short biography of steve jobs in english

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.

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Quick Facts

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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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Short Biography of Steve Jobs

The story of Steve Jobs from cradle to grave - and beyond.

Steven Paul Jobs was born on February 24, 1955 in San Francisco, California. His unwed biological parents, Joanne Schieble and Abdulfattah Jandali, put him up for adoption. Steve was adopted by Paul and Clara Jobs, a lower-middle-class couple, who moved to the suburban city of Mountain View a couple of years later.

The Santa Clara county, south of the Bay Area, became known as Silicon Valley in the early 1950s after the sprouting of myriads of semi-conductor companies in the area. As a result, young Steve Jobs grew up in a neighborhood filled with engineers working on electronics and other gizmos in their garages on weekends. This shaped his interest in the field as he grew up. At age 13, he met one the most important persons in his life: 18-year-old Stephen Wozniak, an electronics whiz-kid —and an incorrigible prankster, much like Steve himself.

Five years later, when Steve Jobs reached college age, he told his parents he wanted to enroll in Reed College — an expensive liberal arts college up in Oregon. Even though the tuition fees were astronomical for the poor couple, they had promised their son's biological parents he would get a college education, so they relented. Steve spent only one semester at Reed, then dropped out, as he was more interested in eastern philosophy, fruitarian diets, and LSD than in the classes he took. He moved to a hippie commune in Oregon where his main activity was cultivating apples.

A few months later, Steve returned to California to look for a job. He was hired at the young video game maker Atari, and used his wages to make a trip to India with one of his college friends, Dan Kottke, in order to 'seek enlightenment'. He came back a little disillusioned and started to take more interest in his friend Woz's new activities.

Apple's origins

Woz, whose interest in electronics had grown stronger, was regularly attending meetings of a group of early computer hobbyists called the Homebrew Computer Club. They were the real pioneers of personal computing, a collection of radio jammers, computer professionals and enlightened amateurs who gathered to show off their latest prowess in building their own personal computer or writing software. The club started to gain popularity after the Altair 8800 personal computer kit came out in 1975.

The knowledge that Woz gathered at the Homebrew meetings, as well as his exceptional talent, allowed him to build his own computer board — simply because he wanted a personal computer for himself. Steve Jobs took interest, and he quickly understood that his friend's brilliant invention could be sold to software hobbyists, who wanted to write software without the hassle of assembling a computer kit. Jobs convinced Wozniak to start a company for that purpose: Apple Computer was born on April 1, 1976.

The following months were spent assembling boards of Apple I computers in the Jobses' garage, and selling them to independent computer dealers in the area. However, Wozniak had started work on a much better computer, the Apple II — an expandable and more powerful system that even supported color graphics. Jobs and Wozniak knew deep down it could be hugely successful, and therefore Jobs started to seek venture capital. He eventually convinced former Intel executive turned business angel Mike Markkula to invest in Apple to the tune of $250,000 (roughly equivalent to $1 million in today's dollars) in January 1977. Markkula was a big believer in the personal computing revolution, and he said to the young founders that, thanks to the Apple II, their company would join the Fortune 500 in less than two years.

Apple II Forever

Although Markkula was a bit too optimistic (it actually took 7 years for Apple to make it), he was right that the company would become an overnight success. Because of its beautiful package, ease of use, and nifty features, the Apple II crushed most of its competition, and its sales made the Apple founders millionaires. The biggest surge in sales came after the introduction of VisiCalc, the first commercially successful spreadsheet program: hundreds of thousands of Americans, whether they be accountants, small business owners, or just obsessed with money, bought Apple IIs to make calculations at home.

In the wake of Apple's success, its leadership decided it was time to go public. The IPO took place in December 1980, only four years after the company was founded. Steve Jobs's net worth increased to over $200 million, at age 25.

Apple's success attracted the attention of the computer giant IBM, which until then was still only selling mainframe computers to large companies. A crash project was started and in August 1981, the IBM PC entered the personal computer market. It was the biggest threat yet to Apple, whose reputation was being put into question after the flop of the Apple III in 1980. Most hopes rested on a business computer project, called the Lisa.

Lisa & Xerox PARC

Steve Jobs was a big believer in the Lisa computer initially. It was he who came up with the name. Indeed, in 1978, his ex-girlfriend from high school Chrisann Brennan gave birth to a little girl, who she named Lisa. Steve denied paternity, although it was obvious to everyone who knew him that he was the father, given the on-and-off relationship he still had with Chrisann at the time. Jobs refused to give any money to Chrisann, despite the millions he had accumulated at Apple. While in denial, he came up with the name "LISA" for the new computer Apple was building...

The following year, a tour of the computer research lab Xerox PARC made a huge impression on him. The scientists who worked there had invented a number of breakthrough technologies that would mark the industry for the coming decades, including the graphical user interface (GUI) and the mouse, Ethernet, laser printing and object oriented programming. Jobs became obsessed with the GUI which was a lot easier to use than the command-line interfaces of the day. Instead of learning a computer language, you only had to point at pictures to use it. He insisted the Lisa should have a GUI and a mouse, too.

However, because of his hot temper and his relative inexperience in management, Steve Jobs grew at odds with the Lisa leadership team and was thrown out of the project. He felt absolutely crushed by this decision. As a revenge, he took over a small project called Macintosh, a personal computer that was supposed to be a cheap appliance, 'as easy to use as a toaster' . In 1981, Steve Jobs became head of the Macintosh project, and decided to make it a smaller and cheaper version of the Lisa, complete with a GUI of folders, icons and drop-down menus —and, of course, a mouse.

The three years it took to develop Macintosh were some of the most productive and intense in Steve Jobs' career. He formed a small group of dedicated, young, brilliant engineers who stood fully behind his vision of a 'computer for the rest of us'. They saw themselves as 'pirates' against the rest of Apple, which they dubbed 'the Navy'. The team antagonized both the Apple II group and the Lisa group, as they dismissed them as representing the past, while they were the future. Yet in 1983, after it became clear the Lisa was turning into another major flop for Apple, all of the company's hopes started to rest on the Macintosh. Steve was supported in his mission by John Sculley, Apple's new CEO whom he hired in 1983 to help him run the company and groom him into a future chief executive.

Leaving Apple

On January 24 1984, after Apple had run a very memorable TV commercial for the Super Bowl ( 1984 ), Steve Jobs introduced Macintosh at the company's annual shareholders meeting . The product was launched in great fanfare and for the first few months, it was quite successful.

However, by early 1985, as the whole PC industry fell into a slump, sales of the Mac started to plummet. Yes, Steve Jobs refused to acknowledge it and continued to behave as if he had saved Apple. This created a lot of tension within the company, especially between Steve and CEO John Sculley. While they used to be very close, they'd now stopped talking to one another.

In May 1985, Steve Jobs started trying to convince some directors and top executives at Apple that Sculley should go. Instead, many of them talked to Sculley, who took the matter to the board of directors. The board sided with Sculley and a few days later, announced a reorganization of the company where Steve Jobs had no operational duties whatsoever —he was only to remain chairman of the board.

Steve was aghast: Apple was his life, and he was effectively kicked out of it. After four months spent traveling and trying out new ideas, he came back in September with a plan: he would start a new computer company aimed at higher education, with a small group of other ex-Apple employees. When Apple learned of the plan, they declared they would sue him as he was taking valuable information about the company to compete with it. As a result, Steve Jobs resigned from Apple and sold all but one of his Apple shares in disgust. He went ahead with his plan anyway, and incorporated NeXT. Apple dropped its lawsuit a few months later.

The NeXT years

Steve aimed at the highest possible standards for his new NeXT machine: he wanted the best hardware, built in the world's most automated factory, and running the most advanced software possible. He decided that the computer's operating system, NeXTSTEP, would be based on UNIX, the most robust system in the world , used by the military and universities —but that it would also be as easy to use as a Macintosh, with its own GUI. NeXTSTEP would allow for object-oriented programming, another breakthrough from Xerox PARC, that made writing software much faster and more reliable. These ambitious plans put off the release date of the computer — called the NeXT Cube — to October 1988.

When it came out, the NeXT Cube was indeed a great machine. But it didn't sell — it was late, and way too overpriced: universities has asked for a $3,000 PC, and NeXT had built a $10,000 workstation. After two years of very low sales, the company launched the cheaper NeXTstation, and expanded its target to businesses, in addition to higher education. It didn't work: the number of NeXT computers sold each month remained in the hundreds. The company was bleeding money and all its co-founders left one after the other, as well as its most prominent investor, Texan billionaire Ross Perot. By 1993, NeXT had to give up its entire hardware business to become a niche software company. Steve Jobs had failed, and he was devastated. He started focusing less on work, and more on his wife Laurene (who he married in 1991) and his newborn son, Reed.

To understand how Steve Jobs got out of his nadir, let's go back eight years earlier, in late 1985. At the time, George Lucas, who was in the middle of an expensive divorce, was selling the computer graphics division of his Lucasfilm empire. Steve Jobs had millions in the bank, after having sold all his Apple stock, and was interested. In early 1986, he bought the small group of computer scientists, and incorporated a new company: Pixar. The founders of Pixar, Ed Catmull and Alvy Ray Smith, had gotten together in the late 1970s with a common vision of making films using computer animation only. But they also knew no computer was powerful enough at the time, and they would have to hold out for a couple decades before their dream could materialize.

For the first five years of Pixar's life, Steve Jobs set a goal for the company to sell high-end computer graphics workstations for institutions, such as hospitals or even the army. The animations group led by John Lasseter was very small at the time, and only survived because it provided good publicity for the power of the Pixar 3D rendering software, RenderMan. Steve Jobs understood this when the studio won an Academy Award for its short movie Tin Toy in 1989. However, just like NeXT's, sales of Pixar hardware were microscopic, and the company went software-only in 1990.

Pixar then became a software company whose primary product was RenderMan. Its animation business was kept alive because it was the only one that brought some cash in, by producing various TV commercials in 3D for brands. However, a decisive contract changed everything: in 1991, Disney signed a contract with Pixar to make a full-feature computer-animated movie. The script had to be fully approved by both parties, and the very hands-on head of Disney animation Jeffrey Katzenberg halted the production several times out of creative disagreements with John Lasseter and his team. But in 1995, the movie was finally starting to take form, and Steve Jobs became increasingly enthused by it.

Although he had used his personal money to fund Pixar for nine years, Jobs had never been implicated that much in the company, which was always more of a 'hobby' to him compared to NeXT. But by 1995, NeXT had more or less tanked, whereas Pixar was obviously going to benefit widely from the Disney marketing machine and make a hit with its movie, Toy Story . Steve understood this new momentum full well: he planned to take Pixar public the week following the release of the movie, in November 1995. He was right, and Toy Story 's box-office success was only surpassed by the Pixar stock's success on Wall Street. Steve Jobs, who owned 80% of the company, saw his net worth rise to over $1.5 billion —five times the money he had ever made at Apple in the 1980s!

