s direction and signaled its seemingly unlimited ambition in the multi-billion dollar market for switched-on consumer products. At the Macworld show, Jobs also saved his customary “one more thing” portion of his presentation for another blockbuster announcement: the iPhone. He described it as nothing less than the re-invention of the telephone: a combination “widescreen iPod with touch controls,” a “revolutionary mobile phone,” and a “breakthrough Internet communicator.”

When the iPhone went on-sale, thousands of people worldwide waited patiently outside Apple stores, sometimes for days, to be first to purchase one. This remarkable show of brand loyalty reflected how deeply Apple products had connected with their users on a personal level. Like the iPod before it, the iPhone sold briskly and transformed another industry (telephones) by making the smartphone an established category of “must-have” device, for everyone from teenagers to business executives. The iPhone was a computer at its core: it ran Apple’s iOS operating system, which was based on Mac OS X, its desktop operating system. To add extra capabilities, the user downloaded ‘apps’ (applications) from the iTunes App Store, launched in July 2008. By October 2011, more than 18 billion apps had been downloaded.

iPad (2010)

Jobs’s last major product launch was the iPad, a tablet computer optimized for media consumption, quick emails, and web browsing. Like the previous iPod and iPhone iOS devices, the iPad pioneered an entirely new set of experiences and possibilities for users. Apple introduced the iPad in 2010, and within a year software developers had introduced more than 100,000 apps for the device, ranging from navigation aids to cameras to wildly popular games and ways both to create and consume every type of media. Yet unlike the iPod and the iPhone, the iPad did not simply improve upon a major segment of consumer electronics: it invented a largely new category. The iPad was another triumph of Apple engineering and marketing, one deeply shaped by Jobs at every step.

steve paul jobs biography

Outpouring of remembrances and ‘thanks’ to Steve Jobs, Apple store, Palo Alto, California, Oct 8, 2011 © All rights reserved by troialynn

Certain qualities persisted throughout Jobs’s career, from the Apple-1 to the iPad. One was an unshakable determination to create something of beauty, in the aesthetic and engineering senses of that word. Another was enormously successful risk-taking, from selling his van to finance the Apple-1 to perfecting the music player, telephone and tablet computer. Another was Jobs’s uncanny ability to focus on a larger vision—and, in the case of consumers, to anticipate whole categories of needs that few of his rivals saw. Finally, especially in the iOS devices, Jobs engaged in “ecosystem thinking,” a drive to integrate radical new hardware advances with bold new software and services. iTunes and the App Stores were as critical to the success of iOS devices as the hardware itself, and established Apple not simply as an unparalleled product company but also as a global content distribution company.

Jobs once said his goal in life was “to make a dent in the universe.” Isaacson asserts that Jobs changed seven industries: personal computers, animated movies, music, telephones, tablet computing, digital publishing and retail stores. At the end of this life, Jobs saw Apple surpass Exxon as the most valuable company in the world as measured in market capitalization. Ultimately, Jobs made his dent, and more. A fitting tribute, borrowed from the tomb of English architect Sir Christopher Wren, might be: Si monumentum requires circumspice. “If you seek his monument, look around you.”

Steven Paul Jobs was born February 24, 1955, and died October 5, 2011.

  • Steve Jobs original iPod introduction
  • Watch the CHM lecture: Steve Jobs: The Authorized Biography. An Evening with Walter Isaacson
  • Stanford University Commencement Speech
  • Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs, New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011
  • Michael Moritz, Return to the Little Kingdom: How Apple and Steve Jobs Changed the World, New York: Overlook Press, 2010
  • Smithsonian Oral History
  • Charlie Rose

About The Author

Dag Spicer oversees the Museum’s permanent historical collection, the most comprehensive repository of computers, software, media, oral histories, and ephemera relating to computing in the world. He also helps shape the Museum’s exhibitions, marketing, and education programs, responds to research inquiries, and has given hundreds of interviews on computer history and related topics to major print and electronic news outlets such as NPR, the New York Times, The Economist, and CBS News. A native Canadian, Dag most recently attended Stanford University before joining the Museum in 1996.

Join the Discussion

Related articles, in memoriam: niklaus wirth (1934–2024), in memoriam: john warnock (1940–2023), in memoriam: gordon moore (1929-2023).

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Steve Jobs: The Story Of The Man Behind The Personal Computer

The Apple founder spoke with Fresh Air's Terry Gross in 1996. Later, after he was diagnosed with cancer, Jobs asked Walter Isaacson to write his biography. Isaacson spoke to Fresh Air Oct. 25, 2011.

Hear The Original Interview

Jobs' Biography: Thoughts On Life, Death And Apple

Author Interviews

Jobs' biography: thoughts on life, death and apple.

DAVID BIANCULLI, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm David Bianculli, editor of TV Worth Watching, sitting in for Terry Gross. The movie "Steve Jobs," with a screenplay by Aaron Sorkin based on the best-selling biography by Walter Isaacson, opens today in New York and LA. Today on FRESH AIR, we'll listen back to Terry's 2011 interview with Isaacson and hear what our film critic, David Edelstein, thinks of the film. But let's start with an excerpt of an interview Terry recorded with Steve Jobs himself. They spoke in 1996.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED BROADCAST)

TERRY GROSS, HOST:

From what I've read, it sounds like you were really the advocate for having a mouse on the Mac. Why did you push for that and what was the argument against it?

STEVE JOBS: Well, as I mentioned earlier, I went to Xerox PARC, Palo Alto Research Center, in 1979 and I saw the early work on graphical user interfaces that they had done. And they had a mouse, and it was obvious that you needed a pointing device and a mouse seemed to be the best one. We tried a bunch of other ones subsequently at Apple and a mouse indeed was the best one. We refined it a little bit.

We found that, you know, Xerox's had three buttons. We found that people would push the wrong button or be scared that they were going to push the wrong button, so they always looked at the mouse instead of the screen. So we got it down to one button so that you could never push the wrong button, made some refinements like that.

The Xerox, you know, mouse cost about $1,000 a piece to build. We had to engineer one that cost 20 bucks to build. So we had to do a lot of those kinds of things. But the basic concept of the mouse came originally from a company called SRI, through Xerox and then to Apple. And there were a lot of people at Apple that just didn't get it. We fought tooth and nail with a variety of people there who thought the whole concept of a graphical user interface was crazy, but fortunate...

GROSS: On what grounds?

JOBS: On the grounds that it either couldn't be done, or on the grounds that real computer users didn't need, you know, menus in plain English, and real computer users didn't care about, you know, putting nice little pictures on the screen. But fortunately, I was the largest stockholder and the chairman of the company, so I won.

BIANCULLI: Apple co-founder Steve Jobs speaking to Terry Gross in 1996. Jobs died in 2011, the same year our next guest, Walter Isaacson, released an authorized biography titled "Steve Jobs." That's also the name of the movie about him opening today in New York and LA. Isaacson describes Jobs as the greatest business executive of our era, having revolutionized six industries - personal computers, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computers and digital publishing. You could even add a seventh - retailing. Jobs chose an esteemed biographer to write his story. Isaacson is the author of biographies of Einstein, Benjamin Franklin and Henry Kissinger. This interview was recorded in 2011.

GROSS: Walter Isaacson, welcome to FRESH AIR. Steve Jobs wasn't the inventor of a lot of the products that he's known for. He didn't literally design them. Would you explain exactly what his role was in creating things like the Mac, the iPod, the iPhone? Choose one example.

WALTER ISAACSON: Steve Jobs didn't invent anything outright, but he invented the future by putting together remarkable inventions and ideas. For example, he walks into Xerox PARC in the 1980s, early 1980s, and sees this graphical user interface that Xerox had created. Xerox didn't know what to do with it, but instead of having...

GROSS: Explain what a graphical user interface is.

ISAACSON: Instead of having those little, awful C-prompts that you and I remember of a green line on sort of a black screen, and you have to do command-execute, that sort of thing, you have what we see today on all computer screens, which is icons and folders and documents. And you use a mouse and you click on them.

All of that was invented at Xerox PARC, but Xerox ended up producing a computer that was totally worthless with it, and Steve Jobs made an arrangement with Xerox. They invested in Apple. And he went and he took that concept, and he improved it a hundredfold.

He made it so that you could drag and drop some of the folders, and you could do all the double-clicking. He invented the pull-down menus, along with this Macintosh team he had in the early 1980s. So what he was able to do was to take a conception and turn it into reality. And that's where the genius was, was connecting art with technology.

GROSS: He even got involved with colors and, you know, with how the computer physically looked, what color it was. One person he worked with complained that there were 2,000 shades of beige that were available, but Steve Jobs wanted to create his own because the other 2,000 shades of beige weren't good enough. I think this was for the Apple II.

ISAACSON: This is, yeah, one of the original computers they did. And he just obsessed over the color, the color of the screws, the finish of the screws, even the screws you couldn't see.

His father taught him, when he was a young kid and they were building a fence or a cabinet, he would say even the parts unseen should be beautiful because although nobody else will know, you will know whether or not you used great craftsmanship.

And so even with the original Macintosh, he makes sure that the circuit board, that all of the chips are lined up properly and look good. He made them go back and redo the circuit board. He made them find the right color, have the right curves on the screw, and even the sort of curves on the machine, he wanted it to feel friendly.

The original Macintosh, he wanted it to look like a human face but not a Neanderthal face. So he made the top a little bit narrower. And if you remember the old Macintosh, it does look like something friendly, something smiling at you.

GROSS: So did this obsessiveness drive his team crazy?

ISAACSON: It drove them crazy, but they became very loyal. It's one of the dichotomies about Jobs is he could be demanding and tough - at times, you know, really berating people and being irate. On the other hand, he got all A-players, and they became fanatically loyal to him. Why? Because they realized they were producing with other A-players truly great products for an artist who was a perfectionist and frankly wasn't always the kindest person when they failed. But they knew that, you know, he was rallying them to do good stuff.

GROSS: You say that starting in 1981, the Mac team gave out an award to someone on the team who best stood up to Steve Jobs.

ISAACSON: Absolutely, and this is typical of Jobs is that he could push people, but he loved to be pushed back. He loved to get into arguments. And so the first year, it was won by Joanna Hoffman, a woman who's from a Central European background. And, you know, she would always just tell Steve no.

At one point, she goes storming up the stairs and tells everybody I'm going to just stab him because he's, you know, making up projections that will never work. And she won it again the second year. But the third year, this new woman, Debbie Coleman, decided she was going to try to win the award, and she did.

Steve loved it, and both Joanna Hoffman and Debbie Coleman got themselves promoted. So as tough as he was as a boss, he liked people to be tough under him.

GROSS: Now, why did he want Apple to have its own operating system, one that would only run on Apple products?

ISAACSON: Jobs was an artist. It was like he didn't want his beautiful software to run on somebody else's junky hardware, or vice versa - for somebody else's bad operating system to be running on his hardware. He felt that the end-to-end integration of hardware and software made for the best user experience. And that's one of the divides of the digital age because Microsoft, for example, or Google's Android, they license the operating system to a whole bunch of hardware makers.

But you don't get that pristine user experience that Jobs as a perfectionist wanted if you don't integrate the hardware, the software, the content, the devices, all into one seamless unit.

GROSS: So how did this work for and against Steve Jobs?

ISAACSON: It was not a great business model, at first, to insist that if you wanted the Apple operating system, you had to buy the Apple hardware and vice versa. And Microsoft, which licenses itself promiscuously to all sorts of hardware manufacturers, ends up with 90 to 95 percent of the operating system market, you know, by the beginning of 2000.

But in the long run, the end-to-end integration works very well for Apple and for Steve Jobs because it allows him to create devices that just work beautifully with the machines - for example, the iPod, then the iPhone, then the iPad. They're all seamlessly integrated.

GROSS: My favorite example in the book, I think, of how much of a control freak he was with his products, Steve Jobs is asked by a real, like, Apple fan to autograph an Apple keyboard. And then Jobs insists on removing certain keys that were added to the keyboard during his hiatus from Apple, after he was ousted, before he returned.

So the person who wanted the keyboard autographed had to remove the function keys - the F1, F2, F3, F4 keys - and had to remove the cursor keys. So... (Laughing)

ISAACSON: Steve Jobs was insistent that everything be perfect, and he didn't like cursor keys because he wanted people to use the point-and-click graphical operating system. So he said there should be no cursor keys on the keyboard. After he leaves, they put them on. So when that student asked him to autograph it, Steve himself takes out his car keys and pries off the cursor keys and the function keys that he thinks are superfluous on the keyboard of the Macintoshes that were being built after he left. And he says, I'm improving the world one keyboard at a time.

BIANCULLI: Walter Isaacson, author of the biography "Steve Jobs," speaking to Terry Gross in 2011. More after a break. This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

BIANCULLI: This is FRESH AIR. Let's get back to Terry’s 2011 interview with Walter Isaacson, author of the best-selling biography of Steve Jobs. A new movie based on his book, with a screenplay by Aaron Sorkin, opens today in New York and LA.

GROSS: So let's talk a little bit about Steve Jobs' relationship with Bill Gates; incredible rivals, but early on, they were going to collaborate. What was the nature of the original collaboration?

ISAACSON: Well, Microsoft, founded by Bill Gates, made some of the original software for the Apple II - software called BASIC, which, you know, is sort of an easy programming language. And what Steve Jobs wanted when he was coming up with the idea of this beautiful new Macintosh that would have this almost playroom-like graphical design and interface was to get Microsoft to write word processing software, spreadsheet software, everything for the Macintosh.

So he goes and visits Bill Gates. They have what I call in the book a binary star system relationship, meaning the gravitational pull of the other affects the orbit. So they have interlinked orbits for almost 30 years. So Gates loves the Macintosh, and he goes down and puts a whole team on it, and they create Word and spreadsheets and Excel and others for the Mac and become one of the biggest software developers for the Mac.

One of the things that Jobs then worried about was that Bill Gates and Microsoft would take the idea of a graphical interface and make their own operating system that copied some of the look and the feel because back then, Microsoft was making an operating system that had all these command lines and C-prompts.

And indeed, Bill Gates decides, of course, like any other computer manufacturer, we should go this graphical route, to show - you know, let people point and click at folders and icons on the screen. So he does begin to create Windows, and that drives Steve Jobs to distraction.

He thinks that he's been ripped off by Microsoft. And indeed, even though you can't copyright the look and feel of a computer, I understand Jobs' feelings, which was he had helped create this beautiful interface. And Bill Gates said, well, you broke into Xerox PARC and stole it; we broke in and saw the Xerox machines as well, and - not broke in, but we saw the machines as well. Everybody's going to do graphical interfaces.

So there are really two sides of that story, and I can understand both sides. But it did become a real source of friction where Jobs just simply felt that Bill Gates didn't come up with anything inventive and just sort of took the ideas that the Macintosh had and created Windows.

GROSS: So do Apple and Microsoft continue to work together after Jobs feels so ripped off by Windows?

ISAACSON: Yes, they do, but there are all sorts of lawsuits where Apple’s trying to sue Microsoft for Windows, for stealing the look and feel. Apple loses most of the suits. But they drag on, and there's even a government investigation.

So by the time Steve Jobs comes back to Apple in 1997, the relationship is horrible between Apple and Microsoft. And when we say that Jobs and Gates had a rivalry, we also have to realize they had a collaboration and a partnership. It was typical of the digital age, which is sort of both rivalry and partnership.

And one of the first calls that Steve Jobs makes when he comes back to Apple in 1997 is to Bill Gates, saying come, we have to talk because we have to resolve this problem, and we have to get you making great software for the Macintosh computer again instead of suing each other.

GROSS: And is that what happened?

ISAACSON: Yes. And Apple had been negotiating with Microsoft for months and months with hundreds of pages of some sort of settlement of all their lawsuits. And Jobs just does what he often does, which is focus and simplify. And he says, here's all we need to do - a commitment that you'll make software for the Macintosh, an investment by Microsoft in Apple and let's just resolve everything.

And they do it within a few weeks, just walking around, talking with Gates and one of Gates' top deputies. And they cut through all the clutter and are able - Steve Jobs is able to announce a deal at the end of - in 1997 at MacWorld in Boston.

GROSS: So when Jobs returned to Apple in '97, after he was ousted in '85, Apple was not in very good shape. Did this…

ISAACSON: It was about 90 days away from bankruptcy.

GROSS: So did this pact that Jobs and Gates arrange help save Apple?

ISAACSON: Yes, absolutely, and it gave everybody confidence that there would be new Apple operating systems, that there would always be software for it. And I think that - Bill Gates says in my book they always liked working with Apple and with Steve.I think there was sort of a joy that they could collaborate again.

GROSS: Gates and Jobs are two, like, the two giants of the, you know, computer and software world. How would you compare their approaches to their work and what drove Jobs and what drives Gates?

ISAACSON: Right, they were both born in 1955. They're both college dropouts. But, you know, Steve Jobs dropped out to sort of eventually wander off to India and seek enlightenment and really got into the counterculture, experimented with drugs.

You know, Bill Gates drops out to form a software company. And he was much, you know, sort of more driven and smart when it came to the mental processing power you need to create and code software. Steve Jobs was more intuitive, operated in a much more volatile manner as opposed to sort of the sharp, crisp meetings that Bill Gates would have.

In the end, I think the biggest difference is that Jobs was very much a genius when it came to aesthetics, design, consumer desire. And Bill Gates was a genius when it came to - here's a business model that can work with great operating systems. And he was much more of a focused businessperson than Jobs was.

GROSS: So now, we talked a little bit about Jobs' relationship with Bill Gates. What about his relationship with Google? Like, for example, you say Jobs was really angry when Google started going into the phone business and developed the Droid. Why wouldn't he expect that Google or another company would try to, you know, copy and improve on, if they could, the iPhone?

ISAACSON: I think there was an unnerving historic resonance from what had happened a couple of decades earlier, which is Microsoft takes the graphical operating system of the Mac and starts licensing it around. Suddenly you have Google taking the operating system of the iPhone and mobile devices and all the touchscreen technology and look and feel and building upon it and making it an open technology that various device-makers could use.

So it was the same type of thing that had happened earlier, and Steve Jobs felt very possessive about all of the look, the feel, the swipes, the multi-touch, you know, gestures that you use and was driven to absolute distraction when Android's operating system, developed by Google, used by many hardware manufacturers, started doing the exact same thing.

Would you expect that to happen? Yeah. That's the way things happen in this world. But it also - would you expect Jobs to be furious about it? He was furious. In fact, that probably understates his feeling. He was really furious. And he let Eric Schmidt, who was then the CEO of Google, know it. They had even a breakfast - coffee at one point in which Jobs says, I'm not interested in just your money. I want you to stop ripping us off.