Back to Apple

Business wasn't all sunshine and roses at Apple. In the decade following Steve's departure, the computer maker had milked all the cash it could from the Macintosh and its successors, surfing on the wave of the desktop publishing revolution that the Mac and the laser printer had made possible. But in 1995, after Microsoft had released Windows 95, which was a pale but working copy of the Mac OS GUI, sales of Macintosh computers started plummeting.

A new CEO, Gil Amelio, arrived in early 1996 to save the company. He cut costs, got rid of a third of the workforce, and decided that instead of writing a new, modern operating system from scratch to compete with Window, it was better for Apple to acquire one. Eventually, Amelio chose to buy NeXTSTEP, NeXT's operating system — and agreed to buy the company for $400 million (roughly equivalent to $670 million today). The deal was made in December 1996: Steve Jobs was back at the company he had founded.

The Amelio-Jobs cooperation didn't last long, though: Apple lost $700 million in the first quarter of 1997, and the board decided to get rid of its CEO. Jobs effectively organized a board coup with the complicity of his billionaire friend Larry Ellison, and after a tenure that lasted exactly 500 days, Amelio was gone. In August 1997, Jobs took the stage at Macworld Boston to explain his plan for Apple: he had gotten rid of the old board of directors, and made a deal with Microsoft to settle patent disputes and invest $150 million in the struggling Silicon Valley icon. One month later, on September 16, 1997, Jobs accepted to become Apple's interim CEO.

For the loser now will be later to win

The few months after Steve Jobs came back at Apple were among the hardest-working in his life. He later told his biographer Walter Isaacson that he was so exhausted, he couldn't speak when he came home at night (remember he was also running a thriving Pixar simultaneously). He reviewed every team at Apple and asked them to justify why they were important to the future of the company. If they couldn't, their product would get canceled, and there was a high probability they'd have to leave, too. Jobs also brought with him his executive team from NeXT, and installed them in key positions.

Critics started to believe in Steve Jobs's ability to run Apple when he unveiled his first great product, the iMac. Introduced in May 1998 , it was Apple's first truly innovative product since the original Macintosh of 1984. Its translucent design blew away the whole PC industry, which had failed to produce anything but black or beige boxes for over a decade. Moreover, it was a hot seller, and put the company's finances back in the black. The iconic iMac also played a key role in bringing back tons of developers to the Mac platform. Design innovations continued throughout 1998 and 1999 with the colored iMacs and the iBook, Apple's consumer notebook. After three years in charge, Steve Jobs had brought Apple back to its status of cool tech icon.

At Macworld in January 2000 , Steve Jobs made two significant announcements: first, he demoed Aqua, the graphics-intensive user interface that Apple would use in its next-generation operating system derived from NeXTSTEP, Mac OS X. Second, he announced he had accepted the Apple board's offer, and became the company's CEO, dropping the 'interim' from his title. It was quite controversial, as he remained CEO of Pixar, another public company. Mac OS X had not shipped yet, though —it would take another year to do so.

The simple fact that such a massive OS transition took place was a technical feat in itself. The Mac OS X team worked very hard and released six major versions of the system at a roughly yearly cadence between 2001 and 2007 —each time delivering more stability, speed, and new user features. Although Steve Jobs buried Mac OS 9 on stage in 2002 , most observers acknowledge that the transition from Classic Mac OS to OS X was really complete in 2005, with the release of Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger. The continuous improvement of Mac OS X and its powerful core technologies and developer tools proved key in the success of the Digital Hub strategy, which Steve Jobs unveiled in January 2001.

The Digital Hub

Once Apple had been come back from its near-death experience in the late 1990s, Steve Jobs started focusing on ways to make the company's shrinking market share (around 5%) grow. He decided to leverage Apple's unique strength of making both hardware & software to do this: not only would Macs be very powerful and attractive machines, but they would also run differentiated software that no Windows PCs could. His first move was to bet on what he called 'desktop video', the ability to shoot and edit personal movies on your Mac. He was convinced that desktop video would become as big a deal as desktop publishing had been in the 1980s. As a first step, in 1999, he introduced the iMac DV (which stood for Digital Video) and a new digital movie editing software, iMovie .

The iMac DV was a hit, but desktop video failed to catch on as well as Jobs had hoped. After much introspection, in 2000, the Apple executive team came up with a new paradigm for the Mac that would set the company's destinies for the coming decade. They took the idea of desktop video and decided to expand it to other consumer digital devices, which were rapidly becoming mainstream at the time. Apple would write software for the Mac to edit and store all the new digital content that consumers created —and these apps would be so powerful, delightful and easy to use, that they would entice PC users to switch to the Mac. The Digital Hub strategy was born. Steve Jobs explained it to the Apple community at Macworld in January 2001 , the same day he unveiled the second and third of the iApps: iDVD —to let you burn your own DVDs— and iTunes, a digital jukebox software. Other iApps would follow: iPhoto in 2002, GarageBand in 2004, and iWeb in 2006.

2001: An Apple Odyssey

In many ways, the juggernaut that Apple became was shaped by very smart decisions that Jobs and his executive team took in the crucial period of 2000-2001. We've already covered Mac OS X and the Digital Hub strategy, both unveiled in January 2001.

A third key decision was taken in 2000 and unveiled in mid-2001: that of creating a fully-owned retail channel, the famous Apple retail stores. Although it is easy to call this strategy smart in retrospect, it was far from obvious back in May 2001, when the first two retail stores were inaugurated. That same year, PC maker Gateway was shutting down its own retail stores one after the other, and the analysts consensus was that niche player Apple would burn precious money in this economic downturn on a foolish and dated idea. On the other hand, Steve Jobs explained that only in an environment fully controlled by Apple, with Apple-trained staff and only Apple-compatible products, could the superiority of Apple products be fully appreciated by consumers.

Finally, it was in 2000 that Jobs started realizing his mistake of betting only on digital movies, and reoriented the company's efforts to another media: music. Digital music file-sharing service Napster was at the peak of its popularity, and young people were not spending their time shooting movies, but rather downloading and listening to MP3 music files. iTunes was born out of that realization. Still, there was a problem: although there were great digital camcorders to run in conjunction with iMovie —and awesome digital cameras too for iPhoto— digital music players mostly sucked. Not to mention, they were ugly.

That's why, in March 2001, Steve Jobs started a crash development program to build an Apple-branded MP3 player and ship it before that year's holiday season: the iPod was born. On October 23, 2001, he introduced this cute white digital device to a small group of journalists on Apple's campus. The tagline was 'A thousand songs in your pocket' ( the ad is a classic ), and there was great emphasis on its symbiosis with the iTunes app. But no one in the room, Jobs included, had any clue how important it would turn out to be.

iPod nation

iPod was a commercial success from the day it debuted, even though it was released as Mac-only, since its goal was to prop up sales of the Mac. It came at a time when a lot of people needed a good MP3 player to take their (mostly stolen) MP3s with them, and despite its rather high price tag, a lot of PC users ended up buying it too, hacking it so they could use it on their machines. This had Steve Jobs and his team think a great deal: should they keep making a Mac-only iPod, or should they open it to Windows, too? Although Jobs was initially staunchly opposed to the latter idea, he eventually relented, and the first Windows iPods were introduced in July 2002 at Macworld New York .

However, it was soon becoming clear that iPod benefited from music piracy, and that its sales could go even higher if there was a legal way to download music. Steve Jobs didn't wait for the music industry to reinvent itself. He went to all record labels to negotiate landmark deals that would lead to the introduction of the iTunes Music Store in April 2003. Ironically, one of the arguments he used was that the risk to music labels was quite low, because of the Mac's small market share (iTunes was still Mac-only). The first compelling legal alternative to illegal music file-sharing, the iTunes Store was an instant success, selling one million songs in its first week. It not only helped the sales of iPods, but it eventually reshaped the whole music industry. It was introduced to Windows as well six months later , in October 2003.

Despite this great success, Apple didn't rest on its laurels. In January 2004, Jobs introduced the iPod mini , a more compact version of iPod that sold at $249, only $50 less than the full featured iPod. It was really the combination of the iPod mini and the Windows compatibility that propelled the iPod to its status of cultural icon. The phrase 'Walkman of the digital age' became commonplace to describe it, and in July 2004, Steven Levy of Newsweek wrote an emblematic cover story entitled 'iPod nation' . The iPod adventure was far from over, since Apple introduced the $99 iPod shuffle and the 'impossibly small' iPod nano in 2005, and the iPod video in 2006. By that time, 'iPod' had become synonymous with 'portable music player', and the iTunes Store had sold over one billion songs.

Although the iPod changed the music industry and the way everybody listened to music, the most important change it carried was probably that of Apple. The wild success of iPod proved to all the company's employees, starting with Jobs himself, that they were right to strive for perfection and ease of use —unlike the Mac, which still didn't grow beyond its 5% market share, iPod garnered Microsoft-like numbers of 80% of the MP3 player market. It was iPod that revealed the future of Apple, not only as a PC manufacturer, but as a consumer electronics powerhouse. It was also iPod that broadened the company's expertise in the supply chain, manufacturing, and distribution of a mainstream digital device in gigantic proportions. Finally, it was iPod which, through the crowds it attracted to the company's retail stores, finally helped the Mac business of Apple, whose growth rate started outpacing that of consumer Windows PCs from 2005.

When Pixar met Disney

iPod also played an indirect role in shaping the future of Steve's 'other' company, Pixar. After having released hit after hit ( A Bug's Life (1998), Toy Story 2 (1999), Monsters Inc. (2001) and Finding Nemo (2003)), the animation studio had decided to let go of its distribution deal with Disney, mainly because of increasing tensions between Steve Jobs and Disney CEO Michael Eisner. Steve Jobs openly said he would not make another deal with the Magic Kingdom until Eisner was out. Turns out his opinion was shared by many an executive at Disney — including Walt's own nephew, Roy Disney, who started a public campaign to oust the company's CEO in late 2003. This led to the nomination of Bob Iger as new CEO in September 2005.

Rumor has it that one of the first phone calls Iger made after he became CEO was to Pixar CEO Steve Jobs. He was willing to show his good will in ending the Pixar-Disney dispute. Steve Jobs took the opportunity to pitch him his new Apple plan. He was going to introduce an iPod with video capabilities soon, and he wanted a movie store to go along with it. Iger accepted, and both men appeared on stage in October 2005 to announce that Disney would be selling TV shows on the iTunes Store. The audience of journalists was pleasantly surprised to see the CEO of Disney appear so friendly with Steve Jobs, and suspected there would soon be news on the Pixar side.

Indeed, just a couple months later, on January 24, 2006, Disney announced its friendly acquisition of Pixar, at $7.4 billion (mostly in stock). Jobs became a Disney board member and its largest individual shareholder, owning 7% of the company's stock —ironically, this is by far what contributed to most of his wealth, not his Apple stock. Pixar executives Ed Catmull and John Lasseter were also both given leadership roles in the new combined animation studio. In many ways, it was as if Pixar had taken over Disney animation —a reverse acquisition reminiscent of NeXT taking over Apple after the 1996 merger.

Meanwhile, Apple was seeing unprecedented success in all its businesses, not only iPod and iTunes. The retail stores were hugely popular, and a milestone was reached when Steve Jobs inaugurated the impressive 5th Avenue store in Manhattan, a glass cube facing Central Park. As for the Mac, it was gaining momentum on the market, benefiting from both the aura of the iPod, and the switch to Intel processors.

Indeed, at WWDC in June 2005, , Jobs made a surprise announcement that after over a decade on the PowerPC microprocessor architecture, Apple would start using more power-efficient Intel chips in its Macs. In the late 1990s, Apple had run several ads to make fun of Intel's Pentium processors. As a matter of fact, the expression 'Wintel machines' (Windows + Intel) was often used to describe PCs. That move to Intel was thus pretty bold, but in the long run turned out to be another wise decision. Not only did it make Macs more competitive and efficient, paving the way for the super slim (and super successful) MacBook Air notebooks —it also opened up a whole new set of customers to Apple, as Intel Macs could run both Mac OS X and Windows. The Mac became the platform of choice for an ever larger number of software developers. Less than a year after the announcement, all new Macs were running Intel. The transition was a complete success.

iPod made Steve Jobs realize that Apple could become the greatest consumer electronics company on the planet. Around 2003, he started a secret project to develop a computer tablet. But in 2004-2005, he realized that the technology that had been developed for this tablet —including a revolutionary touch-screen technology— could also be used in a mobile phone, which was even more appealing. After two more years of development, iPhone was introduced at Macworld on January 9, 2007 . This keynote is often considered the pinnacle of Steve Jobs' career.

iPhone was not only a breakthrough digital convergence device ("an iPod, a phone, and an Internet communicator" all in one), it was also a force of disruption for the traditional phone business. Just like for the iTunes Store, Steve Jobs had negotiated a landmark deal with wireless carrier AT&T before he introduced iPhone —without ever showing them a prototype! In exchange for exclusivity, the carrier would pay Apple a share of all their iPhone subscription revenues. And of course, AT&T could not put any software on the iPhone, and no logo either. This was an inversion of the traditional master-slave relationship that carriers entertained with phone manufacturers (OEMs). In the long run, it really turned the phone industry upside down.

Unlike iPod, all of Apple understood that iPhone, if successful, could become a world-changing device and redefine their company. Thus, at the end of the iPhone introduction, Steve Jobs also announced that the company's name would change from Apple Computer Inc. to Apple Inc. Macs still mattered, but they now accounted for a minority of Apple's revenues, and this trend was not about to be reversed. They was a highly symbolic moment in the company's history.

The original iPhone was quite successful: despite its $399 price tag, Apple sold 6 million of them during its lifetime. But sales really started to skyrocket in 2008, after Apple introduced the cheaper iPhone 3G (at a subsidized $199 price) and the App Store. Just like the Windows-compatible iPod, Steve Jobs was originally opposed to letting third-party software on the iPhone. But the demand was so high that he eventually relented, and introduced the iPhone SDK and the App Store in March 2008.

It is impossible to overestimate the impact of the iPhone's App Store, which ushered in a new era in mobile software. Thousands of developers started writing apps for the iPhone platform, which became a competitive advantage for Apple. Apple proudly showed off this rich choice of software in its TV ad campaign 'There's an app for that' , which ran for over two years.

Health concerns

Unfortunately, while he had never been so successful professionally, Steve Jobs had to start fighting cancer with renewed intensity.

In late 2003, he had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer of a rare kind, that could potentially be cured by surgery. However, against everyone's advice, he refused to have the surgery for nine long months. Instead, true to the ideals of his youth, he tried alternative diets and treatments, including acupuncture and seeing a psychic. Only in July 2004 did he agree to have the surgery. He looked healthy for the next five years, and spoke publicly of being 'cured' of cancer at his famous Stanford commencement speech in 2005 .

Yet at the WWDC keynote in June 2008 , few observers failed to notice how thin he appeared on stage, and concerns about his health started popping up again. They became increasingly frequent until December 2008, when Apple made a shocking announcement that Jobs would not be the keynote speaker at Macworld 2009, and that he was taking a medical leave of absence for six months. Although he (and Apple) publicly denied it, the truth was that his cancer had come back. He was actually weeks away from death when he received a liver transplant, in April 2009. He came back to Apple in late summer 2009, healthier though still very frail in appearance. He was eager to bring the finishing touches to a new project very dear to his heart.

Ushering in the Post-PC era

The iPhone had spun off the idea for a tablet device back in 2005, and it was time to restart that project, which of course became the iPad. Although some speculated it would run Mac OS X, it was decided that iPad would in fact run the same operating system as iPhone, now called iOS. It would therefore benefit from the rich variety of apps already present in the iPhone App Store.

Although iPad was welcomed by mixed reviews when it was introduced in January 2010 (some dubbed it a "larger iPod touch"), it was always clear to Steve Jobs that it was 'the biggest thing [he'd] ever done' —the ultimate post-PC device, an eventual replacement of PCs for the average user. He laid out his vision clearly at the D8 conference in June 2010, where he compared PCs to trucks and iPads to cars. This perspective on iPad was reiterated in a series of TV commercials where the narrator, the 'Apple voice', explained how revolutionary iPad was, and how the revolution had 'only just begun'.

Unfortunately, Steve Jobs' health, which had seemed to recover throughout 2010, started declining again. In January 2011, he announced he was taking a new medical leave of absence, this time without saying when it would end. Everybody started talking about his upcoming departure. However, he deemed iPad and iOS so important that he still made two major public presentations at Apple events. The first one was the introduction of iPad 2 in March 2011, and the second one was WWDC , in June 2011, where he introduced iCloud.

In many ways, the iCloud announcement was of similar importance as the Digital Hub Strategy introduction ten years before. It was not only a product, but a master plan to get consumers to adopt iOS devices and lock them into the Apple ecosystem. The 2011 iCloud, which allowed users to sync email, documents, and media across their Macs and iDevices, was only the first step in that direction. It was crucial to Steve Jobs, who clearly considered iOS to be the most important of Apple's businesses, and the key to its future success.

Building his legacy

The resurgence of Steve's cancer was a painful reminder that it was time to 'put his affairs in order' before his passing —and he did.

First, he made sure that Apple was ready to operate without him. In late 2008, he hired the dean of the Yale School of Management to create 'Apple University', a sort of internal business track to groom future Apple executives by exposing them to the Apple ways, through case studies of the history of the company. He also consolidated his executive team and agreed with the board that his natural successor would be his second in command, COO Tim Cook. Finally, at his last public appearance in June 2011, he unveiled his plans for the future Apple campus in Cupertino (now Apple Park ), a huge spaceship-sized building in the shape of a circle. All of this was in place when he eventually resigned as Apple CEO on August 24, 2011.

Jobs also prepared his personal legacy. In 2009, he started giving interviews to writer Walter Isaacson to prepare for his first and only authorized biography, sharing with him his perspective on his life and career. He also spent his last days designing a yacht for his family on which he hoped to travel the world. Unfortunately, death took him too soon, and he died peacefully at home on October 5, 2011, surrounded by his family —the day following the introduction of the iPhone 4S, an Apple event that he most likely watched from his deathbed.

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Short Biography of Steve Jobs

Reading comprehension: steve jobs biography.

Steve Jobs , the American businessman and technology visionary who is best known as the co-founder, chairman, and chief executive officer of Apple Inc. , was born on February 24, 1955. His parents were two University of Wisconsin graduate students, Joanne Carole Schieble and Syrian-born Abdulfattah Jandali. They were both unmarried at the time. Jandali, who was teaching in Wisconsin when Steve was born, said he had no choice but to put the baby up for adoption because his girlfriend’s family objected to their relationship.

The baby was adopted at birth by Paul Reinhold Jobs (1922-1993) and Clara Jobs (1924-1986). Later, when asked about his “adoptive parents,” Jobs replied emphatically that Paul and Clara Jobs “were my parents.” He stated in his authorized biography that they “were my parents 1,000%.” Unknown to him, his biological parents would subsequently marry (December 1955), have a second child, novelist Mona Simpson, in 1957, and divorce in 1962.

Jobs’s youth was riddled with frustrations over formal schooling. At Monta Loma Elementary School in Mountain View, he was a prankster whose 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 his parents declined. Jobs then attended Cupertino Junior High and Homestead High School in Cupertino, California. During the following years, Jobs met Bill Fernandez and Steve Wozniak , a computer whiz kid.

Through Apple, Jobs was widely recognized as a charismatic pioneer of the personal computer revolution and for his influential career in the computer and consumer electronics fields. Jobs also co-founded and served as chief executive of Pixar Animation Studios ; he became a member of the board of directors of The Walt Disney Company in 2006 when Disney acquired Pixar.

Comprehension:

Biography Online

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 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. 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

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.

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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

Biography of Steve Jobs, Co-Founder of Apple Computers

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Apple Corporation

Disney pixar, expanding apple.

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 Jobs summary

Steve Jobs , (born Feb. 24, 1955, San Francisco, Calif., U.S.—died Oct. 5, 2011, Palo Alto, Calif.), U.S. businessman. Adopted in infancy, he grew up in Cupertino, Calif. He dropped out of Reed College and went to work for Atari Corp. designing video games. In 1976 he cofounded (with Stephen Wozniak ) Apple Computer (incorporated in 1977; now Apple Inc. ). The first Apple computer, created when Jobs was only 21, changed the public’s idea of a computer from a huge machine for scientific use to a home appliance that could be used by anyone. Apple’s Macintosh computer, which appeared in 1984, introduced a graphical user interface and mouse technology that became the standard for all applications interfaces. In 1980 Apple became a public corporation, and Jobs became the company’s chairman. Management conflicts led him to leave Apple in 1985 to form NeXT Computer Inc., but he returned to Apple in 1996 and became CEO in 1997. The striking new iMac computer (1998) revived the company’s flagging fortunes. Under Jobs’s guidance, Apple became an industry leader and one of the most valuable companies in the world. Its other notable products include iTunes (2001), the iPod (2001), the iPhone (2007), and the iPad (2010). In 2003 Jobs was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, and he subsequently took several medical leaves of absence. In 2011 he resigned as CEO of Apple but became chairman.