GROSS: Let's talk a little bit more personally about Steve Jobs' life. When he was I guess in his 20s, that's when he started being interested in Zen Buddhism. He spent time in India. So he was really interested in the Buddhist view of life. Yet, you say he was driven by demons. What do you think some of those demons were?

ISAACSON: I think that he felt slightly apart from the world because of his adoption - being adopted, meaning he was part of the world he lived in but also separate from it. He felt somewhat chosen because his adoptive parents, when he said whoa, the girl across - when he was 6 years old, the girl across the street from him said, oh, you're adopted; that means your parents abandoned you and didn't want you.

So he runs in to see his adoptive parents, the people he considers his real parents, and they say, no, no, no, you're special. We specially picked you out. You were chosen by us. And that helps give him a sense of being special and chosen.

So I think everybody's driven to some extent by, you know, the things in their background. But for Steve Jobs, it was particularly intense, and he felt throughout his life, he told me that he was on a journey. And he said, the journey is the reward. That was one of the Zen, you know, phrases that he loved to repeat. But that journey involved resolving some of the conflicts about his role in this world, why he was here, you know, what it was all about.

BIANCULLI: Walter Isaacson, author of "Steve Jobs," speaking to Terry Gross in 2011. His book is the basis of the film "Steve Jobs," which opens today in New York and LA. We'll hear more of their conversation and another excerpt from Terry's 1996 interview with Steve Jobs himself after a break. I'm David Bianculli, and this is FRESH AIR.

BIANCULLI: This is FRESH AIR. I'm David Bianculli, in for Terry Gross. Back with more of Terry's 2011 interview with Walter Isaacson. He’s the author of the best-selling biography of Steve Jobs, the book on which screenwriter Aaron Sorkin based his screenplay of the new movie, also called "Steve Jobs." The film opens today in New York and LA. Walter Isaacson, in addition to chronicling how Jobs revolutionized personal computers, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computers and digital publishing, also wrote about Jobs’ personal story. When we left off, Isaacson was describing how being adopted left Jobs feeling abandoned by his birth parents and chosen by his adoptive parents.

GROSS: Who were his biological parents, and why did they give them up?

ISAACSON: His biological parents were a Syrian graduate student and teaching assistant at the University of Wisconsin, a guy named Abdul Fattah Jandali, who had come over from Homs, Syria, and ended up in a relationship with another graduate student at the University of Wisconsin, Joanne Schieble, and she got pregnant. They went to Syria together, actually, during the summer, and she comes back pregnant. She's from a very tight-knit Catholic community near Green Bay - or in Green Bay, Wis. And so she goes out, doesn't - they can't get married. Her father is a strict Catholic, and he's dying. So she decides...

GROSS: He threatens to disown her if they get married.

ISAACSON: Yes. He also felt that way about previous boyfriends who weren't Catholic, so I don't think it had anything to do with being Syrian, necessarily. It was just that he was a strict father who was, you know, very upset when his daughter was having relationships, especially with people who weren't part of the Catholic community. She goes out, then, to San Francisco and finds a kindly doctor whose job it was to take unwed pregnant women under wing and help them give birth and then help arrange for private adoptions.

GROSS: So she insisted that the adoptive parents of her baby be college graduates.

ISAACSON: That was the one stipulation she made. Both she and the father of the child, you know, believe very much in education. And in the end, they at first put - the baby, Steve Jobs, is given to a lawyer and his wife. Actually, both of them, I think, are lawyers. But for reasons that are slightly unclear - Steve said it's because they wanted a girl. Whatever it may have been, Steve is taken out of that family and instead is adopted by Paul and Clara Jobs. And he never went to college, in fact, dropped out of high school. He was a repo man, a guy who repossessed cars, you know, for a finance company, been in the Coast Guard. His wife was a, you know, daughter of Armenian refugees. And so when Steve got placed with that family, his biological mother balked at first at signing the adoption papers, but finally did so when the Jobs family made a pledge that they would start a college fund and make sure that Steve went to college.

GROSS: So there's a really interesting story about Steve Jobs finding out who his biological parents are. First, he finds out about his mother. How does he find that out?

ISAACSON: He writes - he wants to find who his biological mother is in the mid-1980s, and he discovers on his birth certificate that there's the name of this doctor. He calls the doctor up in San Francisco. This is the one who had sheltered Joanne Schieble when she was having the child and says I'd like to know who my biological mother is. And the doctor says, I'm sorry, all my records were destroyed in a fire. I can't tell you who that is.

The doctor actually wasn't telling the truth. And that night, the doctor writes a letter, says to Steve Jobs, to be delivered upon my death. And it says who his biological mother is. In one of those coincidences of Steve's life, the doctor dies pretty soon thereafter. And Steve Jobs gets this letter. It says the name of his mother. His mother is then living. He finds a detective. They find that she's now living in Los Angeles. And he contacts her through the detective, the lawyer, and then meets her. And she is very loving and also explains sort of tearfully that she didn't really want to give him up. And he says don't worry, everything turned out OK. I just want to thank you.

GROSS: And then how does he find out who his father is, his biological father?

ISAACSON: So his biological mother says there's something I have to tell you, which is you have a sister, a sister that I didn't put up for adoption, born a year - two - a couple years later. And the sister is Mona Simpson, now an incredibly famous and great novelist, then a struggling and aspiring novelist working for George Plimpton's magazine, The Paris Review, in New York.

GROSS: And her best-known book is called "Anywhere But Here."

ISAACSON: Which, "Anywhere but Here" describes sort of the wandering track of her and her mother, Joanne Schieble, the - Steve's mother, biological mother, as they travel across the country from Wisconsin and eventually end up in Los Angeles. And the mother, shall we say, is delightful but very, very quirky. So it should not surprise you to know that the mother - and the mother gets a lawyer involved - contacts Mona to say you have a brother. But instead of saying your brother is Steve Jobs who used to be at Apple Computers, just left Apple and is, you know, a famous and rich person, simply says, you have a brother. And I'm not going to tell you who he is, but he's famous. He's rich. He used to be poor. He has dark hair, whatever.

And so at The Paris Review, for the next few days, they're all trying to guess who this lost brother of Mona Simpson is. And they finally decide it's John Travolta, probably. That was sort of the most popular of guesses. But Joanne Schieble arrives in New York. They, I think, go to the St. Regis Hotel. Steve Jobs is introduced to Mona Simpson, and they bond totally for the rest of their lives because, as Steve often says, it was just a pleasure to find that I had a sister who was also an artist.

GROSS: At this point, he can find out who his father is - biological father. And it turns out it's somebody who he already had some connection to. So tell us who - what that connection was between Steve Jobs and his biological father.

ISAACSON: It's one of the astonishing sort of coincidences of Steve's magical life, which is Mona Simpson, the sister, helps track down the lost father, Jandali, the Syrian graduate student, and finds that he's running a coffee shop in Sacramento, Calif. And so tells Steve - Mona goes to meet and find Jandali at the coffee shop. And Steve says don't even tell him about me because Steve doesn't really want to meet him. He feels, you know, the guy abandoned Mona, abandoned him. There's no reason to meet him.

So Mona goes to the coffee shop and Jandali gets, I think, probably rather emotional. They talk for a long time. He says that they had had another child, but we’ll never hear from him again. And Mona's kind of aghast and doesn't say anything. And then Jandali says I used to run a really great restaurant, you know, near Cupertino. I wish you could have seen me then. Everybody used to come to that restaurant, even Steve Jobs used to come to the restaurant. Mona, of course, looks shocked and doesn't say well, Steve Jobs is your son. And Jandali looked at her and says oh, yes, Steve Jobs. He was a good tipper.

But Mona never says to Jandali Steve Jobs is your son. But she goes back, reports this conversation to her brother, Steve. And Steve says oh, yeah. The guy who ran that restaurant, I remember him. He was a fat, balding Syrian guy. And Steve decides - you know, he had met him a couple of times, I think shook his hand at the restaurant. And Steve decides, no, I don't ever see that guy again and doesn't.

GROSS: So he never meets him. I mean, he met him before, but he never meets him as his son.

ISAACSON: No. Never after that meets him.

BIANCULLI: This is FRESH AIR. Let's get back to Terry's 2011 interview with Walter Isaacson, author of the best-selling biography of and titled "Steve Jobs." A new movie based on his book, with a screenplay by Aaron Sorkin, opens today in New York and LA.

GROSS: Steve Jobs didn't ask to have any control over the biography you were writing of him. He didn't even want to read the manuscript before it was published. But when he saw the cover, he wanted to change it. What was the original cover? What didn't he like about it?

ISAACSON: The original cover put in the catalog, or an early database, had sort of an Apple logo with a young picture of Steve. And it was kind of slightly gimmicky. And it had a title, "iSteve," that was definitely gimmicky, that both my daughter, my wife, a lot of friends said, oh, that's far too gimmicky.

And it was one of the times he got really angry at me. He said, well, I'm not going to cooperate anymore because - and there were some words I can't use on the air. He said, you know, this stinks, but he said it in stronger language. And then he said, you know, I will keep working with you and giving you interviews but only if you let me have some input and, you know, into the design of the cover. It took me about one or two seconds to think, wow, that's a great offer. Here's a guy with the best design taste I've ever met.

GROSS: (Laughter).

ISAACSON: So I said, great. Sure. And it's the only thing he focused on. I think he kind of believes nobody's really going to read the book, but they are going to see the cover. And he felt that people - he told me. He said, people will somehow think I've been involved with the cover of this book and the design of it because they know my passions in that field, so I have to be. And so I said, sure. And I put it in the book itself, in the introduction, just so everybody knows, you know, that was an involvement of his in this book.

GROSS: So did he choose the photograph?

ISAACSON: We spent a lot of time on the photographs that - it was the photograph I wanted. It's a wonderful Albert Watson photograph taken in - you know, for Fortune magazine in 2009, I think, or it appeared then. I think there were four or five photographs. That's the one I strongly preferred, along with the one on the back, which is a Norman Seeff portrait taken for Rolling Stone, in January of '84 it ran, and him holding the Mac.

That got juggled quite a bit, but he finally approved and said, yeah, OK. Those are the two best pictures. And he also suggested it be in black-and-white, that it be a shiny, glossy cover - I mean, that there'd be a high-quality paper and stark whiteness and a good gloss coating on the cover. So those were the inputs he had on the cover, but he never asked to read the book. But I never quite understood why his legendary desire for control did not extend to wanting to control the book. And when I'd ask him, he'd say, well, it's better if it's an independent book. That's probably better in terms of establishing the credibility of the book.

GROSS: So when you use your Mac or iPhone or iPod, iPad - I imagine you have that stuff, especially since you've been writing about Jobs - what do you see differently about your computer or your devices because you've talked to Steve Jobs so many times, because you got to know him so well?

ISAACSON: I see the depth of the simplicity. I see the fact that when I go on an interface on a different machine, one that's not an Apple machine, I might have to hit a button that says start in order to shut down a machine. And I think that's not intuitive. But if I'm looking at the interface on my iPhone and I don't quite know how to do something, I'll touch what I think intuitively is probably the way to do it on the menu, and boom, magically, it always - or often seems to work. So that intuitive nature of the design and how he would repeatedly sit there with his design engineers and his interface software people and say no, no, no. I want to make it simpler. I want to make it easier. I've appreciated that.

And I also appreciate the beauty of the parts unseen. As I said before, his father taught him that the back of the fence, the back of a chest of drawers should be as beautiful as the front because you will know the craftsmanship that went into it. And so somehow, it comes through the depth of the beauty of the design when I'm, you know, using my iPad, for example.

GROSS: Well, Walter Isaacson, thank you so much for talking with us about Steve Jobs. It's been really interesting, and I really appreciate it.

ISAACSON: I appreciate being on with you, Terry.

BIANCULLI: Walter Isaacson speaking to Terry Gross in 2011. His biography of Steve Jobs is the basis of a new movie, opening today in New York in LA, also called "Steve Jobs."

And now let's hear a little more of Terry's 1996 interview with Steve Jobs himself.

GROSS: What do you think the state of the computer would be if it weren't for Apple? This is a chance, I guess, for a really self-serving answer. But, I mean, I'm really curious what you think.

JOBS: I think our major contribution was in bringing a liberal arts point of view to the use of computers.

GROSS: Yeah, explain what you mean by that.

JOBS: You know, if you really look at the ease of use of the Macintosh, the driving motivation behind that was to bring not only ease of use to people so that many, many more people could use computers for nontraditional things at that time. But it was to bring, you know, beautiful fonts and typography to people. It was to bring graphics to people, not for, you know, plotting laminar flow calculations but so that they could see beautiful photographs or pictures or artwork. Our goal was to bring a liberal arts perspective and a liberal arts audience to what had traditionally been, you know, a very geeky technology and a very geeky audience. That's the seed of Apple - you know, computers for the rest of us. And I think the sort of - the liberal arts point of view still lives at Apple. I'm not so sure that it lives that many other places. I mean, one of the reasons I think Microsoft took 10 years to copy the Mac was 'cause they didn't really get it at its core.

GROSS: What was the very first computer you had?

JOBS: I was very lucky. I was born in San Francisco, and I grew up in Silicon Valley. And I was able to go to NASA AMES Research Center nearby and play with the timesharing computer, which was a – you know, a loud mechanical terminal hooked up with a wire somewhere. And there was supposedly a computer on the other end of it. And I got a chance to, you know, program in FORTRAN and BASIC and . . .

GROSS: Those are the computer languages of the time.

JOBS: The computer languages of the time. And I was captured by it.

GROSS: How did you get into the business? What made you think this is going to be my life?

JOBS: I met my future partner in Apple, Steve Wozniak, when I was about - oh, I guess about 13 years old. He was the first person I met that knew more about electronics and computers than I did at the time. And we became fast friends and started to build electronic devices together. We built blue boxes together for a while, which were little devices that could allow you to make free phone calls everywhere - illegally, I might add. And . . .

GROSS: Oh, so you were a hacker.

JOBS: Yeah. Yeah. We built the first digital blue box in the whole world. It was wonderful. We had – our tagline, which – we put a little card on the bottom of each one - was he's got the whole world in his hands.

JOBS: And the reason we built a computer was that we wanted one, and we couldn’t afford one. We couldn’t afford to buy one. They were thousands of dollars at that time. We were just two teenagers. So we started trying to build them, you know, scrounging parts around Silicon Valley where we could. And after a few attempts, we managed to put together something that was the Apple I, and all of our friends wanted them, too. They wanted to build them. So it turned out that it took maybe 50 hours to build one of these things by hand, and it was taking up all of our spare time because our friends were not that skilled at building them, so Woz and I were building them for them. And we thought, you know, if we could just get what’s called a printed circuit board, where you could just kind of plug in the parts instead of having to hand-wire the whole thing, we could cut the assembly time down from, you know, maybe 50 hours to more like, you know, an hour. And so Woz sold his HP calculator and I sold my VW Microbus, and we got enough money together to pay someone to design one of these printed circuit boards for us. And our goal was to just sell them as raw printed circuit boards to our friends and make enough money to recoup our calculator and transportation.

And what happened was that one of the early computers - in fact, the first computer store in the world, which was in Mountain View at the time, said well, I'll take 50 of these computers, but I want them fully assembled, which was a twist that we’d never thought of. So we went and bought the parts to build 100 computers, and we built 50 of them and delivered them. And then we got paid in cash and ran back and paid the people that sold us parts for the parts.

And we had - then we had the classic Marxian profit realization crisis, which was our profit wasn't liquid. It was in 50 computers sitting on the floor. So we decided we had to start learning about sales and distribution so that we could sell the 50 computers and get back our money. And that's how we got into business.

And we took our idea to a few companies, one where Woz worked and one where I worked at the time. And neither one was interested in pursuing it, so we started our own company.

BIANCULLI: That was Steve Jobs in an interview with Terry Gross, recorded in 1996. He died in 2011. A new movie about him called "Steve Jobs" opens today in New York and LA. Next up, film critic David Edelstein will review that movie. This is FRESH AIR.

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Steve Jobs

  • Born February 24 , 1955 · San Francisco, California, USA
  • Died October 5 , 2011 · Palo Alto, California, USA (pancreatic cancer)
  • Birth name Steven Paul Jobs
  • Height 6′ 2″ (1.88 m)
  • Steven Paul Jobs was born on 24 February 1955 in San Francisco, California, to students Abdul Fattah Jandali and Joanne Carole Schieble who were unmarried at the time and gave him up for adoption. He was taken in by a working class couple, Paul and Clara Jobs, and grew up with them in Mountain View, California. He attended Homestead High School in Cupertino California and went to Reed College in Portland Oregon in 1972 but dropped out after only one semester, staying on to "drop in" on courses that interested him. He took a job with video game manufacturer Atari to raise enough money for a trip to India and returned from there a Buddhist. Back in Cupertino he returned to Atari where his old friend Steve Wozniak was still working. Wozniak was building his own computer and in 1976 Jobs pre-sold 50 of the as-yet unmade computers to a local store and managed to buy the components on credit solely on the strength of the order, enabling them to build the Apple I without any funding at all. The Apple II followed in 1977 and the company Apple Computer was formed shortly afterwards. The Apple II was credited with starting the personal computer boom, its popularity prompting IBM to hurriedly develop their own PC. By the time production of the Apple II ended in 1993 it had sold over 6 million units. Inspired by a trip to Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), engineers from Apple began working on a commercial application for the graphical interface ideas they had seen there. The resulting machine, Lisa, was expensive and never achieved any level of commercial success, but in 1984 another Apple computer, using the same WIMP (Windows, Icons, Menus, Pointer) interface concept, was launched. An advert during the 1984 Super Bowl, directed by Ridley Scott introduced the Macintosh computer to the world (in fact, the advert had been shown on a local TV channel in Idaho on 31 December 1983 and in movie theaters during January 1984 before its famous "premiere" on 22 January during the Super Bowl). In 1985 Jobs was fired from Apple and immediately founded another computer company, NeXT. Its machines were not a commercial success but some of the technology was later used by Apple when Jobs eventually returned there. In the meantime, in 1986, Jobs bought The Computer Graphics Group from Lucasfilm. The group was responsible for making high-end computer graphics hardware but under its new name, Pixar, it began to produce innovative computer animations. Their first title under the Pixar name, Luxo Jr. (1986) won critical and popular acclaim and in 1991 Pixar signed an agreement with Disney, with whom it already had a relationship, to produce a series of feature films, beginning with Toy Story (1995) . In 1996 Apple bought NeXT and Jobs returned to Apple, becoming its CEO. With the help of British-born industrial designer Jonathan Ive , Jobs brought his own aesthetic philosophy back to the ailing company and began to turn its fortunes around with the release of the iMac in 1998. The company's MP3 player, the iPod, followed in 2001, with the iPhone launching in 2007 and the iPad in 2010. The company's software music player, iTunes, evolved into an online music (and eventually also movie and software application) store, helping to popularize the idea of "legally" downloading entertainment content. In 2003, Jobs was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and underwent surgery in 2004. Despite the success of this operation he became increasingly ill and received a liver transplant in 2009. He returned to work after a six month break but eventually resigned his position in August 2011 after another period of medical leave which began in January 2011. He died on 5 October 2011. - IMDb Mini Biography By: IMDb Editors
  • Spouse Laurene Powell-Jobs (March 18, 1991 - October 5, 2011) (his death, 3 children)
  • Children Lisa Brennan-Jobs Eve Jobs
  • Relatives Mona Simpson (Sibling)
  • Black turtleneck sweatshirt and blue jeans - he owned over a hundred
  • CEO of Pixar Animation Studios
  • Has a daughter, Lisa, from a previous relationship. She is the namesake of Apple's computer, the Lisa.
  • When Apple Computer appointed its first Board of Directors, they insisted that all employees wear name badges with a number indicating the order in which they were hired. They assigned Steve Wozniak , who did all the engineering of the highly successful Apple II computer, the title Employee No. 1. Steve Jobs was officially Employee No. 2. He protested, but the board refused to change the badge assignments. Jobs offered a compromise: He would be Employee No. 0, since 0 comes before 1 on the mathematical model known as a number line.
  • CEO of Pixar Animation Studios - the creators of Toy Story (1995) , A Bug's Life (1998) , Toy Story 2 (1999) , Monsters, Inc. (2001) , and Finding Nemo (2003) - as well as various shorts, including Oscar-winning Tin Toy (1988) , Geri's Game (1997) , and For the Birds (2000) .
  • In Forbes Magazine's listing of the 400 Richest Americans in 2005, Steve Jobs came in at number 67 with a total worth of $3.3 Billion.
  • [February 1985, interview in "Playboy" magazine] I don't think I've ever worked so hard on something, but working on Macintosh was the neatest experience of my life. Almost everyone who worked on it will say that. None of us wanted to release it at the end. It was as though we knew that once it was out of our hands, it wouldn't be ours anymore. When we finally presented it at the shareholders' meeting, everyone in the auditorium gave it a five-minute ovation. What was incredible to me was that I could see the Mac team in the first few rows. It was as though none of us could believe we'd actually finished it. Everyone started crying.
  • [1985] I'll always stay connected with Apple. I hope that throughout my life I'll sort of have the thread of my life and then the thread of Apple weave in and out, like a tapestry. There may be a few years when I'm not there, but I'll always come back.
  • [2003] There are downsides to everything; there are unintended consequences to everything. The most corrosive piece of technology that I've ever seen is called television--but then, again, television, at its best, is magnificent.
  • [1998] A lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them.
  • Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn't really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while.