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Jobs' Biography: Thoughts On Life, Death And Apple

Walter Isaacson's biography of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs was published Monday, less than three weeks after Job's death on Oct. 5.

When Steve Jobs was 6 years old, his young next door neighbor found out he was adopted. "That means your parents abandoned you and didn't want you," she told him.

Jobs ran into his home, where his adoptive parents reassured him that he was theirs and that they wanted him.

"[They said] 'You were special, we chose you out, you were chosen," says biographer Walter Isaacson. "And that helped give [Jobs] a sense of being special. ... For Steve Jobs, he felt throughout his life that he was on a journey — and he often said, 'The journey was the reward.' But that journey involved resolving conflicts about ... his role in this world: why he was here and what it was all about."

When Jobs died on Oct. 5 from complications of pancreatic cancer, many people felt a sense of personal loss for the Apple co-founder and former CEO. Jobs played a key role in the creation of the Macintosh, the iPod, iTunes, the iPhone, the iPad — innovative devices and technologies that people have integrated into their daily lives.

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Jobs detailed how he created those products — and how he rose through the world of Silicon Valley, competed with Google and Microsoft, and helped transform popular culture — in a series of extended interviews with Isaacson, the president of The Aspen Institute and the author of biographies of Albert Einstein and Benjamin Franklin. The two men met more than 40 times throughout 2009 and 2010, often in Jobs' living room. Isaacson also conducted more than 100 interviews with Jobs' colleagues, relatives, friends and adversaries.

His biography tells the story of how Jobs revolutionized the personal computer. It also tells Jobs' personal story — from his childhood growing up in Mountain View, Calif., to his lifelong interest in Zen Buddhism to his relationship with family and friends.

In his last meetings with Isaacson, Jobs shifted the conversation to his thoughts regarding religion and death.

"I remember sitting in the back garden on a sunny day [on a day when] he was feeling bad, and he talked about whether or not he believed in an afterlife," Isaacson tells Fresh Air 's Terry Gross. "He said, 'Sometimes I'm 50-50 on whether there's a God. It's the great mystery we never quite know. But 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."

Jobs paused for a second, remembers Isaacson.

"And then he says, 'But maybe it's just like an on/off switch and click — and you're gone.' And then he paused for another second and he smiled and said, 'Maybe that's why I didn't like putting on/off switches on Apple devices.' "

'The Depth Of The Simplicity'

Jobs' attention to detail on his creations was unrivaled, says Isaacson. Though he was a technologist and a businessman, he was also an artist and designer.

"[He] connected art with technology," explains Isaacson. "[In his products,] he obsessed over the color of the screws, over the finish of the screws — even the screws you couldn't see." Even with the original Macintosh, he made sure that the circuit board's chips were lined up properly and looked good. He made them go back and redo the circuit board. He made them find the right color, find the right curves on the screw. Even the curves on the machine — he wanted it to feel friendly.

That obsessiveness occasionally drove his Apple co-workers crazy — but it also made them fiercely loyal, says Isaacson.

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"It's one of the dichotomies about Jobs: He could be demanding and tough and irate. On the other hand, he got all A-players and they became fanatically loyal to him," says Isaacson. "Why? They realized they were producing, with other A-players, truly great products for an artist who was a perfectionist — and wasn't always the kindest person when they failed — but he was rallying them to do great stuff."

He relays one story about Jobs that shows, he says, how much he was able to connect great ideas and innovations together. In the early 1980s, Jobs visited Xerox PARC, a research company in Palo Alto that had invented the laser printer, object-oriented programming and the Ethernet. Jobs noticed that the computers running at PARC all featured graphics on their desktops that allowed users to click icons and folders. This was new at the time: Most computers used text prompts and a text interface.

"Steve Jobs made an arrangement with Xerox and he took that concept [of the graphical user interface] and he improved it a hundred-fold," says Isaacson. "He made it so you could drag and drop some of the folders; he invented the pull-down menus. ... So what he was able to do was to take a conception and turn it into a reality."

That's where Jobs' genius was, Isaacson says. Jobs insisted that the software and hardware on Apple products needed to be fully integrated for the best user experience. It was not a great business model at first.

"Microsoft, which licensed itself promiscuously to all sorts of manufacturers, ends up with 90 to 95 percent all the operating system market by the beginning of 2000," says Isaacson. "But in the long run, the end-to-end integration system works very well for Apple and for Steve Jobs. Because it allows him to create devices [like the iPod and iPad] that just work beautifully with the machines."

Isaacson says working with Jobs gave him an additional insight into the design of Jobs' products.

"I see the depth of the simplicity," he says. "[I appreciate] the intuitive nature of the design, and how he would repeatedly sit there with his design engineers and his user-interface software people, and say, 'No, no no, I want to make it simpler.' I also appreciate the beauty of the parts unseen. His father taught him that the back of a fence or the back of a chest of drawers should be as beautiful as the front because [he] would know the craftsmanship that went into it. So somehow, it comes through — the depth of the beauty of the design."

Jobs was a perfectionist with a famously mercurial temperament. He was an artist and a visionary who "could be demanding and tough and irate," says Isaacson.

Interview Highlights

On what Jobs thought of the Microsoft operating system

Isaacson: "When it first came out — I can't use the words on the air — but [Jobs thought it was] clunky and not beautiful and not aesthetic. But as always is the case with Microsoft, it improves. And eventually Microsoft made a graphical operating system — Windows — and each new version got better until it was a dominating operating system."

On the rivalry between Jobs and Bill Gates

Hear Steve Jobs On Fresh Air

Listen to steve jobs' 1996 conversation with terry gross.

Isaacson: "There are all sorts of lawsuits where Apple is trying to sue Microsoft for Windows, for trying to steal the look and feel. Apple loses most of the suits but they drag on and there's even a government investigation. By the time Steve Jobs comes back to Apple in 1997, the relationship is horrible. 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 — both rivalry and partnership."

On the relationship between Jobs and Google

Isaacson: "I think there was an unnerving historic resonance for what had happened a couple of decades earlier [with Microsoft]. Suddenly you have Google taking the operating system of the iPhone and mobile devices and all of the touch-screen technologies and building upon it, and making it an open technology that various device makers could use. ... Steve Jobs felt very possessive about all of the look, the feel, the swipes, the multitouch gestures that you use — and was driven to absolute distraction when Android's operating system, developed by Google and used by hardware manufacturers, started doing the exact same thing. ... He was furious but that probably understates his feeling. He was really furious and he let Eric Schmidt, who was then the CEO of Google, know it."

Walter Isaacson is president and CEO of The Aspen Institute. His other books include Einstein: His Life and Universe; Benjamin Franklin : An American Life , and Kissinger: A Biography .

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On Jobs' adoptive parents

Isaacson: "When Steve got placed with [parents who were not college graduates], his biological mother initially balked at first but ... the Jobs family made a pledge that they would start a college fund and make sure that Steve went to college."

On approaching Isaacson to write his biography

Isaacson: "It was 2004 and he had broached the subject of doing a biography of him and I thought, 'Well, this guy's in the midst of an up-and-down career and he has maybe 20 years to go, so I said to him, 'I'd love to do a biography of you but let's wait 20 or so years until you retire.' Then off and on after 2004, we would be in touch. ...

"I finally talked to his wife, who was very good at understanding his legacy, and she said, 'If you're going to do a book on Steve, you can't just keep saying, 'I'll do it in 20 years or so.' You really ought to do it now.' This was 2009. Steve Jobs, that year, had had a liver transplant and I realized how sick he was. ... And so, that was when I realized that this was a very fascinating tale and this guy may or may not make it. I thought he was going to live much longer. But at the very least, he was facing the prospect of his mortality so it was time for him to be reflective and do a book."

On his final meeting with Jobs

Isaacson: "He was pretty sick. He was confined to the house. And he said to me, at the end of our long conversation, 'There will be things in this book I don't like, right?' And I said, 'Yes.' Partly because you can interview people right after a meeting they've had with Steve Jobs [and] you interview five people and get five different stories about what happened. ... People have different perceptions of who he is. ...

"He said, 'I'll make you this promise. I'm not going to read the book until next year, until after it comes out.' And it made me feel a grand emotion, of 'Oh! That's great. Steve is going to be alive for another year.' Because when you're around him, the power of his thinking really grabs you. I remember leaving his house and thinking, 'Oh, I'm so relieved. He'll be alive in a year. He just told me so.' Logically, I should have said, 'He doesn't know what ups and downs he's going to have with his health.' But I think that he always felt some miracle would come along because all of his life, miracles had come along."

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Steve Jobs Biography

Learn how Apple co-founder Steve Jobs revolutionized the computer industry.

Table of Contents

Steve Jobs was a computer designer, executive and innovator, as well as an all-around role model for many people in their professional and personal lives. As the co-founder of Apple Computers and the former chairman of Pixar Animation Studios, he revolutionized the computer and animation industries, amassing a fortune worth $10.2 billion at the time of his death. Jobs died at age 56 on Oct. 5, 2011, in Palo Alto, California, after battling pancreatic cancer for eight years.

Steve Jobs’ early life

Born in San Francisco, Jobs was adopted by an encouraging and loving family. He developed an interest in computers and engineering at a young age, inspired by his father’s machinist job and love for electronics. Growing up south of Palo Alto, Jobs was bright beyond comparison – his teachers wanted him to skip several grades and enter high school early, although his parents declined. When he did go to high school, Jobs met his future business partner, Steve Wozniak, with whom he bonded over their shared love for electronics and computer chips.

The start of Apple

After dropping out of college in his first semester, Jobs explored his spiritual side while traveling in India. It was through this spiritual enlightenment that Jobs’ work ethic and simplistic view toward life were developed. “That’s been one of my mantras – focus and simplicity,” he once said. “Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.”

Jobs began to move mountains at age 21 when he and Wozniak started Apple Computers in the Jobs family garage. To fund their venture, Jobs sold his Volkswagen bus and Wozniak sold his scientific calculator. This ended up being a good investment. Prior to Apple’s rise, computers were physically massive, expensive and not accessible by the everyday person. With Jobs heading up marketing and Wozniak in charge of technical development, Apple sold consumer-friendly machines that were smaller and cheaper, at only $666.66 each. The Apple II was more successful than the first model, and sales increased by 700%. On its first day of being a publicly traded company in 1980, Apple Computer had an estimated market value of $1.2 billion.

Apple resignation and Pixar beginnings

But this success was short-lived, even with the praise for Jobs’ latest design, the Macintosh. IBM was Apple’s stiffest competition, and it began to surpass Apple’s sales. After a falling out with Apple’s CEO, John Sculley, Jobs resigned in 1985 to follow his own interests. He started a new software and hardware company, NeXT Inc., and he invested in a small animation company, Pixar Animation Studios.

Pixar became successful thanks to Jobs’ tenacity and evolving management style. Toy Story , Pixar’s first major success, took four years to make while the then-unknown animation company struggled. Jobs pushed its progress along by encouraging and prodding his team in critical and often abrasive ways. While some found his management style caustic, he also earned loyalty from many team members. “You need a lot more than vision – you need a stubbornness, tenacity, belief and patience to stay the course,” Edwin Catmull, the co-founder of Pixar, told the New York Times. “In Steve’s case, he pushes right to the edge, to try to make the next big step forward.”

Return to Apple

While Pixar succeeded, NeXT, trying to sell its own operating system to American consumers, floundered. Apple bought the company in 1997, and Jobs returned to Apple as CEO. Working for an annual salary of $1 a year (in addition to the millions of Apple shares he owned), Jobs revitalized Apple, and under his leadership, the company developed numerous innovative devices – namely, the iPod, the iPhone, the iPad and iTunes. Apple revolutionized mobile communications, music and even how numerous industries, including retail and healthcare, carried out their everyday business operations. He showed a unique intuition when developing these products. When asked what consumer and market research went into the iPad, Jobs reportedly replied, “None. It’s not the consumers’ job to know what they want,” according to his New York Times obituary.

Jobs used his personal experiences, such as growing up in the San Francisco area in the ’60s and his world travel, to shape the way he designed the products that made Apple synonymous with success. He criticized the sheltered lives that characterized many in the computer industry. “[They] haven’t had very diverse experiences,” he told Wired . “So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.”

Death and legacy

In 2004, Apple announced Jobs had a rare but curable form of pancreatic cancer. This brush with death helped Jobs focus his energy on developing the Apple products that rose to such popularity in the 2000s.

“Almost everything – all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important,” he said in his 2005 commencement address at Stanford .

Though he was ill, it was during this time Apple launched some of its biggest (and most successful) creations. iTunes became the second-biggest music retailer in America, the MacBook Air revolutionized laptop computing, and the iPod and iPhone broke sales records while changing the way users consumed content and communicated with each other.

Jobs once said, “I want to put a ding in the universe.” After starting the personal computer revolution, launching the smartphone craze, changing the age of computer animation, and making technology popular and accessible, he made more than a ding.

Steve Jobs’ innovative leadership style

Jobs emphasized the importance of teamwork to his employees. Though he made the final decision on product designs, he knew the right people are a company’s greatest asset. “That’s how I see business,” he said in a 2003 60 Minutes interview . “Great things in business are never done by one person; they’re done by a team of people.” [Read our tips on improving the hiring process .]

At the same time, Jobs knew he had to be the best leader possible to his teams. According to Jobs’ work mantra and ethic, innovation is what distinguishes a leader from a follower. Thanks to Jobs’ expectation of high quality, almost every product he turned out was a huge success among consumers and businesses.

Steve Jobs’ impact

Steve Jobs is still recognized today for making positive impacts in a number of areas:

Helped the environment

Jobs’ innovation led to the creation of products that save trees and help the environment. In situations where someone would typically use paper, such as in a presentation or a script reading, technology on devices like the iPad replaced it. The iPhone and iPad – groundbreaking products that ushered in a new generation of smart mobile technologies – ensure “paperless” is more and more the status quo. [Learn how to create a paperless office for your business.]

Revolutionized technology

While the iPhone wasn’t the first smartphone, it catapulted the mobile revolution forward and gave more freedom to individuals in their professional and personal lives. With an iPhone, professionals could answer calls, respond to emails, join webinars and more from their cellular device – in addition to having immediate access to music, movies and messages that fulfill their personal likes, needs and passions. [These are the tech trends we’re seeing in 2024.]

Created a faster world

Today’s world is more instantaneous than ever before, thanks to advancements by Jobs. His innovations ensure productivity thrives, like being able to make an appointment or reservation from your mobile phone and use your iPad as a point-of-sale (POS) system . With Jobs’ technology, businesses and customers have much smoother and quicker interactions. [Don’t miss our picks for the best POS systems .]

Steve Jobs quotes

Jobs’ approach to innovation and business offers entrepreneurs industry-agnostic inspiration more than a decade after his death. Many of his quotes remain inspiring today:

• “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.”
• “Sometimes when you innovate, you make mistakes. It is best to admit them quickly, and get on with improving your other innovations.”
• “Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition.”
• “Technology is nothing. What’s important is that you have a faith in people, that they’re basically good and smart, and if you give them tools, they’ll do wonderful things with them.”
• “I’m convinced that about half of what separates successful entrepreneurs from the nonsuccessful ones is pure perseverance.”
• “Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.”
• “I’m as proud of many of the things we haven’t done as the things we have done. Innovation is saying no to a thousand things.”
• “Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren’t used to an environment where excellence is expected.”

Elaine J. Hom, Brittney Morgan and Jeanette Mulvey contributed to the writing and research in this article.

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Steve Jobs: The childhood of a great inventor

How did one curious child became the co-creator of one of the biggest tech companies in the world?

Robin Stevenson

In this extract from Kid Innovators , Robin Stevenson tells the story of a creative, rebellious child who grew up to change the world with the iPhone.

Steve Jobs is best known for Mac computers, iPhones, and iPads, but his innovative ideas also transformed the music, movie, and digital-publishing industries. As an adult, he was both brilliant and difficult. Even as a small child, he wanted to do things his own way.

Steve was born in San Francisco, on 24 February 1955. His birth parents were a graduate student named Joanna Schieble and a Syrian teaching assistant named Abdulfattah Jandali. Joanne and Abdullah had met at the University of Wisconsin, fallen in love, and traveled to Syria together. When Joanne became pregnant, they were not ready to become parents. Once back home, they decided to place their baby for adoption.

Paul and Clara Jobs had been wanting a child for many years before one finally came into their lives. They adopted Joanne and Abdullah’s son and named him Steven Paul. Steve grew into an active and curious toddler. Twice they had to rush him to the emergency room: one time because Steve had stuck a metal pin into an electric socket and burned his hand, and another time because he had eaten poison!

When Steve was two, his parents adopted a baby girl named Patty. Three years later, the family moved to the town of Mountain View, near Palo Alto, in California. Steve later said that his childhood home was one of the things that inspired him as a designer. “We had nice toasty floors when I was a kid,” he said, remembering the radiant heating in the house. “I love it when you can bring really great design and simple capability to something that doesn’t cost much.”

Steve always knew he was adopted. When he was about six years old, he told a little girl who lived across the street. “So, does that mean your real parents didn’t want you?” she asked. Steve ran home crying. His parents explained that was not the case at all. “We specifically picked you,” they said, speaking with great emphasis to make sure he understood. “I’ve always felt special,” Steve later said. “My parents made me feel special.”

The family’s house had a garage where Paul, a mechanic, could work on his cars. He marked off one section of a table and told Steve, “This is your workbench now.” Steve wasn’t interested in cars, but he liked spending time tinkering with his dad. When Paul went to the junkyard to look for parts, Steve went along. He admired his dad’s attention to detail. “He loved doing things right,” Steve said. “He even cared about the look of the parts you couldn’t see.”

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Growing up in Silicon Valley, Steve had many neighbours who worked as engineers. One of them, Larry Lang, became an important mentor. “What Larry did to get to know the kids in the block was rather a strange thing,” Steve explained. “He put out a carbon microphone and a battery and a speaker on his driveway where you could talk into the microphone and your voice would be amplified by the speaker.”

Steve’s father had told him that an electronic amplifier was needed to do this, but here was a system that worked without one. “I proudly went home to my father and announced that he was all wrong and that this man up the block was amplifying voice with just a battery,” he recalled. “My father told me that I didn’t know what I was talking about and we got into a very large argument.” So, Steve dragged his dad to Larry’s house so he could see it for himself.

Over the next few years, Larry taught Steve a lot about electronics. He introduced him to Heathkits, a type of kit with detailed instructions for making items like television receivers and radio equipment. Steve said that these kits not only taught him how things worked but also helped him develop a belief that even things that seemed complex – like televisions and radios – could be studied and understood.

Steve’s mom, Clara, taught him to read before he started kindergarten. In the classroom, though, Steve’s learning did not go smoothly. His first school was Monta Loma Elementary, just four blocks from his house. “I was kind of bored for the first few years, so I occupied myself by getting into trouble,” he admitted.

Steve’s best friend was a boy named Rick. One time, he and Rick made posters advertising “Bring Your Pet to School Day”. Kids showed up with their animals and chaos broke loose, with dogs chasing cats all over the school.

Another time, Steve and Rick persuaded the other students to tell them their bike lock combinations. Once they knew dozens of combinations, they undid the locks and switched them around. When school ended that day, the students couldn’t unlock their bikes. According to Steve, it took until ten o’clock that night to sort out the mess.

Another time, Steve let a snake loose in the classroom, and then he set off a small explosion under the teacher’s chair. By the end of third grade, Steve had been sent home from school several times. His parents didn’t punish him, though. They thought it was partly the school’s fault – Steve was misbehaving because he wasn’t being challenged in class. Steve agreed, saying that he was always being asked to “memorise stupid stuff.”

But being bored was only part of the problem. Steve also had a strong dislike for authority and hated being told what to do. Luckily, in fourth grade, he had a teacher who understood him. Mrs Hill started out by bribing Steve to do math problems, but before long, he was enjoying learning and wanted to please her. “I learned more from her than any other teacher,” Steve said. If it hadn’t been for Mrs Hill, he admitted, “I’m sure I would’ve gone to jail.”

Mrs Hill recognised that Steve needed to be challenged, and the school recommended that he skip two grades. His parents thought that was too much, but they agreed to let Steve move up from fourth grade to sixth. That meant switching to another school.

At Crittenden Middle School, the environment was much rougher, and fights were common. Being a year younger than the other students was hard, and Steve was often bullied. His sixth-grade report card noted that he had trouble getting motivated. Halfway through seventh grade, Steve decided he’d had enough.

“He came home one day,” recalled his father, “and said if he had to go back there again, he just wouldn’t go.” His parents decided to move to an area with better schools. They scraped together the money and bought a home in Los Altos, a few miles away.