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Biography

Steve Jobs Biography

steve-jobs

Steve Jobs was born in San Francisco, 1955, to two university students Joanne Schieble and Syrian-born John Jandali. They were both unmarried at the time, and Steven was given up for adoption.

Steven was adopted by Paul and Clara Jobs, whom he always considered to be his real parents. Steven’s father, Paul, encouraged him to experiment with electronics in their garage. This led to a lifelong interest in electronics and design.

Jobs attended a local school in California and later enrolled at Reed College, Portland, Oregon. His education was characterised by excellent test results and potential. But, he struggled with formal education and his teachers reported he was a handful to teach.

At Reed College, he attended a calligraphy course which fascinated him. He later said this course was instrumental in Apple’s multiple typefaces and proportionally spaced fonts.

Steve Jobs in India

In 1974, Jobs travelled with Daniel Kottke to India in search of spiritual enlightenment. They travelled to the Ashram of Neem Karoli Baba in Kainchi. During his several months in India, he became aware of Buddhist and Eastern spiritual philosophy. At this time, he also experimented with psychedelic drugs; he later commented that these counter-culture experiences were instrumental in giving him a wider perspective on life and business.

“Bill Gates‘d be a broader guy if he had dropped acid once or gone off to an ashram when he was younger.” – Steve Jobs, The New York Times, Creating Jobs, 1997

Job’s first real computer job came working for Atari computers. During his time at Atari, Jobs came to know Steve Wozniak well. Jobs greatly admired this computer technician, whom he had first met in 1971.

Steve Jobs and Apple

In 1976, Wozniak invented the first Apple I computer. Jobs, Wozniak and Ronald Wayne then set up Apple computers. In the very beginning, Apple computers were sold from Jobs parents’ garage.

Over the next few years, Apple computers expanded rapidly as the market for home computers began to become increasingly significant.

In 1984, Jobs designed the first Macintosh. It was the first commercially successful home computer to use a graphical user interface (based on Xerox Parc’s mouse driver interface.) This was an important milestone in home computing and the principle has become key in later home computers.

Despite the many innovative successes of Jobs at Apple, there was increased friction between Jobs and other workers at Apple. In 1985, removed from his managerial duties, Jobs resigned and left Apple. He later looked back on this incident and said that getting fired from Apple was one of the best things that happened to him – it helped him regain a sense of innovation and freedom, he couldn’t find work in a large company.

Life After Apple

Steve_Jobs_and_Bill_Gates_(522695099)

Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. Photo Joi Ito

On leaving Apple, Jobs founded NeXT computers. This was never particularly successful, failing to gain mass sales. However, in the 1990s, NeXT software was used as a framework in WebObjects used in Apple Store and iTunes store. In 1996, Apple bought NeXT for $429 million.

Much more successful was Job’s foray into Pixar – a computer graphic film production company. Disney contracted Pixar to create films such as Toy Story, A Bug’s Life and Finding Nemo. These animation movies were highly successful and profitable – giving Jobs respect and success.

In 1996, the purchase of NeXT brought Jobs back to Apple. He was given the post of chief executive. At the time, Apple had fallen way behind rivals such as Microsoft, and Apple was struggling to even make a profit.

Return to Apple

Steve_Jobs_with_the_Apple_iPad_no_logo

Photo: Matt Buchanan

Jobs launched Apple in a new direction. With a certain degree of ruthlessness, some projects were summarily ended. Instead, Jobs promoted the development of a new wave of products which focused on accessibility, appealing design and innovate features.

The iPod was a revolutionary product in that it built on existing portable music devices and set the standard for portable digital music. In 2008, iTunes became the second biggest music retailer in the US, with over six billion song downloads and over 200 million iPods sold.

In 2007, Apple successfully entered the mobile phone market, with the iPhone. This used features of the iPod to offer a multi-functional and touchscreen device to become one of the best-selling electronic products. In 2010, he introduced the iPad – a revolutionary new style of tablet computers.

The design philosophy of Steve Jobs was to start with a fresh slate and imagine a new product that people would want to use. This contrasted with the alternative approach of trying to adapt current models to consumer feedback and focus groups. Job’s explains his philosophy of innovative design.

“But in the end, for something this complicated, it’s really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.”

– Steve Jobs, BusinessWeek (25 May 1998)

Apple has been rated No.1 in America’s most admired companies. Jobs management has been described as inspirational, although c-workers also state, Jobs could be a hard taskmaster and was temperamental. NeXT Cofounder Dan’l Lewin was quoted in Fortune as saying of that period, “The highs were unbelievable … But the lows were unimaginable.”

“My job is not to be easy on people. My jobs is to take these great people we have and to push them and make them even better.” – All About Steve Jobs [link]

Under Jobs, Apple managed to overtake Microsoft regarding share capitalization. Apple also gained a pre-eminent reputation for the development and introduction of groundbreaking technology. Interview in 2007, Jobs said:

“There’s an old Wayne Gretzky quote that I love. ‘I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.’ And we’ve always tried to do that at Apple. Since the very very beginning. And we always will.”

Despite, growing ill-health, Jobs continued working at Apple until August 2011, when he resigned.

“I was worth over $1,000,000 when I was 23, and over $10,000,000 when I was 24, and over $100,000,000 when I was 25, and it wasn’t that important because I never did it for the money.”

– Steve Jobs

Jobs earned only $1million as CEO of Apple. But, share options from Apple and Disney gave him an estimated fortune of $8.3billion.

Personal life

In 1991, he married Laurene Powell, together they had three children and lived in Palo Alto, California.

In 2003, he was diagnosed with Pancreatic Cancer. Over the next few years, Jobs struggled with health issues and was often forced to delegate the running of Apple to Tim Cook. In 2009, he underwent a liver transplant, but two years later serious health problems returned. He worked intermittently at Apple until August 2011, where he finally retired to concentrate on his deteriorating health. He died as a result of complications from his pancreatic cancer, suffering cardiac arrest on 5 October 2011 in Palo Alto, California.

In addition to his earlier interest in Eastern religions, Jobs expressed sentiments of agnosticism.

“ Sometimes I believe in God, sometimes I don’t. I think it’s 50-50 maybe. But ever since I’ve had cancer, I’ve been thinking about it more. And I find myself believing a bit more. I kind of – maybe it’s ’cause I want to believe in an afterlife. That when you die, it doesn’t just all disappear.”

Quote in Biography by Walter Isaacson.

Steve Jobs is buried in an unmarked grave at Alta Mesa Memorial Park, a nonsectarian cemetery in Palo Alto.

Citation: Pettinger, Tejvan . “Biography of Steve Jobs”, Oxford, UK. www.biographyonline.net. Published 25th Feb. 2012. Last updated 11th March 2019.

Steve Jobs: The Exclusive Biography

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  •  Steve Jobs Quotes
  • All About Steve Jobs
  • Steve Jobs at BBC

This is beautiful. He’s one of my role models. RIP Jobs

  • January 20, 2019 7:27 AM

This is very inspirational to all of us in the world today. He made the impossible the possible, he will always be remembered for his great work done. Congrats Steve you are an inspiration!

  • January 16, 2019 5:29 PM

He made life easier for us all, nothing would be the way it is today without him.

  • December 19, 2018 2:19 PM

Steve job amazing man

  • October 27, 2018 7:01 AM
  • By Rambharat

I agree 100%.

  • December 05, 2018 9:13 PM
  • By Roman Lopez

Very nice biography

  • September 04, 2018 12:47 PM

Steve jobs! His lesson reminds alot,but Steve went to school ,through colleges he attained ajob that has resulted him into many champions in business and other s.now how can someone has no such gualification also leave such great impact.

  • December 05, 2017 1:35 AM
  • By Natanyakhu moses

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Apple's Steve Jobs: An Extraordinary Career Ever wondered how Steve Jobs was so successful? Discover the answers in this comprehensive overview of his life, career and death.

By Entrepreneur Staff

Few entrepreneurs have been as impactful as Steve Jobs : the father of Apple computers and one of the most influential business people ever, not only in America but worldwide.

Throughout his career, Steve Jobs started multiple businesses that pushed forward the computer revolution and reshaped how society interfaces with technology.

But how did he attain his titanic success, and what led to his eventual downfall and re-ascension to Apple leadership? These questions have important answers, so keep reading for a closer look at Steve Jobs and his life.

Related: Top 10 Hiring Platforms for Small Business

An overview of Steve Jobs' life

Steven Paul Jobs was an American business owner, entrepreneur, investor and media proprietor. He was best known for co-founding and leading Apple, one of the most successful companies ever. But he also started and ran many successful companies, such as Pixar and NeXT.

Related: Pixar - Articles & Biography | Entrepreneur

Jobs led Apple for many years before he was forced out because of a dispute with the company's Board of Directors. After founding Pixar and NeXT Inc., another computer platform development company, he returned to steer the Apple ship when the company found itself in trying economic times.

Eventually, a pancreatic neuroendocrine tumor led Jobs to reduce his working hours and responsibilities. He died at the age of 56 from respiratory arrest.

Though he died before reaching late age, he left a legacy of entrepreneurial ambition and business savvy that cannot be forgotten.

Related: These 5 Steve Jobs Keynotes Will Inspire You to Better Sell Your Ideas

What is the history of Steve Jobs and Apple ?

The history of Steve Jobs is intricately intertwined with the history of Apple.

It all began in Jobs' youth when he called the co-founder and president of Hewlett-Packard, William Hewlett, for parts for a high school project. Hewlett did more than that.

Related: Hewlett-Packard - Articles & Biography | Entrepreneur

He was so impressed that he offered the young Steve Jobs a summer internship working at Hewlett-Packard.

steve paul jobs biography

This turned out to be a destiny-shaping internship, where Jobs met Steve Wozniak: the future primary creator of the Apple Computer. Wozniak was a talented engineer at the time and five years older than Jobs.

Related: Steve Wozniak - Articles & Biography | Entrepreneur

Jobs finished his internship and enrolled in Reed College in Portland, Oregon. However, he decided to drop out after just one semester, eventually working for Atari designing video games to save enough money to take an Eastern spiritual trip.

When did Apple start?

After he returned from his trip, Jobs reconnected with Wozniak and discovered that his friend was trying to build a personal computer. Wozniak saw the entire endeavor as nothing more than a hobby, but Jobs saw the business potential in a personal computer anyone could have in their home.

Jobs convinced Wozniak to go into business with him. At 20 years old, he set up the Apple company in 1975, working primarily out of his parent's garage in San Francisco, California.

The Apple I computer was released shortly after that, while the pair attended meetings of the local Homebrew Computer Club. To make the project work, Steve Jobs sold his Volkswagen microbus to generate nearly $1400 in liquid capital.

The Apple I was a modest success and was primarily sold to other hobbyists like Wozniak. But it made the business duo enough money to expand their venture.

steve paul jobs biography

By 1977, they had completed a new product, the Apple II , the first personal computer to include a keyboard and color graphics. Its user-friendliness and innovative features made it an instant market success; in the first year, Apple made $3 million. In another two years, it had made over $200 million.

This was the first timeApple saw significant success. Unfortunately, 1980 saw increased competition caused by companies like IBM, partially due to the lackluster Apple III and LISA follow-up computers. Determined to make his mark on the business world, Jobs helped to create the AppleMacintosh in 1984.

The defining factor? A graphical user interface or GUI which a mouse could control. This revolution changed personal computing for everyone, allowing anyone without programming knowledge to now use a computer.

Why did Steve Jobs have a falling out with Apple ?

While the AppleMacintosh was a major technical success, it was priced too high for the consumer market at about $2,495. Furthermore, it wouldn't work for corporate buyers, as it lacked certain features businesses needed (such as high memory, hard drive and networking capabilities).

Though Jobs had helped to usher in a new industry entirely, his aggressive and sometimes egocentric personality led him to clash with Apple's Board of Directors.

By 1983, he had worn out his welcome. He was removed from the board by then-CEO John Sculley. Ironically, Jobs had picked Sculley personally to lead Apple.

steve paul jobs biography

What were Jobs' new endeavors?

Jobs sold his shares of Apple stock and fully resigned in 1985, moving on to build NeXT Computer Co. This new computer company would create another computer to revolutionize higher education.

It was introduced in 1988 , offering innovations like good graphics, a digital signal processor chip and an optical disk drive. However, it was still too expensive to attract big buyers, so Jobs pivoted once again.

This time, he took an interest in PixarAnimation Studios, which he had purchased in 1986 from George Lucas. He cut a deal with the Walt Disney Company to create entirely computer-generated feature films, the first and most popular of which was Toy Story : a 1995 smash hit that broke box office records.

Emboldened by this success, Jobs took the Pixar company public in 1996 and, overnight, was a billionaire thanks to his 80% share of the company. Jobs was finally rich, but this was just the beginning of his rise back to fame and power.

When did Jobs return to Apple ?

Apple Inc. then bought NeXT for approximately $400 million. More importantly, the company reappointed Jobs to the Board of Directors as an advisor to the then chairman and CEO Gilbert F. Amelio.

This was partially out of desperation and nostalgia, as Apple had not developed a popular Macintoshoperating system for the next generation. As a result, Apple's control of the PC market had dropped precipitously, reaching an all-time low of just 5.3%.

Jobs took the reins once again in March 1997, when Apple announced a $708 million quarterly loss. Jobs took over as the interim Apple CEO when Amelio resigned. To ensure the survival of the company he helped to found, Jobs made a deal with Microsoft, getting some investment capital from the competing company in exchange for a nonvoting minority stake.

Jobs' guidance gradually yielded essential benefits for Apple. He led the "Think Different" advertising campaign and the charge to install a new G3 PowerPC microprocessor in Apple computers, making them faster than competing devices.

Then he led the company to develop the iMac as a new, affordable type of home desktop, which finally resulted in the positive reviews he craved. By the end of 1988, Apple had made nearly $6 billion in sales.

However, the innovative iPhone was the most significant victory under Jobs' belt. Once shortly after the iPod portable audio player launched in 2001 alongside iTunes, the iPhone handset came about in 2007, revolutionizing mobile phones and mobile devices.

steve paul jobs biography

The iPhone was the first handheld phone to make calls, text and access the Internet from an intuitive and user-friendly touchscreen. These days, all modern mobile phones are based on the original iPhone design.

Related: Why Steve Jobs 's Passion for Calligraphy is an Important Example for You

Who created Apple ?

Apple was created by both Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. Throughout the partnership, Wozniak was the technical and engineering brains of the operation, spearheading many of the hardware and software development needed to launch the original Apple line of computers. J obs handled the business side of things.

Unfortunately, Wozniak and Jobs had many significant disagreements about the design and development of Apple technologies. Things came to a head with the development of the Apple II, and Wozniak ultimately left the company in 1983.

How did Apple get its name?

Supposedly, there's no profound story surrounding Apple and its name — Steve Jobs just liked apples . A potentially apocryphal story says that Steve Jobs suggested the Apple name to Steve Wozniak after the former visited an apple orchard when they were beginning their business.

Ultimately, the name's origin doesn't matter; it's iconic and unique enough compared to other computer firms that it has cemented itself in business history.

What did Steve Jobs invent?

Although Steve Jobs is named an author of 346 patents according to the US registry, he didn't technically invent anything. He didn't invent the Apple I, the Macintosh computer, the universal remote, the iPod, the iPad or the iPhone.

While he understood the design principles and engineering knowledge behind many of these inventions, his primary skill was business acumen.

Jobs may not have invented these revolutionary technologies, but he did inspire those with the skills to create them. More importantly, he knew how to market and sell those inventions, especially on stage. The Macbook Air, Mac computers and other Apple products would not have been as successful without him.

Related: How Steve Jobs Saved Apple

What was Steve Jobs ' net worth?

Before his death, Steve Jobs' net worth was approximately $10.2 billion , most of which was tied up in his stock options and similar assets. However, he acquired a very high net worth by age 25, at which point it was $250 million, roughly equivalent to around $745 million in 2021.

What were Steve Jobs ' major investments?