In ninth grade, Steve started at Homestead High. The school had an electronics class with a well-equipped lab and a passionate teacher named Mr McCollum. But Steve, with his rebellious attitude and rejection of authority, clashed with the teacher. According to Mr McCollum, Steve was usually “off in a corner doing something on his own and really didn’t want to have much of anything to do with either me or the rest of the class.” Although he loved electronics, Steve dropped the course.

Outside school, however, Steve was beginning to find others who shared his interests. He joined the Explorer’s Club at Hewlett-Packard, where Larry Lang worked. The students met in the cafeteria, where engineers would talk to them about their projects: lasers, holography, light-emitting diodes. Steve was in heaven. It was at HP that he saw his first computer. “I fell in love with it,” he said.

Read more biographies of inventors:

• Nikola Tesla: A genius or a charlatan?
• Leonardo da Vinci's forgotten legacy
• John Bardeen: The greatest physicist you (probably) never heard of

Steve was also working on a project of his own: he wanted to build a frequency counter to measure the rate of pulses in an electronic signal. He didn’t have all the parts he needed, so he looked in the phone book for Bill Hewlett, the head of Hewlett-Packard, and called him at home. Not only did he get the parts he needed, but Bill also gave him a summer job in a factory that made frequency counters.

It was while he was still in high school that Steve Jobs met his future business partner, Steve Wozniak. Wozniak was five years older and highly adept with electronics. In fact, he had learned some of his skills in Mr McCollum’s class.

When Steve was twenty-one, he and Wozniak founded the Apple Computer Company. At first, they worked out of Steve’s bedroom, and later they moved the business into the Jobs family’s garage. Two years later, Steve had earned more than a million dollars – and by the time he was 25, he’d made over 250 million dollars.

Many of the things we use in our daily lives wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for Steve Jobs: Mac computers, iPhones, iPods and iPads, iTunes, Apple Stores, even Pixar’s Toy Story !

But money wasn’t what drove him. “You’ve got to find what you love,” he said. “Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking.”

Kid Innovators by Robin Stevenson is out now (£11.99, Quirk Books).

• Buy now from Amazon UK , Waterstones or Bookshop.org

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Introduction

Steven Paul Jobs was born on February 24, 1955, in San Francisco, California , U.S. He was adopted and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area. He had a younger sister, Patricia.

As a child, Steve liked reading, swimming, music, and practical jokes. He also spent a lot of time building electronics . As a young teenager, he got a summer job at an electronics company. In high school, he joined an electronics club whose members were called “wireheads.”

In 1972 Jobs went to college for less than a year. In 1974 he worked at Atari, a video-game company. Later that year he began working with an old friend named Stephen Wozniak.

Jobs and Wozniak built a computer in Jobs’s garage. They called it the Apple I. In 1977 the friends released the Apple II. Sales were so high that their company, also called Apple, soon became one of the top companies in the United States.

In 1984 Apple introduced the Macintosh, or Mac. It featured a mouse and a picture-based screen. The Mac did not sell as well as personal computers that used Microsoft software ( see Bill Gates ). The directors of Apple fired Jobs in 1985.

Jobs formed a new computer company called NeXT. He also bought Pixar, which made computer- animated movies. Pixar’s success made Jobs a billionaire.

By the mid-1990s, Apple was failing. In 1997 Jobs was asked to lead the company once again. His popular new products—including colorful iMac computers and laptops—saved Apple.

In 2001 Jobs introduced the iPod. It quickly became the top-selling portable music player. The iPhone was released in 2007. It could be used to make phone calls, access the Internet , play music, and more. In 2010 Apple began selling the iPad, a tablet computer.

As Apple’s success climbed, Jobs began to have health problems. He learned that he had cancer in 2003. Nevertheless, he remained in charge of the company until 2011. Jobs died on October 5, 2011, in Palo Alto, California. Nearly 11 years after his death, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. The medal is the highest nonmilitary award in the United States.

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Entrepreneurs

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.

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Luciano Benetton

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 (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 (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 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 (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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• 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.
• 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.
• Biological son of immigrants to the U.S., Syrian Abdul Fattah Jandali and German-Swiss Joanne Carol Schieble. He was placed for adoption at a very early age, where he was adopted by an Armenian-American couple, Paul and Clara Jobs, who raised him. As a result of his upbringing, Jobs was fluent in the Armenian language.
• [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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• Occupation: Entrepreneur and inventor
• Born: February 24, 1955 in San Francisco, California
• Died: October 5, 2011 in Palo Alto, California
• Best known for: Co-founding Apple Computers
• Jobs got the name for Apple Computers after spending some time at an apple orchard.
• The movie Brave from Disney Pixar was dedicated to Steve Jobs.
• Ashton Kutcher played the lead role in the 2013 film Jobs .
• He had four children including three daughters and a son.
• In 2013, Apple sold more than 350,000 iPhones a day.
• Fortune magazine named him as the "greatest entrepreneur of our time."
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Summary and Study Guide

Steve Jobs (2011) is an authorized biography written by Walter Isaacson about the life of the late Apple founder and tech revolutionary. Based on more than forty interviews with Jobs, the book is an in-depth exploration of who Jobs was, from the story of his birth and subsequent adoption to his massive success at the helm of Apple. Jobs himself personally requested that Isaacson write his biography on a phone call in 2004. By the time the book was published seven years later, Isaacson and Jobs had formed a special bond. The book went on to become a New York Times bestseller and was later adapted into a feature film in 2015 starring Michael Fassbender with a screenplay written by Aaron Sorkin.

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Isaacson introduces the book by describing how Jobs called him in 2004, requesting that he write his biography. Jobs was born to two graduate students who gave him up for adoption. His birth parents were adamant their son be raised by college graduates who would make his education a priority. Upon learning more about Paul and Clara Jobs, Steve’s adoptive parents, they agreed to allow the couple to adopt the boy with the promise that they would fund Steve’s education. Paul Jobs was a member of the US Coast Guard during the Second World War. His wife, Clara, was the daughter of Armenian refugees who fled the region during the Turkish conflict. The couple moved to San Francisco in 1952. The narrative then shifts to Jobs’s biological parents. His biological mother, Joanne Schieble, was a devout Catholic who fell in love with Abdulfattah Jandali, a teaching assistant from Syria. As her father forbade them to marry and abortion was frowned upon in their strict Catholic community, the couple decided to give their infant son up for adoption.

Isaacson chronicles Jobs’s relationship with his business partner and co-creator of Apple, Steve Wozniak (Woz). The two met while attending the same electronics class and soon realized that their ideas and goals were similar. Before long, the two developed a lasting friendship and a working relationship that would revolutionize the technology industry for decades to come.

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Chrisann Brennan became Jobs’s first girlfriend in 1972. Around this time, Jobs began experimenting with various changes to his lifestyle, including an exploration of vegetarianism and LSD. Jobs also entered college in 1972. His adoptive parents tried to convince him to attend Stanford or Berkeley, but Jobs had his eyes set on Reed College.

Jobs attended undergraduate school for two years until, in 1974, he left Reed College and began looking for work. Eventually, he landed a job at Atari. The author illustrates the somewhat flamboyant attitude that would follow Jobs throughout his life by recounting an instance at Atari where Jobs barged in and demanded he be hired. His attitude ostracized Jobs from the Atari culture; his supervisors relegated him to the night shift because of his body odor and the fact that no one wanted to work with him. However, Jobs’s time at Atari provided the blueprint for what would become a lifelong appreciation for mingling simplicity with elegant design.

The cultural climate of the early-mid 1970s had as much influence on Jobs as did his stints at various companies. Working at Hewlett-Packard gave him access to the resources and brainpower needed to perfect his initial designs. During this time, dissension began among the Apple co-founders, specifically Wozniak, whose father was concerned that his son would not receive the same equity and esteem as Jobs.

Notable in Jobs’s life at the start of Apple’s rise in the tech industry was Steve’s refusal to embrace his own daughter Lisa, who Chrisann had given birth to in 1978. Jobs denied he was the father, and ultimately was only convinced when a DNA test proved his paternity. Eventually, he would go on to have three more children during his marriage to Laurene Powell.

Despite personal and professional setbacks, Apple Computers skyrocketed in brand recognition and usability with the launch of the first Mac in 1984. Although the company experienced an initial loss of sales due to the ubiquity and market share of IBM, Jobs’s ingenuity and creative prowess provided the springboard for a marketing campaign that drastically increased the company’s popularity.

After chronicling the meteoric success that Apple would experience through the iMac, the iPod, and the iPhone , Isaacson concludes the book by reiterating Jobs’s position as one of the great innovators of the twentieth century. 

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In the days following October 5, 2011 – the day when Steve Jobs passed away, a cartoon picture was widely shared and emailed in the online world. Titled: Three Apples That Changed The World, the cartoon had caricatures of Eve, Isaac Newton and Steve Jobs. The very fact that the first two apples were connected with Steve Jobs’ Apple, implies that the last apple was equally impactful like the first two. The cartoon was an instant hit with the Twitter and Facebook users.

We have heard and read: what Eve made Adam do with the apple; what an apple falling from a tree led Newton to, but what Steve Jobs did with Apple is something we haven’t yet stopped talking about.

Steve Jobs, lesser known by his real name Steven Paul Jobs was the co-founder and chief executive officer of Apple and Pixar Animation Studio. In his influential career, the charismatic businessman and designer made remarkable contributions in the field of computer and consumer electronics. In 2006, when Disney acquired Pixar, he was on the board of directors of the Walt Disney Company. Through Apple products, he brought about personal computer revolution and also changed the way we perceived music, movies and mobile phones.

Joanne Schieble, daughter of Arthur Schieble, was a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin. Her father, a German descent, had immigrated to the outskirts of Green Bay. In the early days of settlement, the Schieble’s had owned a mink farm and also tried their hands in other businesses, including real estate and photoengraving.

Joanne had a Catholic upbringing. Her father was very particular about his daughter’s relationships. He had strongly disapproved her first love Abdulfattah Jandali because the boy was a non-Catholic. Abdulfattah Jandali, a Syrian and the youngest of the nine children of a Muslim family, worked at the University of Wisconsin as a teaching assistant. He hailed from a well-to-do family that had large holdings in Damascus and Homs. They were so rich and influential, that at one point of time they used to control the price of wheat in the region. His mother was a traditional Muslim woman and a conservative housewife. In the house of Jandali’s, education had always been of high importance. Hence, they sent their son Adulfattah to a Jesuit boarding school, later to an American University in Beirut for an undergraduate degree, and finally to the University of Wisconsin to pursue a doctoral degree in Political science.