Throughout his career, Steve Jobs merely invested in companies that he owned, such as Apple, Pixar and NeXT. This is why his wealth ballooned so much after major business breakthroughs. Jobs was also known to hold stock and assets in companies like Microsoft and other tech companies.

What was Steve Jobs ' education like?

Like many famous entrepreneurs, Steve Jobs did not have a very comprehensive traditional education. Though he graduated high school and enrolled at Reed College in Oregon, he did not stay there for long.

He dropped out of just one semester without telling his parents. This turned out to be the right choice for his long-term career, as Jobs had the time to focus on Apple and his other endeavors.

Related: Steve Jobs Systematically Cultivated His Creativity. You Can Too

Who is in Steve Jobs ' family?

Steve Jobs was born to Joanne Carole Schieble and Abdulfattah Jandali, German-American and Syrian, respectively.

However, Jobs was adopted by Paul Jobs and Clara Hagopian, who had elected to consider adoption after an ectopic pregnancy in 1955. Jobs reportedly loved his parents and treated them as his "true" family from an early age.

Jobs had one adopted sister, Patricia, who was adopted in 1957. He met his future wife, Laurene Powell, at Stanford Graduate School of Business. They were married in 1991 at Yosemite National Park and had their first child that same year.

Reed, the first child, eventually graduated from Stanford University. The couple's next to children, Erin Siena and Eve, were born in 1995 and 1988, respectively.

However, Jobs had another child, Lisa Brennan-Jobs, in 1978, from an on-again-off-again relationship with Chrisann Brennan. Jobs initially denied responsibility for the child but eventually was required to make child-support payments and provide medical insurance coverage for Lisa after a DNA test that proved his fraternity in 1980.

Related: The Best Advice Steve Jobs Ever Gave

What donations, charity and philanthropic efforts did Steve Jobs pursue?

Unlike many wealthy individuals, Steve Jobs was not well known for his philanthropic or charitable donations. He was a very private individual and was repeatedly criticized during his business career for not donating as much money as fellow billionaires.

That said, while his name may be absent from the Million Dollar List of large global philanthropy, many have speculated that large anonymous donations may have been made by Jobs at one time or another.

Jobs did launch the Stephen P. Jobs Foundation after leaving Apple. The Foundation was originally intended to focus on vegetarianism and nutrition but eventually pivoted to social entrepreneurship.

When Jobs returned to Apple in 1987, he eliminated the company's philanthropic programs to cut costs. It's partially because of this that Apple retains a reputation as being among the least philanthropic companies.

Later in life, Jobs donated $50 million to Stanford Hospital and contributed an undisclosed amount of money to cure AIDS. Overall, Jobs is noteworthy and admirable for his business efforts, not for his charitable donations.

Related: As Steve Jobs Once Said, 'People with Passion Can Change the World'

How and when did Steve Jobs pass away?

Steve Jobs was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2003. Although he put off surgery in favor of alternative medicine solutions , he had to undergo a significant reconstructive surgery called the Whipple operation in 2004. Parts of his gallbladder, pancreas, bile duct and duodenum were removed.

Jobs recovered to lead Apple afterward, but in 2008, he lost significant weight. After a liver transplant in April 2009, Jobs' situation had become direr. August 2011 saw him resign as CEO of Apple, remaining chairman.

Unfortunately, he passed away due to respiratory arrest on October 5, 2011, at his Silicon Valley home. He was a fan of Eastern philosophies such as Buddhism. The Jobs family was with him in Palo Alto when he passed.

What are the best Steve Jobs quotes?

Apple co-founder Steve Jobs was well known for many inspiring quotes .

Here are a few to keep in mind as you pursue your own business ambitions:

  • "Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life."
  • "Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower."
  • "You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future."
  • "Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice."
  • "Stay hungry. Stay foolish."
  • "I'm convinced that about half of what separates the successful entrepreneurs from the non-successful ones is pure perseverance."
  • "Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren't used to an environment where excellence is expected."
  • "You can't just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them. By the time you get it built, they'll want something new."
  • "We're here to put a dent in the universe. Otherwise, while else even be here?"

Related: 6 Reasons Why Steve Jobs Was Truly One of a Kind

What can Steve Jobs ' story teach you?

Steve Jobs had a significant impact on the computer and video industries.

His legacy will never be forgotten, and his business skills and lessons are essential materials for up-and-coming entrepreneurs to learn as they grow their own careers.

Check out Entrepreneur's other articles for more information about business leaders and other financial topics.

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The Real Leadership Lessons of Steve Jobs

  • Walter Isaacson

steve paul jobs biography

Reprint: R1204F

The author, whose biography of Steve Jobs was an instant best seller after the Apple CEO’s death in October 2011, sets out here to correct what he perceives as an undue fixation by many commentators on the rough edges of Jobs’s personality. That personality was integral to his way of doing business, Isaacson writes, but the real lessons from Steve Jobs come from what he actually accomplished. He built the world’s most valuable company, and along the way he helped to transform a number of industries: personal computing, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, retail stores, and digital publishing.

In this essay Isaacson describes the 14 imperatives behind Jobs’s approach: focus; simplify; take responsibility end to end; when behind, leapfrog; put products before profits; don’t be a slave to focus groups; bend reality; impute; push for perfection; know both the big picture and the details; tolerate only “A” players; engage face-to-face; combine the humanities with the sciences; and “stay hungry, stay foolish.”

Six months after Jobs’s death, the author of his best-selling biography identifies the practices that every CEO can try to emulate.

His saga is the entrepreneurial creation myth writ large: Steve Jobs cofounded Apple in his parents’ garage in 1976, was ousted in 1985, returned to rescue it from near bankruptcy in 1997, and by the time he died, in October 2011, had built it into the world’s most valuable company. Along the way he helped to transform seven industries: personal computing, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, retail stores, and digital publishing. He thus belongs in the pantheon of America’s great innovators, along with Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, and Walt Disney. None of these men was a saint, but long after their personalities are forgotten, history will remember how they applied imagination to technology and business.

  • WI Walter Isaacson, the CEO of the Aspen Institute, is the author of Steve Jobs and of biographies of Henry Kissinger, Benjamin Franklin, and Albert Einstein.

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Steve Jobs Biography

Steve Jobs Biography

The well-known businessman, computer genius, and even digital entertainment Steve Paul Jobs , better known as Steve Jobs , was born in the city of San Francisco, California, the United States, on February 24, 1955, and died in the city of Palo Alto, California, United States, on October 5, 2011. He is recognized for his role as the co-founder of Apple Inc. In addition to having held the position of CEO in the same company. But on all these aspects highlights the fact of being co-creator of the first personal computer.

Steve was born as the first child of the American Joanne Carole Schieble and the Syrian immigrant Abdulfattah “John” Jandali, a couple of university students who did not have the means to take care of the child, so he was given up for adoption to the marriage formed by Paul and Clara Jobs. They would then adopt a girl named Patty to grow up with Steve. Sometime later the biological parents of this would marry, having their second child: the novelist Mona Simpson.

Paul Jobs worked as a train driver for a railroad company, while his mother was a housewife. In spite of not having all the means available, they tried to ensure that their adopted children had the best possible education available. By 1961, the family moved to the city of Mountain View, this place was beginning to emerge as an important epicenter of technological development that would undoubtedly influence Steve Jobs. There he continued his studies at Cupertino Middle School, ending at Homestead H.S. Paul Jobs repaired cars at home, accompanied by the inventions exhibited to the children by the Hewlett-Packard (HP) group, caused Steve a great interest in the electronic aspect, added to the taste for creating things from his own imagination and means.

“Sometimes when you do not have time, you have to borrow it.” Steve Jobs

He constantly occupied his time in his studies and attended lectures by the Hewlett-Packard group. One day, in the midst of a conference, Steve impressed the company’s president William Hewlett, who offered him to work for them as a part-time employee on summer vacation. About this time in the company, he would meet Steve Wozniak, a person with his same interests and with whom he would develop a good friendship. Due to the high costs of education at Reed College in Portland, after six months enrolled he dropped out in 1972. However, he still attended classes as a listener.

After scarcely surviving doing work from which he obtained little profit, in 1974 he returned to California. His intention with this return was to start from that city a trip to India to start a spiritual encounter with himself and seek enlightenment. In 1976, back in California, Steve got involved in the idea of ​​Wozniak about creating themselves a computer, goal that they reached the following year after much work in the garage of Steve, calling the project Apple I.

Finally, he would take care of making the invention known, interesting potential investors to finance their invention. Scott McNealy, manager and engineer in the process of retiring from Intel by then, was the one who would collaborate on the Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak project.

For the year of 1977, Wozniak and Jobs manufacture the model Apple II, which is exhibited in an event known as West Coast Computer Fair. This fact catapulted the interest of the invention and positioned the company Apple Inc. Creation of both young people in a point of high commercial interest, achieving something that was considered improbable: to have a very successful company at a young age. After the success that brought the Apple II, the next step would be the creation of a computer accessible to people who did not have computer skills. At the beginning of 1983, this new project named Lisa was born. Unfortunately, its high cost in the market did not allow it to be accessible to all people, with IBM products preferred. This would be the first failure committed by the company.

For the next year, Steve Jobs would not give up and try to put the idea back into play with a different model: the Apple Macintosh. This model was more economical and included a mouse. However, it did not meet market expectations. After this new defeat, he left his own company in the year of 1985. The following year he would buy the shares of a computerized animation studio that would later be known as Pixar. Under the direction of Jobs, several contracts were made for the production of films for the company Walt Disney.

“Your time is limited, so do not waste it living someone else’s life. Do not get caught up in the dogma, that is to live like others think you should live. Do not let the noises of others’ opinions silence your own inner voice. And, most importantly, have the courage to do what your heart and your intuition tell you. They already know in some way what you really want to become. Everything else is secondary.” Steve Jobs

At the same time, Jobs was dedicated to the creation of a new computer company and a new computer model, both would be known as NeXT. The new proposed model was barely noticed in the market, did not receive red numbers but either favorable sales. In 1996, Apple would acquire the rights to the software of this computer, at the same time that its founder would return to the company. This re-entry of Jobs served to further increase the reach of Apple, signing contracts with Microsoft and Intel.

On August 24, 2011, resigned again, but this time definitively, because of the serious health problems that he was suffering prevent him from working properly. Since 2003, he had been diagnosed with cancer in the pancreas, the following year he would stay in treatment. However, his condition continued to get worse since then.

Finally, his body could not take it anymore, dying on October 5, 2011, in his own home. After an exclusive funeral, his body was deposited in the Alta Mesa Cemetery Memorial Park in the city of Palo Alto.

steve paul jobs biography

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Luciano Benetton

Luciano Benetton Biography

Luciano Benetton Biography

Luciano Benetton (May 13, 1935) Born in Ponzano, Treviso, Italy. An Italian businessman and fashion designer, co-founder of the Benetton Group company, one of the most popular and important fashion companies in the world. After working for several years as a clerk in a clothing store, Benetton ventured as an entrepreneur selling the garments her sister made. When he won recognition, he created with his brothers the firm Fratelli Benetton (1965), with which he expanded and ventured into various commercial sectors linked to the world of fashion, such as perfumery. Under his command, the company became famous in the nineties for the publication of a series of controversial advertisements directed by Oliviero Toscani. He entered politics in the 1990s and left the company in charge of his son in 2012.

FAMILY AND BEGINNINGS

Born in an Italian province with an extensive textile tradition, Benetton had as a father a small businessman who died of malaria in 1945, having emigrated to Africa to work as a truck driver. Benetton, who at that time was only nine years old, left school to work and be able to support his mother and three sisters. He got a job as a clerk in a fabric and clothing store, where he stayed for several years. In 1955, a young twenty-year-old Benetton proposed to his sister, who at the time worked weaving clothes for a workshop, who worked together and created their own business, she would cook and sell her work in various stores.

With little money the two of them started their project and understanding that they had to sacrifice their comfort to grow, they sold some of their personal items, such as a bicycle, a guitar and other objects of little value, with which they collected the money to buy their first machine to knit. At that time, his sister Giuliana spent more than 18 hours in front of the machine, creating her first jerseys, which Luciano initially sold at the store she worked on and shortly thereafter began promoting them in other stores, gradually winning a clientele faithful. Determined to grow the business, Benetton created his own sample and presented it to various merchants in the town, in a short time getting his first large order, which consisted of 700 garments.

As the demand progressively increased, the brothers began to expand and hire more artisan employees, making themselves known in the region for their work and quality. Thanks to their hard work and the recompense they had, they founded in 1965 the commercial firm Fratelli Benetton, together with their brothers Gilberto and Carlo. The four brothers continued to work and publicize the brand, which in a short time became one of the best-known clothing companies in the country. By the end of the 1960s, the company opened its first headquarters abroad, establishing a store in Paris.

LUCIANO BENETTON’S PATH

After creating his signature Fratelli Benetton with his three brothers (Giuliana, Gilberto, and Carlo), Benetton took command of the company in 1974, at which time the company was known nationally and internationally. By the mid-1970s, the Benetton group was a multinational that had nine factories, five in its country and four abroad (Scotland, Spain, the United States, and France). Over the years the company continued to grow and to reach more than 1,300 stores abroad by the end of the 1980s. In addition to stores in the United States, Spain, France, and Scotland, they had stores in Bucharest (Romania), Prague (Czech Republic) and Budapest (Hungary). Each year the group sold more than seventy million garments and earned more than 152,000 million pesetas, trading on the stock exchanges in Frankfurt, Tokyo and New York (Wall Street). These gains made him one of the most prominent textile sector entrepreneurs of the time, along with great personalities such as Amancio Ortega and Isak Andic.

Understanding that the business needed to diversify to continue growing, Benetton launched a bathroom line, created a perfume manufactured by Hermés and designed a financial holding company called Edizione, which diversified in infrastructure, beverages, food, real estate, and agriculture. In a short time Edizione bought Nordica, a renowned sporting goods and clothing company for it, with which it was not only established as one of the most relevant companies in Italy, but also as one of the most complete fashion companies in the world (casual clothes, sports clothes and work clothes, etc).

The company’s success was affected in the 1990s, with the publication of a series of controversial commercials directed by photographer Oliviero Toscani. In the ads you could see a newborn baby covered in blood, a nun kissing a priest and a family accompanying a dying young man with AIDS. Although the campaign was designed to make the viewer reflect on the importance of the other, human rights and miscegenation, the message was lost and the viewers were scandalized, criticizing the firm for the proposal. Criticism continued when Benetton appeared naked covering her private parts in a newspaper to announce the Clothing Redistribution Project campaign , a charitable operation that sought to collect used clothing and send it to the Third World.

Although he was harshly criticized for his campaigns and eccentricity, Benetton entered politics in 1992. He obtained a seat in the Senate as a member of the Italian Republican Party, however, his passage through it was overshadowed by the emergence of the investigation against him for the bankruptcy of Fiorucci. Leaving politics and focused on business, Benetton secured a large number of properties in Argentina, becoming one of the most important landowners in the country. By the end of the 1990s, the company had expanded, earning more than 300,000 million pesetas a year. In the new millennium, he included in his business his sons Alessandro and Rocco, who were in charge of the company at his departure in 2012 . The story of this renowned designer and businessman was collected in the Benetton autobiography, the color of success (1991).

Louis Vuitton

Louis Vuitton Biography

Louis Vuitton Biography

Louis Vuitton (August 4, 1821 – February 25, 1892) businessman and fashion designer. Founder of the leather goods brand Louis Vuitton. He was born in Anchay, France. His parents were Xavier Vuitton, a farmer, and his mother Coronne Vuitton, a woman who dedicated herself to making hats. At the age of 16, Louis gets a job as a trunk manufacturer, an occupation that allowed him to move to Paris.

In 1854, he opened a shop in Paris at number 4 on the rue Neuve-des-Capucines that would become one of the reference brands at the end of the 20th century. Subsequently, he served as luggage provider for Empress Eugenie de Montijo, wife of Napoleon III. His biggest goal in his life project was to create a leather bag workshop, he was passionate about the design of these items. So, with his savings, he opened the Atelier in 1859, a workshop of handmade leather bags and suitcases. This place was very symbolic and special for him because his child grew up there: Georges Vuitton, his mother was Clemence-Emilie Parriaux.

His workshop was very successful and popular because of the exclusivity of the designs and the quality of the materials used in his work, Vuitton became a benchmark for luxury leather goods. In 1885, he opened a store in London. At the time, he developed the Tumbler lock that made travel trunks much safer. In 1867, he won the bronze medal at the Universal Exhibition in Paris. Empress Eugenia de Montijo remained her best client, her support would be crucial for her commercial development.

Louis Vuitton died on February 5, 1892, while in Asnières-Sur-Seine, France. His son followed in his footsteps but did not continue with the company, which did not end because it was commanded by other people. Its success was such that decades later the company had 225 workers. In 1896, Louis Vuitton company designed the monogram canvas with which it differs from other brands. Georges patented the Louis Vuitton lock, a revolutionary and very effective system that could not be opened even by the great American illusionist Harry Houdini.

Peter Drucker

Peter Drucker biography

Peter Drucker biography

Peter Drucker (November 19, 1909 – November 11, 2005) writer, consultant, entrepreneur, and journalist. He was born in Vienna, Austria. He is considered the father of the Management to which he devoted more than 60 years of his professional life. His parents of Jewish origin and then converted to Christianity moved to a small town called Kaasgrabeen. Drucker grew up in an environment in which new ideas and social positions created by intellectuals, senior government officials and scientists were emerging. He studied at the Döbling Gymnasium and in 1927, Drucker moved to the German city of Hamburg, where he worked as an apprentice in a cotton company.

Then he began to train in the world of journalism, writing for the Der Österreichische Volkswirt. Then he got a job in Frankfurt, his job was to write for the Daily Frankfurter General-Anzeiger. Meanwhile, he completed a doctorate in International Law. Drucker began to integrate his two facets and for that, he was a recognized journalist. Drucker worked in this place until the fall of the Weimar Republic. After this period he decided to move to London, where he worked in a bank and was also a student of John Maynard Keynes .

Although he was a disciple of Keynes, he assured, decades later, that Keynesianism failed as an economic thesis where it was applied. Because of the ravages of Nazism and persecution of Jews, he emigrated to the United States, where he served as a professor at Sarah Lawrence College in New York, from 1939 to 1949 and simultaneously was a writer. His first job as a consultant was in 1940. He then returned to teaching at Bennington College in Vermont. Thanks to his popularity he received a position to teach in the faculty of Business Administration of the University of New York.

He was an active contributor for a long period of time to magazines such as The Atlantic Monthly and was a columnist for The Wall Street Journal. The quality and recognition of his writings assured him important contracts both as a writer and as a consultant with large companies, government agencies, and non-profit organizations in the United States, Europe, Latin America, and Asia. Quickly and surprisingly his fortune grew. Drucker served as honorary president of the Peter F. Drucker Foundation for Nonprofit Management.

In 1971, he obtained the Clarke Chair of Social Sciences and Administration at the Graduate School of Management at the University of Claremont. Now, at present Drucker is considered the most successful of the exponents in matters of administration, his ideas and terminologies have influenced the corporate world since the 40s. Drucker was the first social scientist to use the expression “post-modernity” something that caught the attention of this man is that he does not like receiving compliments. He was simple, visionary, satirical and vital.

Within his studies, he says that his greatest interest is people. His work as a consultant began in the General Motors Multinational Companies, from that moment begins to raise the theory of Management, Management trends, the knowledge society. Thanks to this theory he has published several books, these are consulted often and are fundamental for the career of business administrator. In his works, he deals with the scientific, human, economic, historical, artistic and philosophical stage.

He was founder and director of a business school that bears his name. For Drucker, it was beneficial that many of his ideas have been reformed because of the innovative way of thinking and analyzing business issues. Although approaches such as the knowledge society are the basis of the current company and the future is still maintained. He has published more than thirty books, which include studies of Management, studies of socio-economic policies and essays. Some are Best Sellers. The first book was The end of economic man (1939), The future of industrial man (1942), The concept of Corporation (1946). Later he published The Effective Executive (1985). He focused on personal effectiveness and changes in the direction of the 21st century. In 2002 the society of the future was published.

His first book caused much controversy because he talked about the reasons why fascism initiated and analyzed the failures of established institutions. He urged the need for a new social and economic order. Although he had finished the book in 1933, he had to wait because no editor wanted to accept such horrible visions. Now, Drucker has dealt with such controversial issues as individual freedom, industrial society, big business, the power of managers, automation, monopoly, and totalitarianism.

We must indicate that his analysis of the Administration, is a valuable guide for the leaders of companies that need to study their own performance, diagnose its failures and improve its productivity, as well as that of your company. Several companies have taken their approaches and put them into practice, such as Sears Roebuck & Co., General Motors, Ford, IBM, Chrysler, and American Telephone & Telegraph.

The consultant assured that there are some differences between the figure of the manager and that of the leader. For him, true leaders recognize their shortcomings as mortal beings, but they systematically concentrate on the essentials and work tirelessly to acquire the decisive competences of management. Actually, the contributions of this character in the world of administration and in the economic and social world have been significant. Drucker died on November 11, 2005, leaving a great legacy.

Paul Allen biography

Paul Allen biography

Paul Gardner Allen (January 21, 1953) entrepreneur, business magnate, investor, and philanthropist. He was born in Seattle, Washington, United States. Allen attended Lakeside School, a private school located in Seattle, and became friends with Bill Gates , who was three years younger and shared a common enthusiasm for computers. His parents encouraged him from childhood to be curious and very dedicated to studying. At the age of 14, he became interested in computer science, scrutinizing computers internally and externally.

When the school was over, Allen went to the Washington State University, although when he had been studying for two years he decided to leave the school with his friend Bill Gates, who was studying at the prestigious Harvard University. Both felt that it was more useful to begin to devise commercial software for the new personal computers. At first, the brand was called Micro-Soft and was installed in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The first sale was in 1975, and they started selling a BASIC language interpreter. Allen had an impressive business spirit so he was instrumental in achieving a project that aimed to acquire an operating system called MS-DOS for $ 50,000.

Gates and Allen managed to supply the operating system for the new IBM PCs. As of this moment, the company suffered constant and ascending progress. Maybe young people would not imagine the scope that Microsoft could have. But after several years of work, effort, and progress Allen had to separate from Gates and leave the company because of a serious illness, Hodgkin’s disease, which did not allow him to perform his duties. Allen had to undergo several months of radiotherapy treatment and a bone marrow SDF transplant.

Once recovered, he returned to Microsoft in 1990, but at that time the fate of Bill was already cast: he was the richest person in the world. Although Bill never turned his back on him and placed him in an important management position. He started working on an idea that a few months later became a reality, this is Vulcan Ventures Inc. in Washington: a venture capital fund specialized in cable and broadband services. With this idea Allen has participated in more than 140 companies, the most prominent are Priceline, Dreamworks, GoNet, Oxygen, and Metricom.

The money he earns he invests it in a variety of issues, and one of them is in the Portland Trail Blazers basketball team. As a fan of this sport, he decided to invest more than 70 million dollars for that team in 1988. A short time ago, he invested 200 million dollars for the Seattle Seahawks. In short, he is one of the minority owners of the Major League Soccer team, and of the Seattle Sounders FC. One of his passions is music, specifically Rock and Roll. He also spends many hours playing the guitar in his professional recording studio installed in his house.

Allen has not only invested in sports and personal passions, but he has also funded the Museum Experience Music Project and the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in Seattle. He has done this because of his interest in extraterrestrial life. Like every philanthropist, he has founded several charitable organizations. Allen’s contribution to Microsoft gave him great momentum and it was very significant, he decided to retire in the year 2000. After this Bill Gates published in the official account a moving statement, where he acknowledged the contribution of Allen to the success of the company.

This made him a great strategic advisor. That year, he sold 68 million shares, but still owns 138 million, which makes up the bulk of his wealth. This is proven in the investments he has in more than 50 technology and entertainment companies. For example, Experience Music Project, Entertainment Properties Inc., Charitable Foundations, Vulcan Ventures Inc., First & Goal Inc., and Clear Blue Sky Productions are just some of them. He made a significant investment in young and promising companies in the Internet sector such as Priceline, Click2learn, and Netperceptions.

Unfortunately, he did not manage to invest in one of the most successful and profitable companies in the Internet sector and with a promising future: eBay.com. It is not a secret that Allen puts the eye and the signature, where the best opportunities reside. The experience and success of Allen in recent years, prove him as one of the best investors worldwide. Allen’s investment strategy focuses on companies with future technology. Allen says that the next boom will be in the interactive sector. Paul Allen appears on the Forbes list of the richest people in the world, in 2009 the first was his friend and fellow, Bill Gates , while Allen has something less than 17,500 million dollars.

Nik Powell biography

Nik Powell biography

Nik Powell (November 4, 1950) businessman and co-founder of the Virgin Group. He was born in Great Kingshill, Buckinghamshire, England.  Powell studied at the Longacre School and then left school because his family moved to Little Malvern. Then, he entered a small Catholic high school called St. Richard’s. He always showed a great ability for mathematical questions and for writing. Then he attended high school at Ampleforth College a high school located in North Yorkshire. Upon graduation, he entered the University of Sussex. But a year later he retired and began operating a mail order company, a small record store, and a recording studio.

The intentions to grow were increased, so the partners established Virgin Records in 1972. Little by little, the record began to bear fruit until years later it was recognized as one of the main record labels in the United Kingdom. In the year 1992, it was sold to EMI. During this time, Powell and Stephen Woolley came together to start the project that had as its object the foundation of a production company called Palace Productions. She was responsible for the production of The Company of Wolves (1984), Mona Lisa (1986) and The Crying Game (1992). But, although they achieved great things, the company collapsed in 1992 due to a series of inconclusive contracts and debts.

Without leaving his dreams behind, Powell began working in the film industry this time with Scala Productions, responsible for the production of Fever Pitch, Twenty Four Seven, Last Orders, B. Monkey and Ladies in Lavender. Since then he has been the president of this company. Simultaneously accepted the position of director of the National School of Film and Television in 2003. This decision was very controversial and caused great controversy because there were many people from academia who claimed that Powell was not prepared for the position. For a few years, he received the support of his wife Merrill Tomassi, from whom he divorced.

Later he married the singer Sandie Shaw, Powell was very important in the relaunching of her artistic career. They had two children, Amie and Jack, and they divorced in the 1990s. The distinguished career in the media industry, first in music as a co-founder of Virgin Records and later as a producer of several award-winning films allowed Nik to handle with excellence the School and be welcomed and respected by his students, the above has also gained more popularity to the institution.

Nik has not left his close ties with the leaders of the music and film industry, and also served as a trustee of BAFTA, where he chaired the Film Committee. While chairing the NFTS, Nik has been responsible for a remarkable transformation of the School that has grown in infrastructure and in importance and quality. It has been recognized as one of the best film schools in the world and now he can welcome more students because its academic offer is wider: masters, diploma, certificates and short courses in the film, television and games industries.

In recent years, the school received its accreditation from the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE). Being then an accredited institution of higher education. A few years ago the NFTS was equipped with two buildings and a new digital television studio 4K. The president of the School has extended and made public his thanks to the work of Powell, and to the great achievements that the students of this school have made. They have been winners of several awards, such as four Oscar nominations, seven BAFTA and 10 Cilect Global Student Film awards.

Many NFTS graduate students are working in the best film, television, and gaming industries in the United Kingdom. But, after 14 years under the direction of the school, Powell decided to retire from this position in June 2017. Although he resigned from his position, he affirmed that he will continue supporting everything he can to his beloved institution. Powell appeared on the Queen’s 2018 New Year’s Honors list. Powell received an OBE. His partner Richard Branson has also recognized his work and admires his work. He also works with novelist and screenwriter Deborah Moggach.

After his retirement he realized, against all odds, that if he could get ahead in the role of academic director of such a prestigious institution, he could also found Virgin, enter the world of cinema, among other things. During his time as director, he took great pains to expand scholarships for students who do not have the economic capacity, and also encouraged the entry of women into the institution. And finally, he was very efficient with financing from large film industries. Powell is an inspiring man and was an important figure for the NFTS.

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'Steve Jobs' biography: A wealth of detail

Walter Isaacson's biography of the Apple leader has been released. Here's a look at what's in the book.

steve paul jobs biography

  • Shankland covered the tech industry for more than 25 years and was a science writer for five years before that. He has deep expertise in microprocessors, digital photography, computer hardware and software, internet standards, web technology, and more.

The cover of "Steve Jobs," by Walter Isaacson.

Walter Isaacson's biography, "Steve Jobs," has arrived. It's a good read, and CNET News is teasing out tidbits from the 656-page book .

Jobs died earlier this month at age 56 after a fight with pancreatic cancer. The book arrives when interest in Jobs and Apple--the company Jobs co-founded and led--is perhaps at an all-time high.

Isaacson's book brings forth an ocean of anecdotes about Jobs. Below is a look at a handful of them.

Disclosure: "Steve Jobs" is published by Simon & Schuster, which like CNET is owned by CBS .

Childhood The book begins as biographies sensibly often begin: with ancestry. Jobs had two sets of parents, biological and adoptive. The latter were Paul Reinhold Jobs, a repo man who repaired cars after serving in the Coast Guard during World War II, and Clara Hagopian, a daughter of Armenian immigrants and who couldn't have children after an ectopic pregnancy. Paul and Clara "were my parents 1,000 percent," Jobs told Isaacson. His biological parents "were my sperm and egg bank. That's not harsh, it's just the way it was, a sperm bank thing, nothing more."

Though some suggest being put up for adoption by his biological parents was a seminal part of his personality--his desire to control, his ability to be cruel--Jobs agreed only with the notion that it helped make him independent. When a girl suggested to a six- or seven-year-old Jobs that being adopted meant he'd been abandoned, "lightning bolts went off in my head," he said, and he talked to his parents about it. "They were very serious and looked me straight in the eye. They said, 'We specifically picked you out,'" Jobs told Isaacson.

Paul Jobs "knew how to build anything" and marked off a section of his workbench for his son. One lesson, from building the fence around their Mountain View, Calif., home: finish the backs of cabinets and fences well even though they're hidden. Ever look inside a Mac Pro?

He grew up steeped in the Silicon Valley milieu, with "mysterious and high-tech" defense companies, and an engineer from Hewlett-Packard bringing him electronics "stuff to play with." One such object, a carbon microphone, led Jobs to the realization that "I was smarter than my parents." They accommodated him with ever-better schools, but it was a rough start for the boy: The schools "came close to really beating any curiosity out of me," he said. He played pranks and got sent home.

His savior was Imogene "Teddy" Hill, his fourth-grade teacher, who bribed him with a giant lollipop into doing challenging work. The bribes became unnecessary, though: "I just wanted to learn and to please her...if it hadn't been for her I'm sure I would have gone to jail."

His Lutheran upbringing ended at age 13 when he saw starving children on the cover of Life magazine and his pastor didn't have a satisfactory explanation about how God could know about it. "The juice goes out of Christianity when it becomes too based on faith rather than on living like Jesus or seeing the world as Jesus saw it," Jobs told Isaacson. He eventually took up Zen Buddhism, but reflected: "I think different religions are different doors to the same house. Sometimes I think the house exists, and sometimes I don't. It's the great mystery."

In the ninth grade, he took up with counterculture kids interested in electronics and LSD, with pot smoking beginning at age 15 and LSD by his senior year. At the same time, he took up Heathkit electronics projects and landed an assembly-line job at Hewlett-Packard after calling Bill Hewlett at his Palo Alto home phone number. He got along better with the engineers upstairs, though, and got early schooling in business by buying and reselling used electronics. At the end of high school, he discovered literature and music, too.

Apple seeds Steve Wozniak, who built a 100-transistor calculator in eighth grade but didn't find school a good match for his engineering talent, met the future Apple co-founder when Jobs was in high school but Wozniak was in college. The two bonded over pranks, electronics, and Bob Dylan bootleg recordings. When in 1971 "Woz" discovered Ron Rosenbaum's "Secrets of the Little Blue Box," which described how hackers figured out how to make long-distance calls for free by using audio tones to control AT&T network, the two snuck into the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center library through an unlocked door on a Sunday to find the necessary electronics frequencies.

Their first version, built by midnight that same day with the analog recipe, couldn't produce stable enough tones, but a later digital version did work. Jobs decided to start selling the Blue Boxes, going through about 100 of them at $150 apiece before calling it quits when somebody robbed them of one at gunpoint.

It was enough to get the bigger ball rolling, though. "If it hadn't been for the Blue Boxes, there wouldn't have been an Apple," Jobs said. The pattern worked well: Woz led the engineering, and Jobs led the user design, marketing, and money-making.

In 1972, Jobs started going to Reed College in Portland, Ore., where he discovered Zen Buddhism and vegetarianism. He was bored, and found Reed more to his liking after dropping out and auditing courses instead. And LSD remained a part of his life. He told Isaacson: "Taking LSD was a profound experience, one of the most important things in my life. LSD shows you that there's another side to the coin, and you can't remember it when it wears off, but you know it. It reinforced my sense of what was important--creating great things instead of making money, putting things back into the stream of history and of human consciousness as much as I could."

In 1974, he returned to his parents' house and found work at video game maker Atari, drawn by an ad that said, "Have fun, make money." He arrived in the lobby, demanded a job, and chief engineer Al Alcorn hired him. Jobs was wrongly convinced his diet would eliminate body odor, so Alcorn put Jobs on a night shift so he didn't have to deal with complaining coworkers.

After a dysentery-afflicted interlude in India, Jobs returned to Atari, where founder Nolan Bushnell did a little meta-engineering: he gave Jobs the challenge of creating a game that he suspected would bring Woz into the picture. Woz, who often hung around the Atari offices although working at HP, rose to the challenge. Woz designed the system while Jobs built the electronics, and the design was done in four days. They split the pay, but Jobs kept all of the bonus Bushnell paid for a design that used fewer than 50 microchips.

Apple sprouts Skipping ahead past the founding of Apple itself, here's a look at the Apple II.

The Apple II towed the company into the big time. Its polished exterior required a lot more money to build, so newly incorporated Apple got a $250,000 line of credit and Woz, after much persuading, left HP. Guaranteeing the money and joining the company was business-savvy Mike Markkula, who'd grown wealthy off Intel and Fairchild Semiconductor stock. He wrote a short piece, "The Apple Marketing Philosophy," which laid out a course that remains at Apple to this day: "We will truly understand their needs better than any other company...In order to do a good job of those things that we decide to do, we must eliminate all of the unimportant opportunities...People DO judge a book by its cover...We may have the best product, the highest quality, the most useful software etc.; if we present them in a slipshod manner, they will be perceived as slipshod; if we present them in a creative, professional manner, we will impute the desired qualities."

The Apple II tested the wills of Woz and Jobs. Jobs wanted a sealed box, but Woz threatened to quit unless it could be expanded with new circuit boards. Woz won--that time. But future Apple products generally took Jobs' route, becoming ever more self-contained. (The newer crop of MacBook Pros, following the course of iPods and iPhones, don't have replaceable batteries.)

The Apple II launch, at the West Coast Computer Faire, also foreshadowed a Jobs to come. He paid extra for prime real estate, obsessed over the appearance of the only three Apple II models that were completed, and took Markkula's advice to clean up and dress in a suit. It worked: Apple sold 300 of the metal-cased, beige systems.

Also prologue to Jobs' future was a will that was strong. Isaacson recounts the views of Mike Scott, Apple's first president, who told Jobs to bathe more often. Scott told Isaacson: "My very first walk [where Steve held important discussions] was to tell him to bathe more often...He said that in exchange I had to read his fruitarian diet book and consider it as a way to lose weight...Steve was adamant that he bathed once a week, and that was adequate as long as he was eating a fruitarian diet."

They clashed over Jobs' perfectionism, too. Pantone had 2,000 shades of beige, but "none of them were good enough for Steve," Scott told Isaacson. The early Apple was a place with plenty of conflict, but it sold 16 million Apple II systems and played a key role in launching the computing industry.

Big money Jobs was at heart a calculating businessman. One anecdote from the book reveals just how much.

Daniel Kottke, who'd been Jobs' friend through college and India, joined Apple when it was still in Jobs' parents' garage. He worked as an hourly employee and wasn't eligible for stock options when Apple went public in 1980. Jobs wouldn't talk to Kottke about it, though. When Kottke finally brought it up in Jobs' office, Jobs was "cold," Isaacson recounts about the incident. He quotes Kottke: "I just got choked up and began to cry and just couldn't talk to him...Our friendship was all gone. It was so sad."

This was when Jobs was 25 years old.

His own wealth--$256 million from the initial public offering--made Jobs comfortable, but he pledged not to let it control his life. In the book, he said, "I made a promise to myself that I'm not going to let this money ruin my life."

Birth of the Mac Jobs had extracted the famous graphical user interface technology from Xerox PARC--the Palo Alto Research Center--for 100,000 shares of Apple stock at $10 apiece before its IPO, a tidy investment. The technology started making its way into Apple's Lisa project. But Jobs was ejected from the Lisa project in September 1980 after management clashes and was stripped of his title, vice president for research and development.

Ultimately, it was fortuitous, because he ended up taking control of the Macintosh project, which proved much more influential and successful even though it began as a company sidelight. "It was like going back to the garage for me. I had my own ragtag team and I was in control," Jobs told Isaacson.