Abdulfattah and Joanne met at the University of Wisconsin and fell in love. The thought of wedlock between a Muslim boy and a Catholic girl, in the conformist society of 1950s was unacceptable. But as they say, ‘love is blind,’ nothing could stop the new lovers. In the summer of 1954, when the couple was twenty-three, they went to Abdulfattah’s home in Homs, Syria. Here, Joanne learnt to cook Syrian dishes. When they returned after two months’ stay, Joanne discovered that she was pregnant. On one hand where a new life was on its way, on the other, Joanne’s father was dying. Joanne’s father, Arthur Schieble, was a conformist and he threatened to disown her if she married Abdulfattah. A pregnant Joanne found herself into a fine kettle of fish. As the society would not accept a child outside marriage and the Catholic Church condemned abortion, she moved to San Francisco. There, she was taken in by a doctor who took care of unmarried mothers and helped with adoptions.

On 24 th February, 1955, Joanne delivered a baby boy. But understanding the critical situation of her father’s health, she did not want to upset things for him and so she put the child out for adoption. However, her only condition was that the child must be adopted by college graduates. A lawyer and his wife came forward to adopt the child, but backed out saying they wanted a girl. The next couple – Paul and Clara Jobs – were high school dropouts, Paul had passion for mechanics and Clara was a bookkeeper. Learning that the couple were school dropouts, Joanne took time to sign the adoption paper. On the back of her mind, she was speculating that in case her father passed away, she could keep the child with her. To put it in famous singer John Lennon’s words: Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans. Her father stayed around. After much of dawdling, Joanne finally signed the adoptions papers with a promise that the adoptive parents would provide the child with a college education. Arthur Schieble died after the adoption was settled. After almost nine years into marriage, the Jobs’ – Clara and Paul had in their arms their bundle of joy; they named him Steven Paul Jobs.

After dad’s death in August 1955, Joanne married Abdulfattah just after Christmas. A year later, their second child was born, who later grew up to become an acclaimed novelist Mona Simpson. However, the marriage was short lived and the divorce soon followed in the year 1962.

Paul Reinhold Jobs, Steve’s adoptive father was of German origin. He had a calm and gentle disposition, despite of being broght up by an alcoholic father. Paul was raised on a dairy farm in a German town, Wisconsin. He dropped out of high school, did a few mechanic jobs and at the age of nineteen, joined the Coast Guard. He was a fine machinist and a ‘used-car’ salesman. After serving the Coastal Guard during the World War II, Paul took up a job with a finance company. He was in ‘bad debts collection’ section. In his spare time, he fixed used-cars and sold them. The profit he made from selling these cars would go to Steve’s future college fund. Clara, an Armenian-American was born in New Jersey. When she was a child, her parents fled Armenia to escape the Turks and settled in the Mission District of San Francisco. Clara had a past which she did not speak about when she met Paul. Her husband of the first marriage was killed in the war. As she wanted to make a new start with Paul, she felt it was not important to tell him about it.

The inevitable aftereffect of World War II was felt by most people. The Jobs’ were no exception to it. They had little money so they moved to Wisconsin and put up at Paul’s parents’ place for a few years. Paul then worked with International Harvester as a machinist and later took up a full time job as a salesman. With nine years of marriage behind them, there was still something missing. Clara was suffering from an ectopic pregnancy. Under this, the fertilized egg got implanted in the fallopian tube instead of the uterus and therefore the pregnancy could never complete its term. Finally, the couple decided to adopt one more child.

Now that Steve was two years old, the Jobs decided to adopt a girl. They named her Patty. The kids were growing, Steve was five and Patty three when Clara thought it would be better to have them raised in San Francisco. Somehow, she managed to get Paul and the kids move into a tract house in Mountain View, San Francisco.

Childhood memories make some of the finest wallpapers of our life. Little Steve, what his parents and teachers recall, was a curious child, much advance for his age. His curiosity would get him into situations that would end up into hospital visits. Once he had inserted a hairpin into an electrical outlet and got his hand burned.

In another instance, he had taken in ant poison. Rearing a child like Steve wasn’t easy. His mother once confided that as a toddler, Steve was very difficult to handle. He would wake up in the morning before the rest of the house. Thus to keep him busy, his parents made sure they bought him a rocking horse, a record player and some Little Richard’s records. When Steve grew a bit older, his father put up a workshop for him in the garage. He showed Steve the workshop and said, “ Steve this is your work bench now. ” He gave his son a tool kit and showed him how to use the hammer. Steve remembers spending a lot of time with his dad, learning how to ensemble and reassemble parts of objects. He was impressed with his father’s skillful craftsmanship and fastidious attention to details.

His father emphasized on the importance of doing things right. His father would say, “When you’re a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you’re not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You’ll know it’s there, so you’re going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back .” Steve would later apply this lesson over and over again in the designs of Apple products.

Steve vividly remembers, he was six or seven years old, and he was telling the girl who lived across the street that his parents never hid the fact of him being adopted from anyone. To which the girl asked, “So, does that mean your real parents didn’t want you?” This question hit him badly. Steve said, “ Lightening bolts went off in my head and I remember running into the house, crying. My parents said, ‘No, you have to understand.’ They were very serious and looked me straight in the eye. They said, ‘We specifically picked you out.’ Both of my parents said that and repeated it slowly for me. And they put an emphasis on every word in that sentence. ”

The feeling of being adopted made Steve feel ‘ abandoned yet chosen and special ’. His closest friends say that the knowledge of being given up at birth left some scars. They would say, that his need for control grew out of deep sense of abandonment. While talking to his biographer about him being adopted, Steve said, “ Knowing I was adopted may have made me feel more independent, but I have never felt abandoned. I always felt special. My parents made me feel special. ”

Later, when Steve was asked by the media about his “adoptive parents,” he snapped at them saying, “ They were my parents 1,000%. ” About his biological parents, he was brusque: “ They were my sperm and egg bank. That’s not harsh, it’s just the way it was, a sperm bank thing, nothing more.”

Steve’s parents observed that he was an exceptionally bright child. On learning that Steve was interested in reading, his mother taught him to read even before he could learn it at school. But then, learning to read even before his other classmates, put his teacher in a tight spot. They would find it difficult to keep him interested in things he already knew. As a result, he would find school dull and boring. To make things fun, he would play pranks on his classmates and teachers.

Many of the Monta Loma Elementary School kids rode bikes to school and would lock them up in racks outside. In 3 rd grade when Steve was eight years old, he and his friends traded the combination of their bike lock with many of their classmates. One day, Steve and his friends switched the locks around and guess what, until about ten o’clock that night his schoolmates were busy sorting out their bikes. Steve wouldn’t even spare the teachers. Once, he and his friends let a snake loose in the classroom and planted a small

explosion under the teacher’s chair. On two or three accounts, he was sent home. However, he doesn’t remember being ever punished. In fact, he remembers his father defending him, saying, “ If you can’t keep him interested, it’s your fault .”

In 4 th grade, Steve met the saint of his life, his teacher – Imogene “Teddy” Hill. Mrs. Hill was very kind with Steve and she showered all her attention on him. One day, she asked her students, “What is that you don’t understand about the universe?” Her precocious student, young Steve answered, “ I don’t understand why all of a sudden my dad is so broke ”, this reply made Mrs. Hills realize the trauma little Steve was going through at such a young age, and which could possibly have been one of the reasons why he could not concentrate in class.

Within a few weeks Mrs. Hill figured out how to keep her unusual student interested. She offered Steve a deal: if he could finish a math workbook on his own and get at least 80 percent correct answers, she would give him five dollars and a giant lollipop. Steve looked at her like he wanted to say ‘Are you a crazy lady?’ However, he accepted the challenge. With time, Steve developed respect and admiration for Mrs. Hill and thus, he started doing the assignments given to him without any bribe. She once even presented him with a kit for making a camera by grinding his own lens; this was Mrs. Hill’s love for Steve.

Years later, when Mrs. Hill met Steve’s co-workers at Apple, she entertained them by showing a photo of her class on Hawaiian Day. In the photo, Steve was wearing a Hawaiian shirt which he had managed to borrow from his classmate. Steve said: “ I learned more that year than I think I learned in any year in school .” He added, “ I’m one hundred per cent sure that if it hadn’t been for Mrs. Hill in fourth grade and few other teachers, I would have absolutely ended up in jail.”

Steve now found school interesting and his performance was on track. In fact, he had scored so high in his tests that the school officials recommended him to skip a couple of grades. However, his parents let him skip just one grade, not two. He moved to grade six.

As Steve recalls, “ I just wanted to do two things; read books because I loved reading and go outside and chase butterflies .” Steve was an extreme deviation from the mean and did not like to follow instructions.

Later in Apple, there were number of instances where he showed this characteristic: With the introduction of floppy drive, he got the 5 ¼ inches floppy drive replaced with the 3 ½ inches and later designed diskless computers. As far as stylus was concerned, he was not in favour of using stylus for mobiles. He said, “ When God has given 10 styluses then why do you need extra. ” So you see, he would not do things just because other were doing them.

Middle school, academically was tougher. But, the precociousness of Steve still persisted. His sixth-grade report read: “An excellent reader”. However, it further added: “he has great difficulty motivating himself or seeing the purpose of studying and reading.”

Apparently in seventh grade, things became different. There was a much rougher crowd in class and since Steve had skipped one grade, he was the youngest among the lot. His classmates bullied him and fights began to be a common thing. By the mid-term of his seventh grade, Steve felt miserable. In somewhat of an ultimatum to his parents, he said that if he had to go back to school there again, “ he just wouldn’t go .”

Steve’s parents then weren’t well-off financially, so to move into a newer place was not an easy thing to do. Somehow, they pulled in together whatever little they had and bought a three-bedroom home in Los Altos, a city in Santa Clara County, California. Los Altos is at the southern end of the San Franciscan Peninsula, in the San Francisco Bay Area. The Santa Clara County, in early 1950s came to be known as the Silicon Valley, after a number of semi-conductor companies sprouted up across the Bay Area. Thus, Steve was lucky to be growing up in a neighborhood packed full of engineers and tinkerers.

Talking about his old house, Steve said, “ The place formerly was an orchard of apricot, when I moved here, these corners were still orchards, ” And pointing out to a house, he added, “ The guy who lived right there taught me how to be a good organic gardener and to compost. He grew everything to perfection, I never had better food in my life. That’s when I began to appreciate organic fruits and vegetables. ”

When it came to faith, the Jobs’ were not fervent about their faith. But they wanted their kids to have a religious upbringing. They took them to the Lutheran church on Sundays. Until he was thirteen, Steve was regular with his church visits. Then, something happened and he left the church.