Macintosh was the embodiment of the vision of Jef Raskin, who wanted to build a computer for the masses. But he and Jobs fought, and Jobs won out. "Steve started acting on what he thought we should do, Jef started brooding, and it instantly was clear what the outcome would be," Mac team member Joanna Hoffman told Isaacson.

Raskin left, and Apple II engineer Andy Hertzfeld, took his place. He passed Jobs' scrutiny, but Hertzfelt said he needed to wrap up an Apple II project first and Jobs intervened forcefully, according to the book: "What's more important than working on the Macintosh? You're just wasting your time with that...Who cares about the Apple II? The Apple II will be dead in a few years. The Macintosh is the future of Apple, and you're going to start on it now!" And he unplugged Hertzfelt's Apple II, wiping out the code he had been working on.

One Mac programmer welcomed Hertzfeld by warning him about what he called Jobs' "reality distortion field": "In his presence, reality is malleable. He can convince anyone of practically anything. It wears off when he's not around, but it makes it hard to have realistic schedules."

The term came to define Jobs.

Of it, Hertzfelt said: "The reality distortion field was a confounding melange of a charismatic rhetorical style, indomitable will, and eagerness to bend any fact to fit the purpose at hand...Amazingly, the reality distortion field seemed to be effective even if you were acutely aware of it. We would often discuss potential techniques for grounding it, but after a while most of us gave up, accepting it as a force of nature."

Aiding the field was Jobs' exquisite sensitivity to the emotions and beliefs of whoever he was talking to. "It's a common trait in people who are charismatic and know how to manipulate people. Knowing that he can crush you makes you feel weakened and eager for his approval, so then he can elevate you and put you on a pedestal and own you," Hoffman said.

One example of his motivational skills came with engineer Larry Kenyon, who was working on the Mac's operating system software. Jobs wanted the computer to boot faster. "If it could save a person's life, would you find a way to shave ten seconds off the boot time?" Isaacson said he asked Kenyon, who said he probably could. Jobs then did the math: 5 million Mac users spending 10 extra seconds a day each to boot their Macs meant something like 3 million hours per year saved--more than 100 lifetimes. Kenyon peeled 28 seconds off the boot time.

During this period, Jobs cajoled the team with aphorisms: "Don't compromise." "The journey is the reward." "It's better to be a pirate than to join the navy." And famously brushing aside the idea of market research, "Customers don't know what they want until we've shown them." In 1983 when the Lisa beat the Mac to store shelves, Jobs told the Mac team that success meant bringing their product to market: "Real artists ship."

When the Mac did ship, though, the chief executive that Jobs had recruited to run Apple, John Sculley from PepsiCo, raised the price from the planned $1,995 to $2,495. Jobs disagreed yet went along with it. But he saw the decision as a fatal mistake: "It's the main reason the Macintosh sales slowed and Microsoft got to dominate the market," he said.

Steve Jobs vs. Bill Gates Isaacson spoke to both Jobs and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and got each to comment on his arch-rival. Each had sharp words, but only one of them was at all gracious.

Gates on Jobs: "He really never knew much about technology, but he had an amazing instinct for what works."

Jobs on Gates: "Bill is basically unimaginative and has never invented anything, which is why I think he's more comfortable now in philanthropy than technology...He just shamelessly ripped off other people's ideas."

Microsoft and Apple worked together several times, but rarely without friction. One example: when Gates was visiting Apple, privately showing Windows to Jobs, Gates recounted the meeting thus: "Steve didn't know what to say...He could either say, 'Oh, this is a violation of something,' but he didn't. He chose to say, 'Oh, it's actually really a piece of shit.'" Gates responded, "Yes, it's a nice little piece of shit," and though Windows 1.0 was a dud, Windows has long prevailed in the personal computer market.

The debate lives on. Jobs told Isaacson: "They just ripped us off completely, because Gates has no shame," to which Gates responded, "If he believes that, he really has entered into one of his own reality distortion fields."

The interlude After Mac sales sputtered, the mutual admiration of Sculley and Jobs turned sour, and eventually Jobs was squeezed out of operational responsibilities to become a chairman without a real job. He started working on what would become NeXT, luring five Apple employees in a move that led to even worse relations with Apple. Jobs resigned from the company he'd founded.

NeXT, though, had trouble, in part because of its exacting and impractical hardware specifications and in part because Gates badmouthed the system. One interesting moment in the book describes Jobs' licensing its Unix-based operating system to IBM and engaging in discussions with PC giants Dell and Compaq to do the same--but Jobs stopped short, the IBM relationship fizzled, and the world lost a potential Windows rival.

Jobs also took over Lucasfilm's Pixar unit, initially a combination of hardware, software, and animation. What succeeded, of course, was the animation work. Through Pixar, Jobs dealt with Intel's CEO at the time, Andy Grove, who'd asked Pixar for suggestions on improving how Intel chips could deal with 3D graphics. Jobs said that Pixar would have to be paid, Intel refused to pay, Jobs appealed to Grove, and Grove told him that's "what friendly companies and friends do for each other," Isaacson said.

After that, Jobs showed humility: "I have many faults, but one of them is not ingratitude...Therefore, I have changed my position 180 degrees--we will freely help. Thanks for the clearer perspective."

As Isaacson presents it, Jobs wouldn't have messed with the hardware and software of Pixar if he'd known how well the animation proved to turn out, but then again, he wouldn't have touched Pixar if it hadn't had the hardware and software. "Life kind of snookered me into doing that, and perhaps it was for the better," he concluded.

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison saw "Toy Story" in the making many times. "I can't tell you the number of versions of Toy Story I saw before it came out," Ellison told Isaacson said. "It eventually became a form of torture. I'd go over there and see the latest 10 percent improvement. Steve is obsessed with getting it right--both the story and the technology--and isn't satisfied with anything less than perfection."

Difficulties paying for Pixar and "Toy Story" paid off with the company's IPO, during which the stock popped over the $22 per share asking price to close that day at $39. Jobs' 80 percent stake, for which he'd paid $50 million, became worth $1.2 billion.

In hammering out Pixar's deal with Disney, though, then-CEO Michael Eisner and Jobs played a game of brinksmanship. Jobs threatened to take future movies to a rival studio, but Eisner threatened to make "Toy Story" sequels.

"Eisner was reasonable and fair to me then," Jobs told Isaacson, "But eventually, over the course of a decade, I came to the conclusion that he was a dark man."

Ultimately, NeXT, too, paid off, even though its products flopped. Apple, adrift, bought the company for $400 million, talking Jobs down without too much trouble from his opening offer of $500 million. Jobs, conflicted over what role he should play, became merely "advisor to the chairman."

The comeback Bringing Apple back from the brink--including through a massive investment from Microsoft--was tough. Jobs also did in the clones such as Power Computing that had licensed the Mac OS.

"It was the dumbest thing in the world to let companies making crappier hardware use our operating system and cut into our sales," Jobs said.

And he drastically cut back the Mac product line by 70 percent and laying off staff. He laid out a clear direction at one strategy meeting, writing down two columns--consumer and pro--and two rows--desktop and portable. The company's job was to make only four products, one for each quadrant, he argued.

One casualty was the ill-fated Apple Newton handheld organizer. Isaacson quoted Jobs view: If "Apple had been in a less precarious situation, I would have drilled down myself to figure out how to make it work. I didn't trust the people running it. My gut was that there was some really good technology, but it was fucked up by mismanagement. By shutting it down, I freed up some good engineers who could work on new mobile devices. And eventually we got it right when we moved on to iPhones and the iPad."

The successes, though, helped boost Apple, perhaps most notably with the iMac, which brought new customers into the Apple fold. Behind the scenes, there was also a development process that integrated everything from design to manufacturing, new executives, and a better supply chain. And he tried to keep the "bozo explosion" from plaguing Apple with mediocre employees, as Isaacson recounts:

"For most things in life, the range between best and average is 30% or so. The best airplane flight, the best meal, they may be 30% better than your average one. What I saw with Woz was somebody who was fifty times better than the average engineer. He could have meetings in his head. The Mac team was an attempt to build a whole team like that, A players. People said they wouldn't get along, they'd hate working with each other. But I realized that A players like to work with A players, they just didn't like working with C players. At Pixar, it was a whole company of A players. When I got back to Apple, that's what I decided to try to do. You need to have a collaborative hiring process. When we hire someone, even if they're going to be in marketing, I will have them talk to the design folks and the engineers. My role model was J. Robert Oppenheimer. I read about the type of people he sought for the atom bomb project. I wasn't nearly as good as he was, but that's what I aspired to do."

The iPod The new hits came in succession. The next was the iPod, the product of Jobs' work to move beyond personal computers.

Here, Jobs banged the "Simplify!" drum over and over, Isaacson reported. Jobs said. "In order to make the iPod really easy to use--and this took a lot of arguing on my part--we needed to limit what the device itself would do. Instead we put that functionality in iTunes on the computer. For example, we made it so you couldn't make playlists using the device. You made playlists on iTunes, and then you synced with the device. That was controversial. But what made the Rio and other devices so brain-dead was that they were complicated. They had to do things like make playlists, because they weren't integrated with the jukebox software on your computer. So by owning the iTunes software and the iPod device, that allowed us to make the computer and the device work together, and it allowed us to put the complexity in the right place."

And Jobs discussed how he decided to market iPods as a way to market Macs: "I had this crazy idea that we could sell just as many Macs by advertising the iPod. In addition, the iPod would position Apple as evoking innovation and youth. So I moved $75 million of advertising money to the iPod, even though the category didn't justify one hundredth of that. That meant that we completely dominated the market for music players. We outspent everybody by a factor of about a hundred."

Ultimately, Jobs concluded he was almost uniquely positioned to fuel the digital-music revolution through the iPod, iTunes, and the iTunes Store.

"I'm one of the few people who understands how producing technology requires intuition and creativity, and how producing something artistic takes real discipline," he told Isaacson.

Jobs balked for months when his deputies called for iTunes to run on Windows, not just Macs. Ultimately, the iPod conquered Microsoft's Zune. In Jobs' assessment: "The Zune was crappy because the people at Microsoft don't really love music or art the way we do. We won because we personally love music. We made the iPod for ourselves, and when you're doing something for yourself, or your best friend or family, you're not going to cheese out."

The Mac moves to Intel Apple hasn't dethroned Windows personal computers by any stretch of the imagination, but Macs continue to make serious inroads. The iMac-on-a-stalk, the Cube, the curvy iBooks, the all-in-one iMacs--all have kept the more staid Windows machine builders scrambling.

The Macs suffered, however, because Motorola's PowerPC processors weren't competitive. Ultimately, in 2005, Apple switched to Intel processors, but Isaacson reveals that the move began in 1997, when Jobs was pushing for speedier laptop chip development in a call with Motorola CEO Chris Galvin. "Jobs offered his opinion that Motorola chips sucked," Isaacson reported.

"We had to find creative ways to bridge the numbers," Intel CEO Paul Otellini said of making the finances work, but Intel assigned a special team to the project, and the Intel-based Macs arrived six months early.

Gates was impressed, Isaacson said: ""If you'd said, 'Okay, we're going to change our microprocessor chip, and we're not going to lose a beat,' that sounds impossible."

iPhone and iPad The iPhone was an Apple's triumph: it leaped past the Mac's position on the periphery of the personal computer market and led Apple to the heart of another industry that's at least as important. Jobs himself loathed the cell phones that were around in the early days of the iPod: "We would sit around talking about how much we hated our phones," he told Isaacson. "They were way too complicated. They had features nobody could figure out, including the address book. It was just Byzantine."

Apple also began developing multitouch tablets at the same time and decided to apply the technology to the iPhone. "They decided to proceed on two paths: P1 was the code name for the phone being developed using an iPod trackwheel, and P2 was the new alternative using a multitouch screen," Isaacson said. P2 was the bigger risk, but engineers had troubles making P1 simple enough, and Jobs opted for P2.

And Jobs was not a passive executive, apparently.

"Jobs spent part of every day for six months helping to refine the display," Isaacson said. "In session after session, with Jobs immersed in every detail, the team members figured out ways to simplify what other phones made complicated."

And Jobs interceded well into the product's design when he concluded the front face of the phone let the case, not the display, steal some of the show. "Guys, you've killed yourselves over this design for the last nine months, but we're going to change it," Isaacson said Jobs told the design team. They stepped up to the challenge, and Jobs said: "It was one of my proudest moments at Apple."

The iPad, too, was a personal project for Jobs. He took the initial criticisms personally, saying he was "depressed" on launch day by a flood of e-mailed complaints. But Apple sold a million in less than a month. "The reason Apple can create products like the iPad is that we've always tried to be at the intersection of technology and liberal arts," Jobs told Isaacson.

Securing content was one project for Jobs. Isaacson recounts negotiation between Jobs and Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes. Bewkes wasn't upset that Apple wanted 30 percent of the subscription rate for a digital version of Time. But the deal hung up over the issue of which company the subscriber was a customer of.

"We have to figure something else out, because I don't want my whole subscription base to become subscribers of yours, for you to then aggregate at the Apple store...And the next thing you'll do, once you have a monopoly, is come back and tell me that my magazine shouldn't be $4 a copy but instead should be $1," Isaacson reported.

New rivals The old days of competing against Microsoft and PC makers changed in the new millennium. One major challenger was erstwhile ally Google, whose CEO, Eric Schmidt, had served on Apple's board.

When Google launched the Android operating system for mobile phones and then tablets, Jobs was livid--as angry as Isaacson had seen him. Apple sued Android handset makers for patent infringement, but Jobs made it clear to Isaacson that Google is the ultimate target: "Our lawsuit is saying, 'Google, you fucking ripped off the iPhone, wholesale ripped us off.' Grand theft. I will spend my last dying breath if I need to, and I will spend every penny of Apple's $40 billion in the bank, to right this wrong. I'm going to destroy Android, because it's a stolen product. I'm willing to go to thermonuclear war on this. They are scared to death, because they know they are guilty. Outside of Search, Google's products--Android, Google Docs--are shit.

A meeting with Schmidt afterward yielded nothing but further acrimony. Jobs told him, "We've got you red-handed. I'm not interested in settling. I don't want your money. If you offer me $5 billion, I won't want it. I've got plenty of money. I want you to stop using our ideas in Android, that's all I want."

And to Isaacson, he complained of Android's multitude of screen sizes and versions. "I like being responsible for the whole user experience. We do it not to make money. We do it because we want to make great products, not crap like Android," Jobs said.

Jobs also tangled with Adobe Systems over its Flash Player software, which he barred from the iPod and iPhone. "Flash is a spaghetti-ball piece of technology that has lousy performance and really bad security problems," he told Isaacson.

Evidently tangled up in the issue was Jobs' feelings toward Adobe. "I helped put Adobe on the map," with the desktop publishing revolution, Jobs said, but Adobe declined to support the Mac with video editing software in 1999. Adobe founder John Warnock retired in that period, and Jobs concluded, "The soul of Adobe disappeared when Warnock left. He was the inventor, the person I related to. It's been a bunch of suits since then, and the company has turned out crap."

Leaving Apple Jobs' health declined with a third battle with cancer.

As he resigned as Apple's CEO in 2011, he effectively bid adieu to the world with Bill Clinton, Bill Gates, and even Google's new CEO, Larry Page. To the latter, Jobs offered this advice: "I described the blocking and tackling he would have to do to keep the company from getting flabby or being larded with B players. The main thing I stressed was focus. Figure out what Google wants to be when it grows up. It's now all over the map. What are the five products you want to focus on? Get rid of the rest, because they're dragging you down. They're turning you into Microsoft. They're causing you to turn out products that are adequate but not great."

The day he told the board he was resigning, Jobs had lunch with two lieutenants, Scott Forstall and Phil Schiller. Isaacson recounts Jobs' first experience with what would become Siri, the voice-controlled assistant for the iPhone 4S: "Jobs grabbed the phone in the middle of the demo," Isaacson said, "and proceeded to see if he could confuse it. 'What's the weather in Palo Alto?' he asked. The app answered. After a few more questions, Jobs challenged it: 'Are you a man or a woman?' Amazingly, the app answered in its robotic voice, 'They did not assign me a gender.'"

That brightened the mood, but it reversed when they discussed how HP had abandoned its bid to carve a niche in the phone and tablet world. Jobs concluded: "Hewlett and Packard built a great company, and they thought they had left it in good hands. But now it's being dismembered and destroyed. It's tragic. I hope I've left a stronger legacy so that will never happen at Apple."

Updates : This article was updated a dozen times over the course of the night with the last update at 4:00 a.m. PT October 24.

Clarification : Jobs was referring to his adoptive parents as "my parents 1,000 percent."

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Paul Jobs Close ones

Paul Jobs was born and raised in Wisconsin, and served in the Coast Guard during World War II. After the war, he settled in San Francisco, and married Clara Hagopian in 1946. The couple adopted baby Steve nine years later. Paul, who never graduated from high school, became a car machinist - he fixed broken cars and sold them for a profit. He taught his son Steve the importance of craftsmanship, and how to get parts for a low price from dealers. That would prove useful in Apple's early years. Steve had the greatest respect for his father and was devastated when he died.

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The many contributions of steve jobs (1955-2011).

The extraordinary career of the entrepreneur is chronicled in the Smithsonian collections

Megan Gambino

Megan Gambino

Senior Editor

Apple founder Steve Jobs in 1977 introduces the new Apple II computer

Steve Jobs died yesterday, at age 56, of pancreatic cancer, just weeks after stepping down from his position as chief executive of Apple Inc. The impact of the tech visionary is indisputable and has been reason enough for the National Museum of American History to collect Apple artifacts throughout the co-founder’s career.

I spoke this morning with David K. Allison, associate director of curatorial affairs at the museum, who has a special research interest in the history of information technology. Though none are currently on display, the museum has the marked Jobs’ extraordinary career with the acquisition of multiple Apple products to its permanent collections.

Apple II Personal Computer

The Apple II, which went on sale in June of 1977, was Apple’s “first big seller,” says Allison. “The Apple II is really best known for being one of the first to run a spreadsheet.”

Apple Lisa II Personal Computer

Released in 1983, the Apple Lisa was a lesser known, intermediate machine. “It was a very expensive machine—too expensive,” says Allison. It didn’t succeed in the marketplace. “But it pioneered many of the ideas that were later made cost effective in the Macintosh,” he says.

The Apple Macintosh

When the Apple Macintosh exploded onto the market in 1984, it was billed as “The computer for the rest of us.” Of the Apple artifacts in the museum’s collection, Allison considers the Macintosh to be the most significant. “The Macintosh really introduced the graphic-user interface to the world,” he says. A graphic user interface allows the user to open files and programs by clicking on icons or menu choices with a mouse.”That really pointed personal computing in a new direction,” says Allison. “It was outsold by the PCs when they came along,” he adds. The original selling price of an Apple Macintosh was $2,495. “There was that whole debate over whether computers should be design oriented or business oriented. The profitability for most of history has been on the business side, but those weren’t the cool things to own necessarily,” he says.

Apple Newton and the iPod

After battling with CEO John Sculley for control of the company in 1985, Jobs left Apple, only to return again in 1997. During his absence, in 1993, the company launched its first handheld device. The Newton, as it was called, retailed for $700 and had its bugs. Apple almost went under trying to pioneer handheld technology that essentially over-promised what it could do. ”They almost lost out by doing too much too early,” says Allison. As Time magazine later reported, “Jobs revisited the scene of the crime to reinvent the PDA for the internet age, and wound up with a few devices that would have made the Newton proud: the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad.” The museum’s most recent Apple acquisition is an iPod. “I would say the Macintosh, the Newton and then the iPod really are all critical technologies in telling Apple’s story,” says Allison.

On the legacy of Steve Jobs

Allison was involved in the Computerworld Smithsonian Awards, a program lasting 12 years that recognized leaders in the field. In 1995, Steve Jobs was a recipient of the award and was interviewed at that time (bits of the interview have resurfaced in several recent articles). But Allison never had the privilege of meeting Jobs.

“He is clearly one of the iconic innovators of our lifetime,” he says. “How he has been able to mix business savvy and design sensibility, by making his technology something that is really cool and seen as being very appealing to own, for so long with so many different products is, to me, the success of the company. In most cases, his devices weren’t the cheapest. In some cases, they weren’t even technically the best. But his technology was able to rise to the top in terms of desirability in the eyes of many people. Apple has become one of the premier technology companies in the world by really sticking with the notion of how to make things appealing to consumers and also very easy to use,” says Allison.

Editor’s Note: This post was updated to clarify Jobs’ involvement in the release of the Apple Newton.

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Megan Gambino is a senior web editor for Smithsonian magazine.

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steve paul jobs biography

Jobs’s Early Life and Education

Steven Paul Jobs (1955–2011), known universally as “Steve,” was born Abdul Lateef Jandali in San Francisco, California.

Jobs’s father was Abdulfattah Jandali, a Syrian immigrant to the US who was working as a graduate student instructor while pursuing a doctorate in political science at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

Jobs’s mother was Joanne Schieble, an American woman of Swiss-German extraction who was a graduate student in the class Jandali taught.

Schieble’s parents were unhappy about the relationship and threatened to cut off their daughter financially if she kept the baby. For this reason, the couple gave the baby up for adoption.

Schieble traveled from Madison to San Francisco for the delivery on account of a special obstetric cum adoption practice run by a doctor there.

The baby was adopted by Paul Reinhold Jobs and Clara Jobs (née Hagopian), who lived in Los Altos, California, near the southwestern tip of San Francisco Bay—in the future Silicon Valley—between Palo Alto and San Jose.

Jandali and Schieble subsequently married and two years later had a second child, the future American novelist, Mona Simpson .

When Jandali finished his PhD, he initially returned home to Syria to seek employment, but Schieble did not accompany him. The couple were divorced in 1962.

The brother and sister did not meet until 25 years later. Jobs was in contact with Schieble on and off for most of his life, but never had any contact with Jandali.

Paul Jobs had a high school education. He worked as a mechanic in the Coast Guard before marrying and later in civilian life as a machinist. Clara Jobs had attended college for a while without graduating.

Steve Jobs was raised in Los Altos and the adjacent community of Mountain View. Paul and Clara adopted another child, a girl, who was two years younger than Steve. Thus, Jobs had an adoptive sister who was the same age as his biological sister—though he did not of course know that until years later.

In later life, Jobs had a very negative attitude towards his biological parents and always regarded his Paul and Clara Jobs as “1000% his parents.”

Paul Jobs set up a workshop in his garage, where he eventually allowed the young Steve to have his own workbench. In this way, the father also passed along his love of mechanics to his son.

Steve worked on fixing things around the house—cabinets, fences, and so forth—from an early age. He also learned to fix cars.

By the time Jobs was 10, he was deeply involved with electronics.

Jobs was bored in school, often got into trouble, and was bullied. His parents were naturally extremely concerned and moved several times in an effort to find a suitable school for him with their limited financial means.

In 1968, Jobs entered Homestead High School , an upscale public secondary school in nearby Cupertino. 

At Homestead, Jobs met future business partners Bill Fernandez and Steve Wozniak .

Wozniak was five years older than Jobs and so left Homestead to attend the University of California, Berkeley, while Jobs was still in high school. Jobs visited Wozniak at Berkeley frequently, and experience which led him to seek out congenial company at Stanford University, which was closer to his home.

At Stanford’s Student Union, Jobs discovered an electronics club, which he was allowed to join.

Jobs was also interested in literature—probably due to his mother’s influence—and for a long time was unsure of which direction to follow in his life. During his senior year at Homestead, he enrolled in an English class at Stanford and for a while even worked on an “underground” film.

Jobs has said that he did not fit well into any social group in high school or college. He was too much the “hippie” to fit in comfortably with the “nerds,” and vice versa .

During his senior year, Jobs also began experimenting with the psychedelic drug, LSD.

In 1972, Jobs enrolled in Reed College in Portland, Oregon. However, he dropped out after one semester and for a time lived the life of a campus hanger-on, auditing classes while sleeping on friends’ sofas, cadging loose change from strangers, and obtaining free meals from the “ Hare Krishna ” converts.

Jobs’s Career

In 1974, Jobs moved back in with his parents in Los Altos.

On the strength of a computer board programmed to play an early video game (similar to Pong ) given to him by his buddy Wozniak, Jobs got a job with Atari, Inc. , in Los Gatos.

For several months, while working for Atari, Jobs continued to live at home and saved up for a trip to India he had long dreamed of.

Then, later in 1974, Jobs made his way to India with a friend he had made at Reed — his future business partner Daniel Kottke—and the friends traveled around the country for seven months.

Upon returning to the US, Jobs spent time on a hippie commune in Oregon. Throughout this time, he continued to take psychedelic drugs. He also developed a serious interest in Zen Buddhism.

Jobs soon returned to living with his parents, with frequent trips to visit Buddhist centers and teachers in California, including the well-known Tassajara Center . For a time, he seriously considered studying Zen at a monastery in Japan.

In 1975, Jobs went back to work for Atari. The company gave him a special assignment that Jobs felt was beyond his technical expertise. For this reason, he turned once again to his friend Wozniak for help.

Wozniak exceeded Atari’s stringent specifications for the task, but in the end the friends felt they received only a pittance for their efforts. Thus, they remained dissatisfied and on the lookout for other business opportunities.

Meanwhile, in nearby Menlo Park, a group of computer hobbyists had come together to form the Homebrew Computer Club . Gates and Wozniak began attending their meetings in 1975—an event which was to have important consequences for the futures of both men.

Inspired by the other hobbyists of the Homebrew Club, Jobs and Wozniak decided to build their own personal computer. Originally, the idea was to produce bare printed circuit boards to sell to other computer enthusiasts.

In March of 1976, Wozniak produced the first circuit board, which the friends named “ Apple I ,” in honor of the apple orchard Jobs had worked in on the Oregon commune.

One month later, in April of 1976, Jobs and Wozniak—together with a third partner named Ronald Wayne , who had much-needed business experience—formed the Apple Computer Company (now Apple, Inc. ).

The company was headquartered in Jobs’s bedroom in his parents’ home in Los Altos, and later moved to the garage. The friends sold many of their personal belongings to raise funds for the purchase of the materials needed to build the circuit boards.

In terms of the division of labor, Wozniak would drop by Jobs’s house once a week with his latest batch of circuit boards, while Jobs spent most of the day every day on the telephone attempting to raise venture capital to finance the transformation of Apple into a more consumer-oriented enterprise.

Jobs was successful in raising capital and a year later, in April of 1977, the friends introduced their second model, Apple II , onto the market.

For Apple II, Wozniak embedded his new and improved circuit boards inside a molded plastic body, which also contained a typewriter keyboard and connected to a color monitor.

Apple II was one of the first three personal computers, or PCs. The other two PCs also introduced in 1977 were developed by established electronics companies, namely, the Commodore PET 2001 and the Tandy Corporation (Radio Shack’s parent company) TRS 80 .

The Apple II proved to be extremely popular. Within a year, in 1978, when Jobs was just 23 years old, his net worth had soared to $1 million. By 1980, it had risen to some $250 million.

The company grew so fast that it turned into an immense corporate entity that was beyond Jobs’s ability to manage personally. For this reason, in 1983, Jobs hired Pepsi-Cola’s John Sculley to serve as Apple’s CEO.

In 1984, Apple brought out the Macintosh . It was the first device to introduce such features as graphical user interface (GUI), a built-in screen, and a mouse.

In 1981, IBM had released its PC. Macintosh was intended to go head-to-head with IBM for dominance of the PC market. However, by 1985 it was obvious the attempt had failed.

This setback led to a power struggle between Jobs, Sculley, and Apple’s board of directors. In 1988, Jobs chose to resign from the company he had founded.

Jobs subsequently founded a company called NeXT Inc . The NeXT workstation was marketed as an “interpersonal” computer, meaning that it was specialized for local network communications.

NeXT got high marks from critics for its technical innovations, notably, its software based on object-oriented programming (OOP) . Jobs marketed NeXT, not to ordinary consumers, but rather to scientists, other academics, and financial experts.

Other business ventures that Jobs embarked upon at this time include Pixar , an early computer graphics company servicing the film industry.

During the decade that Jobs was away from Apple, the company’s profitability had sagged. In 1997, tge Apple management bought NeXT, as part of a deal which brought Jobs back to the helm of his old company. In 2000, Jobs was confirmed as Apple’s CEO once again.

In 2007, under Jobs’s guidance, Apple introduced the pathbreaking iPhone , which both turned the company’s fortunes around and revolutionized the way people live their daily lives throughout the world.

In 2011, at the age of only 56, Jobs died from pancreatic cancer and comorbidities. He is estimated to have been worth more than $10 billion.

Jobs Quotation Collections

I, Steve: Steve Jobs in His Own Words , edited by George Beahm (2011).

The Ultimate Compendium of Steve Jobs’ Best Sayings: A Quotes Reference Book , edited by Joseph Marty (2022).

Selected Books About Jobs and Apple

Beahm, George, Steve Jobs’ Life by Design: Lessons to be Learned from His Last Lecture (2014).

Becraft, Michael B., Steve Jobs: A Biography ( 2016).

Blumenthal, Karen, Steve Jobs: The Man Who Thought Different (2012).

Brennan, Chrisann, The Bite in the Apple: A Memoir of My Life with Steve Jobs (2013).

Deutschman, Alan, The Second Coming of Steve Jobs (2000).

Elliot, Jay, Leading Apple with Steve Jobs: Management Lessons from a Controversial Genius (2012).

Gallo, Carmine, The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs: How to Be Insanely Great in Front of Any Audience (2009).

Gold, Steve, Steve Jobs: The Biography and Lessons of the Mastermind Behind Apple (2016).

Goldsworthy, Steve, Steve Jobs (2022).

Hartland, Jessie, Steve Jobs: Insanely Great (2015).

Isaacson, Walter, Steve Jobs (2011).

Isaacson, Walter, The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution (2014).

Klein, Shawn E., ed., Steve Jobs and Philosophy (2015).

Kocienda, Ken, Creative Selection: Inside Apple’s Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs (2018).

Lakin, Patricia, Steve Jobs: Thinking Differently (2012).

Levy, Lawrence, T o Pixar and Beyond: My Unlikely Journey with Steve Jobs to Make Entertainment History (2016).

Linzmayer, Owen W., Apple Confidential 2.0: The Definitive History of the World’s Most Colorful Company, second edition (2004).

Lynch, Kevin, Steve Jobs: A Biographic Portrait (2018).

MacGregor, J.R., Steve Jobs: The Man Behind the Bitten Apple: Insight into the Thoughts and Actions of Apple’s Founder (2018).

Mickle, Tripp, After Steve: How Apple Became a Trillion-Dollar Company and Lost Its Soul (2022).

Parr, A.J., Top Habits of Successful Entrepreneurs: Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Arianna Huffington, Warren Buffett, and Richard Branson (2020).

Pollack, Pam and Meg Belviso, Who Was Steve Jobs? (2012).

Revell, Anna, Steve Jobs: A Steve Jobs Biography (2021).

Schlender, Brent and Rick Tetzeli, Becoming Steve Jobs: The Evolution of a Reckless Upstart into a Visionary Leader ( 2015).

Stross, Randall E., Steve Jobs and the Next Big Thing (1993).

Young, Jeffrey S., Steve Jobs: The Journey Is the Reward (1987).

Young, Jeffrey S. and William L. Simon, iCon Steve Jobs: The Greatest Second Act in the History of Business (2005).

Obituary: Steve Jobs

  • Published 6 October 2011

Despite his wealth and corporate success, Steve Jobs always managed to retain the air of a Silicon Valley buccaneer.

His abrasive style meant he was often difficult to work with but his eye for a desirable product made Apple one of the planet's most recognised brands.

Steven Paul Jobs was born in San Francisco on 24 Feb 1955, the son of two unmarried university students, Joanne Schieble and Syrian born Abdulfattah Jandali.

His parents gave him up for adoption and he was taken in by a working class Californian couple Paul & Clara Jobs.

Months after his adoption, his biological parents married and had a daughter, Mona, who did not learn of her brother's existence until she was an adult.

He was brought up in his adoptive parent's home in Silicon Valley, the hub of the US electronics industry.

While attending a local high school the young Jobs was offered a summer job at the Hewlett Packard plant in Palo Alto where he found himself working alongside a fellow student named Steve Wozniak.

He dropped out of college after one term and went to work for the video game manufacturer Atari with the idea of raising enough money to travel to India.

Apple 1 computer

Jobs returned from his trek around the sub continent with a shaven head, wearing Indian robes and having experienced the effects of LSD; he was to remain a Buddhist and vegetarian throughout his life.

He went back to work at Atari and joined a local computer club with his friend Steve Wozniak who was designing and building his own computer.

In 1976 Jobs pre-sold 50 of Wozniak's machines to a local computer store and, armed with a copy of the order, successfully persuaded an electronics distributor to let him have the components on credit.

He managed to launch the machine, called the Apple 1, without having borrowed any money or given up a share of the business to anyone else.

Apple stocks

Ousted from Apple

He named the company after his favourite fruit which, either by chance or design ensured it appeared in phone book listings ahead of rival Atari.

The profit from the first Apple was ploughed back into an improved version, the Apple II, which appeared at a Californian computer fair in 1977.

Development of the new machine was expensive and Jobs persuaded Mike Markkula, a local investor, to guarantee a $250,000 loan and, together with Wozniak, the three formed the company Apple Computer.

The Apple II, unlike many other computers of the time, came complete and worked straight out of the box rather than the purchaser having to assemble the various parts.

The new model became an instant success, kick starting the personal computer boom, achieving sales in excess of six million before production ended in 1993.

Wozniak & Jobs

But there were concerns at Apple about Jobs' lack of management experience and professional executives were hired to run the company.

One Apple board member claimed Jobs was "uncontrollable." "He got ideas in his head, and being a founder of the company, he went off and did them regardless of whether it ended up being good for the company."

Jobs introduced the Macintosh in 1984 to wild acclaim, but behind the hyped up launch there were financial problems at Apple.

A downturn in sales, and a growing resentment at what many employees saw as Jobs' autocratic style, resulted in an internal power struggle and he was ousted from the company.

By this time he had other irons in the fire. He founded NeXT Computer in 1985 and a year later bought Graphics Group from the Star Wars director, George Lucas.

The company, which Jobs renamed Pixar, produced extremely expensive computer animation hardware which was used by a number of film makers, including Disney.

Jobs switched the emphasis away from computer manufacturing and began producing computer animated feature films.

The breakthrough came in 1995 with the film Toy Story, which went on to gross more than $350 million worldwide, and was followed by other successes including A Bug's Life, Finding Nemo and Monsters Inc.

Steve Jobs,1999

A year later, Apple paid more than $400 million for NeXT computer and Jobs was back with the company he founded, wasting no time in removing Apple's then, Chief Executive Officer.

Jobs tackled Apple's poor profitability by dropping some fringe projects and moving the company into the burgeoning consumer electronics market.

The iPod, launched in 2001 satisfied the demand for music on the move and immediately became a style icon with its sleek design and distinctive white ear phones.

To drive his new machine Jobs also launched iTunes, allowing customers to download music from the internet and create their own play lists.

In 2003 Jobs was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and, rejecting the idea of surgery, set about finding alternative therapy, including a special diet.

He finally underwent surgery in 2004 having kept his illness secret from all but a small handful of Apple insiders.

Steve Jobs

In 2005 Disney paid $7 billion worth of stock to buy Pixar from Jobs who, as a result, became the Walt Disney Company's biggest shareholder.

Two years later, at yet another much hyped launch, Jobs introduced the iPhone to a legion of customers, many of whom had queued for hours at their local Apple store.

In 2008 the ultra thin Macbook Air was launched with Jobs doing his usual stage presentation dressed in his habitual black turtle neck jumper and faded jeans.

His thin and somewhat gaunt appearance fuelled speculation that his illness had returned and it was announced, in early 2009, that he was taking a six month break to cope with what was described as a "hormonal imbalance."

In April of that year he underwent a liver transplant, with his doctors announcing that the prognosis was "excellent."

However, in Jan 2011, Apple announced that Jobs would taking a leave of absence for health reasons.

Unlike his contemporary, Microsoft's Bill Gates, Steve Jobs showed little inclination to use his personal wealth for philanthropic purposes.

And, strangely for a self-professed Buddhist, he did not embrace environmental concerns, with Apple coming under fire from Greenpeace for its reluctance to produce easily recyclable products.

Steve Jobs was a one off; a man who had total belief in his own abilities and a shortage of patience for anyone who failed to agree with him.

His great gifts were an ability to second guess the market and an eye for well designed and innovative products that everyone would buy.

"You can't just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them," he once said. "By the time you get it built, they'll want something new."

Related Internet Links

Apple website

steve paul jobs biography

A Touch of Business

The Life of Steve Jobs

The life story of steve jobs.

In his 2005 commencement speech at Stanford, Steve Jobs narrated one of his life stories and ended the note by saying you cannot connect the dots looking forward.

You can only connect them by looking backward. By believing that your life story will tie together in the future, you’ll have the courage to follow your heart and keep moving forward even though you are currently on an unfamiliar path.

Steve Paul Jobs

Steven Paul Jobs came to life on 24th February 1955 in San Francisco, California, to Abdulfattah Jandali and Joanne Carole Schieble. His birth parents felt they were young and unprepared for parenthood, so they gave him up for adoption.

Steve Jobs was later adopted by Paul Jobs, a machinist and mechanic, and Clara Jobs, Paul’s wife. Even though Paul and Clara told Jobs he was adopted, he still considered them his biological parents.

Childhood and Growing Up

In 1961, Paul Jobs moved his family to Mountain View, California, south of Palo Alto. This area later gained the name Silicon Valley since it was the hub for electronics such as radios, stereos, televisions, and computers.

Steve Jobs grew up surrounded by friends and neighbors who worked as engineers at the Hewlett-Packard Company, Intel , and Xerox. He saw his first computer at 12 years old.

Steve Jobs enjoyed working with his dad at his workshop and garage. He admired how his dad could build anything with his hands. He could construct a cabinet for their home, a fence, and repair cars as a mechanic.

His father later designated a workbench for him at the garage, but Jobs wasn’t all that interested in fixing cars. He was, however, into electronics, especially computers.

Steve Jobs attended Monta Loma Elementary School in Mountain View but later transferred to Crittenden Middle School in sixth grade. Many of his schoolmates thought he was odd and socially awkward.

He struggled to make friends his age and preferred doing things alone. Jobs was also rebellious as a student. He said he found school boring and often played pranks on other students. It wasn’t until fourth grade that Jobs began taking learning seriously, thanks to his fourth-grade teacher, Imogene “Teddy” Hill.

Jobs disliked Crittenden Middle School. He complained of being bullied and gave his parents an ultimatum; if they didn’t transfer him, he would drop out.

His parents relented and bought a home in Los Altos, which they relocated to in 1967. Little did Jobs or his parents know that this house would be the first operations base for Apple .

Jobs went to Cupertino Junior High. It was in this school where Jobs met Fernandez, who later introduced him to Steve Wozniak.

In 1968, Jobs joined Homestead High School, where he struggled to make friends. His two closest ones were Steve Wozniak and Chrisann Brennan, his girlfriend.

Wozniak, at that time, was studying at the University of California, Berkeley.

Jobs occasionally attended lectures at the Hewlett-Packard Company. One time, Jobs asked HP’s president, William Hewlett , for computer parts to complete a school project.

Hewlett not only gave him the parts but also offered him a summer internship at HP. The work entailed assembling frequency counters.

After graduation, Jobs wanted to attend Reed College in Portland, Oregon. However, this school was too expensive for his parents, but they relented.

Jobs joined the school but dropped out after one semester. He, however, stayed within the campus for 18 months, during which he pursued a calligraphy course. Jobs later credits this course to the typography they used in the Macintosh in 1984.

In 1973, Jobs returned to San Francisco and became a technician at Atari in Los Gatos. He lived a simple life in a cabin and saved most of his salary for a pilgrimage in India.

$23,000,000 In student results, Banner

After saving enough money, Jobs went on his spiritual journey in India. He wanted to meet the Buddhist guru, Neem Karoli Baba, but he had passed away. Jobs stayed in India for seven months and then returned to the United States.

Creating Apple

Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak started Apple in 1976 after Jobs saw the personal computer that Wozniak had built. He was so impressed that he requested Wozniak to start a company, saying they wouldn’t have anything to lose.

Wozniak was the engineer behind the software and hardware of Apple’s computers, while Jobs was in charge of marketing. Their third partner, Ronald Wayne, left the company after only weeks.

Jobs was also tasked with searching for an angel investor, and he, fortunately, got Mike Markkula to invest in a one-third stake in Apple. The three incorporated Apple in 1977 and worked on creating Apple II.

Jobs loved involving himself in the design process. He wanted computers to be appealing and attractive. He wasn’t solely focused on the functionality aspect. He wanted Apple’s computers to be “insanely great.”

In 1979, Jobs and a small group of Apple engineers went to the Xerox Corporation’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) to learn about graphical user interfaces (GUI).

Jobs realized that GUIs would be the future of computers and began designing his own at Apple. He named the project the Lisa project.

However, Jobs got transferred to head the less interesting Macintosh project after clashing with his team. He worked on making the Macintosh attractive and “insanely great” and introduced it in 1984. During this time, Jobs also encouraged the board to hire John Sculley as CEO.

Sculley, at that time, was the CEO of PepsiCo . He got Sculley to join Apple by asking him the famous question, “Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life, or do you want to change the world?”

The relationship between Sculley and Jobs was smooth initially, but the two had different views and plans for Apple. They clashed so much that Jobs wanted the board to oust Sculley, but they sided with him. Jobs later resigned in 1985.

Leaving Apple

During his commencement speech at Stanford University, Jobs narrated that leaving Apple was the best thing that ever happened to him. The years he spent away from the company were the most creative ones of his life.

Jobs started NeXt and then purchased a controlling stake in Pixar, which went on to create popular animations such as  Toy Story ,  Finding Nemo , and  The Incredibles . NeXt was also purchased by Apple for $429 million in 1996, during which Jobs returned to Apple.

Personal Life

Steve Jobs married Lauren Powell in 1991. The couple lived in Palo Alto, California, and had three children, Reed, Erin, and Eve. Jobs also had a daughter called Lisa with Chrisann Brennan.

He initially denied being the father but later accepted. Lisa came to live with Jobs when she became a teenager.

Returning to Apple

Jobs returned to Apple as a consultant in 1996 but convinced the board to make him interim CEO in 1997. His first strategic decision was to reduce Apple’s product line to only four computer models.

He also released the iMac in 1998, iPod in 2001, iTunes in 2003, and iPhone in 1997. Job’s tenure as CEO was one of the most phenomenal in the company’s history.

The Death of Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs resigned as CEO of Apple in August 2011 due to health complications. He died two months later of pancreatic cancer, in October 2011, with his family by his side. He was buried at Alta Mesa Memorial Park in an unmarked grave.

Facts and Anecdotes

  • Joanne, Jobs’s biological mother, wanted Jobs’ adoptive parents to be educated. She refused to sign the adoption papers when she learned that Paul and Clara Jobs hadn’t gone to college. Joanne later agreed after they promised that Jobs would go to college.
  • Jobs was a pescetarian. He only ate fish meat.
  • Atari’s co-founder admitted that Jobs was an odd but valuable employee. He occasionally walked around barefoot in the Atari offices.
  • Jobs named the Lisa project after his first daughter, Lisa. He, however, denied it at the time, saying that the name Lisa was short for Local Integrated Software Architecture.
  • Jobs’ annual salary at Apple was $1. He was, however, the majority shareholder in Pixar and owned more than 5 million shares in Apple.

Timeline.

Steve Jobs is born in San Francisco, California.

Launch your fist digital product in days, Banner.

Steve Jobs and his family relocate to Mountain View, California.

Steve Jobs and his family move to Los Gatos. Jobs attends Cupertino Junior High School.

Jobs attends Homestead High School.

Jobs joins Reed College but drops out after one semester.

Jobs travels to India for his planned pilgrimage.

Jobs founds Apple with Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne.

Jobs attends a demonstration at the Xerox Corporation PARC. He learns about graphical user interfaces.

Jobs resigns from Apple after the board fails to side with him. He later establishes NeXt.

Jobs purchases controlling interest in Pixar.

Jobs marries Lauren Powell.

From 0 to 7,000,000, Per Year Banner.

Jobs returns to Apple as an advisor after the company buys NeXt.

Jobs becomes interim CEO of Apple.

Jobs officially becomes CEO of Apple.

Jobs takes a six-month medical leave from Apple for a liver transplant surgery.

Jobs resigns as CEO of Apple in August and passes away in October.

More About Steve Jobs

Below you will find resources to get in-depth information on the areas of Steve Jobs’ life beyond this post’s scope.

Many of the links in each section lead to search results so that you always have the latest and most popular information.

Success & Lifetime Achievements

As a result of his achievements, Steve Jobs changed the world we live in today. Steve has created several groundbreaking inventions that have contributed to how we live our lives.

One of his most life-changing inventions was the iPhone, which Increased global connectivity.

Looking into his achievements is beyond the scope of this post; therefore, see the link below to explore the information available on the achievements of Steve Jobs.

Search Results – Successes & Lifetime Achievements of Steve Jobs.

We all have failures, and Steve Jobs is no exception. Some of his biggest mistakes include seeking venture capital too early, losing control, and hiring John Sculley as CEO of Apple.

While you may have been interested in Steve Jobs’ success, looking at his failures gives you a more comprehensive view.

Search Results – Steve Jobs Failures.

Character Traits

The character traits of Steve Jobs are controversial. He was tough on people, and unless you shared the same vision, he showed no mercy.

Some may see this as aggressive and rude behavior, while others may see this as someone who is focused and knows what he wants; therefore, you were onboard or had to get out of his way.

There are many perspectives on the character traits of Steve jobs, and you can review the latest and most relevant results from the link below.

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Search Results – Steve Jobs Character Traits.

Management Style

Naturally, your character traits affect your management style, and as mentioned above, you were either with him or against him. However, as a leader, Steve was very strict and paid close attention to every detail.

The link below will offer the top results regarding the management style of Steve Jobs.

Search Results – Management Style of Steve Jobs .

Lessons Learned

We can learn many lessons from Steve Jobs that we can apply to our life journey. Of course, you don’t have to be exactly like Jobs, but you can apply the lessons that make sense.

You can also see how others have used the lessons in their companies.

Search Results – Lessons Learned From Steve Jobs.

  • Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn’t matter to me. Going to bed at night saying we’ve done something wonderful, that’s what matters to me.
  • It’s not a faith in technology. It’s faith in people.
  • I was lucky – I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple In my parents’ garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years, Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees.
  • I think money is a wonderful thing because it enables you to do things. It enables you to invest in ideas that don’t have a short-term payback.

I have chosen a few quotes to include in this post; for more quotes, see the link below for the latest search results for quotes from Steve Jobs.

Search Results – Steve Jobs quotes.

There are numerous books written about Steve Jobs. If you are interested in learning more about his life, you can look at the link below for the editor’s choice and recommendations Amazon offers.

Some include:

  • Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson, Dylan Baker, et al.
  • Steve Jobs: The Man Who Thought Different: A Biography by Karen Blumenthal
  • Steve Jobs: A Biography by Walter Isaacson
  • Becoming Steve Jobs: The Evolution of a Reckless Upstart into a Visionary Leader by Brent Schlender, Rick Tetzeli, et al.

View the most recent books related to Steve Jobs on Amazon.

Even though Steve Jobs passed away, there is still news about his life and work. 

Use a site like Google News to see the latest stories covered by the media. In addition, you can create an alert and receive notifications anytime something new is published.

See Google’s News search results related the Steve Jobs.

YouTube offers some excellent videos related to the life of Steve Jobs. See the link below offering the latest videos, and I found documentaries I’m sure you’ll find interesting.

See the most recent videos related to Steve Jobs.

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  1. Steve Jobs

    Steven Paul Jobs (February 24, 1955 - October 5, 2011) was an American businessman, inventor, and investor best known for co-founding the technology giant Apple Inc. Jobs was also the founder of NeXT and chairman and majority shareholder of Pixar.He was a pioneer of the personal computer revolution of the 1970s and 1980s, along with his early business partner and fellow Apple co-founder ...

  2. Steve Jobs: Biography, Apple Cofounder, Entrepreneur

    In 1976, Steve Jobs cofounded Apple with Steve Wozniak. Learn about the entrepreneur's career, net worth, parents, wife, children, education, and death in 2011. ... FULL NAME: Steven Paul Jobs ...

  3. Steve Jobs

    He dropped out of Reed College, in Portland, Oregon, took a job at Atari Corporation as a video game designer in early 1974, and saved enough money for a pilgrimage to India to experience Buddhism. Apple I. Steve Jobs (right) and Steve Wozniak holding an Apple I circuit board, c. 1976. Back in Silicon Valley in the autumn of 1974, Jobs ...

  4. Biography of Steve Jobs, Co-Founder of Apple Computers

    Steve Jobs (February 24, 1955-October 5, 2011) is best remembered as the co-founder of Apple Computers. He teamed up with inventor Steve Wozniak to create one of the first ready-made PCs. Besides his legacy with Apple, Jobs was also a smart businessman who became a multimillionaire before the age of 30. In 1984, he founded NeXT computers.

  5. Steve Jobs

    Steven Paul "Steve" Jobs (February 24, 1955 - October 5, 2011 [2] [3]) was an American businessman, investor, and co-founder and CEO of Apple Inc. He was the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Pixar Animation Studios until it was bought by The Walt Disney Company. [4] He was the largest shareholder at Disney [5] and a member of Disney's Board ...

  6. The life and times of Steven Paul Jobs, Part One • The Register

    The early years. Jobs was born in San Francisco on February 24, 1955. Shortly thereafter he was adopted by Paul and Clara Jobs of the same city, who had married in 1946 but had been unable to have a child of their own. They named their new son Steven Paul Jobs. Jobs' biological parents were Joanne Schieble of Green Bay, Wisconson, and Syrian ...

  7. Steve Jobs: From Garage to World's Most Valuable Company

    Steven Paul Jobs was born February 24, 1955, and died October 5, 2011. Explore further. Steve Jobs original iPod introduction; Watch the CHM lecture: Steve Jobs: The Authorized Biography. An Evening with Walter Isaacson; Stanford University Commencement Speech; Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs, New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011

  8. Steve Jobs summary

    Steve Wozniak American electronics engineer, cofounder, with Steve Jobs, of Apple Computer, and designer of the first commercially successful personal computer. Wozniak—or "Woz," as he was commonly known—was the son of an electrical engineer for the Lockheed Missiles and Space Company in Sunnyvale,

  9. Steve Jobs: The Story Of The Man Behind The Personal Computer

    The Apple founder spoke with Fresh Air's Terry Gross in 1996. Later, after he was diagnosed with cancer, Jobs asked Walter Isaacson to write his biography. Isaacson spoke to Fresh Air Oct. 25, 2011.

  10. Steve Jobs

    Steve Jobs. Producer: Toy Story. Steven Paul Jobs was born on 24 February 1955 in San Francisco, California, to students Abdul Fattah Jandali and Joanne Carole Schieble who were unmarried at the time and gave him up for adoption. He was taken in by a working class couple, Paul and Clara Jobs, and grew up with them in Mountain View, California. He attended Homestead High School in Cupertino ...

  11. Steve Jobs Biography

    Steve Jobs was born in San Francisco, 1955, to two university students Joanne Schieble and Syrian-born John Jandali. They were both unmarried at the time, and Steven was given up for adoption. Steven was adopted by Paul and Clara Jobs, whom he always considered to be his real parents. Steven's father, Paul, encouraged him to experiment with ...

  12. Amazon.com: Steve Jobs: 9781451648539: Isaacson, Walter: Books

    Walter Isaacson's "enthralling" (The New Yorker) worldwide bestselling biography of Apple cofounder Steve Jobs.Based on more than forty interviews with Steve Jobs conducted over two years—as well as interviews with more than 100 family members, friends, adversaries, competitors, and colleagues—Walter Isaacson has written a riveting story of the roller-coaster life and searingly ...

  13. Steve Jobs Biography

    Related: Top 10 Hiring Platforms for Small Business An overview of Steve Jobs' life. Steven Paul Jobs was an American business owner, entrepreneur, investor and media proprietor. He was best known ...

  14. Steve Jobs Biography

    Steve Jobs was an American entrepreneur, investor, and the co-founder of Apple Inc. Check out this biography to get detailed information regarding his childhood, family life, achievements, death, etc. ... Born on February 24, 1955, Steve Paul Jobs was the adopted son of Paul Reinhold and Clara Jobs. His biological parents were Abdulfattah ...

  15. The Real Leadership Lessons of Steve Jobs

    Summary. Reprint: R1204F. The author, whose biography of Steve Jobs was an instant best seller after the Apple CEO's death in October 2011, sets out here to correct what he perceives as an undue ...

  16. Steve Jobs

    Steve Jobs Biography. The well-known businessman, computer genius, and even digital entertainment Steve Paul Jobs, better known as Steve Jobs, was born in the city of San Francisco, California, the United States, on February 24, 1955, and died in the city of Palo Alto, California, United States, on October 5, 2011.He is recognized for his role as the co-founder of Apple Inc.

  17. 'Steve Jobs' biography: A wealth of detail

    Jobs' 80 percent stake, for which he'd paid $50 million, became worth $1.2 billion. In hammering out Pixar's deal with Disney, though, then-CEO Michael Eisner and Jobs played a game of ...

  18. Paul Jobs

    Short Bio. Paul Jobs was born and raised in Wisconsin, and served in the Coast Guard during World War II. After the war, he settled in San Francisco, and married Clara Hagopian in 1946. The couple adopted baby Steve nine years later. Paul, who never graduated from high school, became a car machinist - he fixed broken cars and sold them for a ...

  19. The Many Contributions of Steve Jobs (1955-2011)

    Senior Editor. October 6, 2011. Apple founder Steve Jobs in 1977 introduces the new Apple II computer AP Photo/Apple Computers Inc., file. Steve Jobs died yesterday, at age 56, of pancreatic ...

  20. Steve Jobs

    Jobs's Early Life and Education. Steven Paul Jobs (1955-2011), known universally as "Steve," was born Abdul Lateef Jandali in San Francisco, California.. Jobs's father was Abdulfattah Jandali, a Syrian immigrant to the US who was working as a graduate student instructor while pursuing a doctorate in political science at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

  21. Obituary: Steve Jobs

    Steven Paul Jobs was born in San Francisco on 24 Feb 1955, the son of two unmarried university students, Joanne Schieble and Syrian born Abdulfattah Jandali. His parents gave him up for adoption ...

  22. Here Is a Look Into the Life of Steve Jobs

    Steve Paul Jobs. Steven Paul Jobs came to life on 24th February 1955 in San Francisco, California, to Abdulfattah Jandali and Joanne Carole Schieble. His birth parents felt they were young and unprepared for parenthood, so they gave him up for adoption. Steve Jobs was later adopted by Paul Jobs, a machinist and mechanic, and Clara Jobs, Paul ...

  23. Steve Jobs

    Steve Jobs bei der WWDC (2010) Jobs stellte wichtige Apple-Produkte selbst der Öffentlichkeit vor, hier das MacBook Air im Jahr 2008. Bei solchen Auftritten trug er als Markenzeichen stets einen schwarzen Rollkragenpullover und Blue Jeans. Steven „Steve" Paul Jobs (* 24.Februar 1955 in San Francisco, Kalifornien; † 5. Oktober 2011 in Palo Alto, Kalifornien) war ein US-amerikanischer ...