In July 1968, Life magazine published a shocking cover page – a picture of a pair of starving children in Biafra. Badly shaken by the picture, Steve took the magazine to Sunday school. He asked the church’s pastor: “ If I raise my finger, will God know which one I’m going to raise even before I do it? ” The pastor answered, “Yes, God knows everything.” Steve then pulled out the magazine and showing the cover page to the pastor he asked, “ Well, does God know about this and what’s going to happen to those children? ” The pastor replied, “Steve, I know you don’t understand, but yes, God knows about that.” And after that episode, Steve never went back to the church. He was clear that henceforth, he will have nothing to do with worshipping such God. He nourished his spirituality quotient by studying and engaging into practices of Eastern spirituality and the tenets of Zen Buddhism.

Years later, while reflecting on his spiritual feeling, Steve said: “ Religion is at its best when it emphasizes spiritual experiences rather than received dogmas. ” He told his biographer, Walter Isaacson, “ 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 .”

Steve was in the 9th grade when his father started working for a company called Spectra-Physics. The company made lasers for electronics and medical products. As a machinist at Spectra-Physics, Steve’s father crafted the prototypes of products that the engineers were devising. Now, his fourteen year old son had grown up and no more shared similar interests in mechanics. But, he made sure to get Steve electronic gizmos from time to time. Steve had few friends of his age so he began to hang out with some seniors who were into the counterculture of the late 1960s. With counter culture came the Hippies and trend of free expressions and drugs. Steve later began to take LSD, an illegal drug and drop acid with his friends.

In the year June 2005, as a commencement speaker for a college graduation ceremony, Steve Jobs told three stories from his life. Story One : ‘Connecting the dots’ which was about him being adopted and his college life; story Two: ‘Love and Loss’ which was about being lucky to have love come into his life early, and unlucky, for not having it stay for long. It also revealed about the creation of Apple and being fired from Apple, and lastly, story Three: ‘Death’, which was about his fight against cancer. He ended his speech on a profound note: “Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish”. According to Steve, “ The journey is the reward .” To know how this journey started, we will learn about it dot-by-dot and as we learn more, we will be able to connect the dots better.

Living in a fine neighborhood of engineers, there were high chances of running into one as well. One such engineer which Steve ran into, was Larry Lang, in whom he found a mentor. Lang intrigued him with an old-fashioned carbon microphone set up in his driveway that did not need an electronic amplifier. Seeing young Steve fascinated and all lit up, Lang introduced him to Heathkits. The assemble-it-yourself kits – Heathkits came with all the boards and parts color-coded. It also had the manuals explaining the theory of its operation. Steve said about them, “[ no doubt] You actually paid more money for them than if you just went and bought the finished products. ” He recalled, “ It made you realize that you could build and understand anything. Once you built a couple of radios, you’d see a TV in the catalogue and say, ‘I can build that as well’ even if you didn’t. I was very lucky, because when I was a kid both my dad and the Heathkits made me believe I could build anything. ” In elaborating on what these kits did to him, Steve said, “ It gave a tremendous level of self-confidence that, through exploration and learning, one could understand seemingly very complex things in one’s environment. ”

In what could be seen as an add-a-friend instance, Larry Lang added Steve to the Hewlett Packard Explorers Club. The club was a group of fifteen or so students and they met in the company cafeteria on Tuesday nights. The club would arrange for an engineer from one of the labs to come and talk about his work. Steve recalled, “ My dad would drive me there .” It was during one of those visits that Steve saw a desktop computer for the first time – the 9100A. “ It was huge maybe forty pounds, but it was a thing of beauty. I fell in love with it ”, Steve added.

At the Explorers Club, the kids were encouraged to do projects. Steve decided to build a frequency counter. This would measure the number of pulses in an electric signal. While working on it, Steve needed some parts that HP manufactured, so he looked up for Bill Hewlett in Palo Alto, California and called him at home. Mr. Hewlett not only answered the call, but also chatted with him for twenty minutes. By the end of it, Steve got the parts he was looking for and a job in the plant where they made frequency counters. He worked there the summer after his freshman year at Homestead High in 1968.

In the late1940s, three scientists : John Bardeen, Walter Brattain and William Shockley invented the transistor. They were working at the famous telecommunication service company, AT&T. This tiny device could direct and amplify electrons. It was built around a material called “semi-conductor.” This was neither a proper insulator nor a conductor and it could send electric current in one direction, but not the other. The semi conducting material was popularly known as a ‘semiconductor’ or ‘chip’.

Semiconductor changed the dynamics in the field of electronics. By replacing the bulkier and less reliable vacuum tubes, the chip was the most manufactured piece of electronics in Silicon Valley. With this material, the scientists and engineers could come up with smaller gadgets such as pocket transistor radios, palm size calculators and eventually a computer.

Semiconductor unfolded a world of possibilities. More and more manufacturers got into manufacturing chips and circuits. The new housing developments replaced the orchards in the valley, and the valley soon turned into the land of chip makers. Thus, the area soon came to be known as the Silicon Valley.

During sophomore year, the fourteen year old Steve took up a job of stock clerk at a cavernous electronic store, Haltek. He spent weekends and the summer working at the store. Here he learnt a great deal about electronic parts. He would go to electronic flea market, haggle for used circuit boards that contained valuable chips or components, buy them and then sell them to his manager at Haltek. It can be said that Steve’s negotiating skills and sense of business dynamics were first spotted here.

The man, who in times to come would own Mercedes and BMWs, had a two tone Nash Metropolitan as his first car. Steve’s father presented him a used-car, after fixing it’s engine . He thought it was an uncool car, but did not want to tell this to his father as it would have meant missing out on the chance of owning a car. However, within a year, Steve saved up enough from his various jobs and got himself a red Fiat 850 coupe with an Abarth engine.

During the summer between his sophomore and junior years at Homestead, Steve began smoking marijuana. On finding some dope in his Fiat, his father asked, “What is this?” Steve coolly replied, “ That’s marijuana .” This was one of the few times when Steve had to face his father’s anger; “ I got stoned for the first time that summer. I was fifteen, and then began using pot regularly. He wanted me to promise that I’d never use pot again, but I wouldn’t promise. ” In his senior years, Steve started dabbling in hash as well. However, during the last two years in high school he found himself at an intersection. Besides being geekily immersed in electronics, he was also into literature and creative endeavors. “ I started to listen to music a whole lot, and also started to read more, besides science and technology – Shakespeare, Plato. I loved King Lear. ”

During the junior years, Steve’s classmate, Bill Fernandez became a good friend of his. Together, they worked on science fair projects and shared other interests. Steve was known for his long walks; he would go for long walks to talk about his big ideas and difficult matters. He and Bill would go for such walks in the evening and talk about all sort of serious matters, from Vietnam War to girls, from drugs to religion, etc. “ We were both interested in the spiritual side of things, and big questions like: Who are we? What is it all about? What does it mean? ” Fernandez said, “ Mostly it was Steve who would do the talking…He would have a grand passion of the day, or something that was on his mind, and he would bend my ear for hours as we walked. ”

Bill began spending his evenings and weekends helping his neighbor Steve Wozniak build a small computer in Wozniak’s garage. Steve Wozniak, a computer engineer and programmer later became the co-founder of Apple Computer. Wozniak created the Apple I computer and also its successor, the Apple II. His works and creations significantly contributed to the microcomputer revolution era. That was a short snippet on Steve Wozniak.

Picking up from where we left – Wozniak was also known as Woz in his friend circle. He was building a small computer in his garage. He was almost five years older than Steve and was his senior at Homestead High. Woz was a star student; he was good at Maths, Science and Electronics.

Steve and Fernandez were deeply into electronics, but Woz was way deeper into it; he was obsessed with the computer. He used to collect and study manuals that would explain how minicomputers worked and would also study their components and connections. And just for fun, he would sketch out designs that would allow him to build it with fewer parts. Woz was in his senior year when he visited the University of Colorado. Apparently, it was the Thanksgiving weekend and everything was closed for holidays. However, in the campus, he found an engineering student who showed him the lab. Moving from Homestead High to University of Colorado wasn’t an affordable option for the Wozniak’s. It was not within their capacity to pay for the out-of-state tuition fee. However, Woz’s father made a deal that he would be allowed to go for one year, but would have to transfer to De Anza Community College back home, the next year.

Bill Fernandez began spending more evenings and weekends at Steve Wozniak’s place, helping him build a small computer. Finally, after putting together the spare parts, they built a computer that had memory good enough to hold 256 typed characters. There was no keyboard or screen connected to it and the memory was too little to do simple math, but still, it could run a program. Woz would write small programs on punch cards that prompted the computer to beep every three seconds or perform a function by flashing lights attached to the front. Wozniak recalled, “ It was basically a calculator capable of multiplying numbers entered by a set of switches and displaying the results in binary code with little lights.”

While they were working on building the computer, they drank large amounts of Cragmont cream soda and would ride their bikes to Sunnyvale Safeway to return the bottles, collect the deposits and buy more soda. “ That’s how we started referring to it as the Cream Soda Computer. ” Wozniak recalled.

Fernandez told Wozniak that there was someone at Homestead he should meet. “ His name is Steve. He likes to pull pranks on people like you do, and he’s also into building electronics like you. ” Wozniak recalled, “ Steve and I just sat on the sidewalk in front of Bill’s house for the longest time, just sharing stories – mostly about pranks we’d pulled and also what kind of electronics designs we’d done. We had so much in common. Typically, it was really hard for me to explain to people what kind of design I worked on, but Steve got it right away and I instantly liked him. He was kind of skinny and wiry and full of energy. ”

When Jobs was asked about the first time the two Steves’ met, he replied, “ Woz was the first person I’d met who knew more electronics than I did. ” He added further, “ I liked him right away. I was little more mature than my years, and he was a little less mature than his, so it evened out. Woz was very bright, but emotionally he was of my age. ” They would hang out together. It was Wozniak who introduced Steve to Bob Dylan’s music and powerful lyrics. They both became such big fans of Dylan that they would together hunt down for Dylan’s tapes.

Jobs formed a club at Homestead High – the Buck Fry Club. They played on the principal’s name Mr. Bryald and coined the name for the club. Even though Wozniak and his friend Allen Baum had already graduated, they joined forces with Jobs at the end of his junior year to come up with a farewell gesture for his seniors. Baum had tied-dyed with the school’s green and white colors and they painted a huge hand flipping middle-finger salute.

It was Baum’s mother who helped them draw it and showed them how to do the shading and shadows to make it look more real. The entire arrangement was done in such a way that a system of ropes and pulley could dramatically lower the banner as the graduation class marched past the balcony. The banner read “SWAB JOB,” the initials of Steve Wozniak, Allen Baum and Steve Jobs. Are you wondering if this act irked the school authorities? Yes, it did. Steve Jobs was suspended!

Among other pranks, Wozniak had built a pocket device that could emit TV signal. The device was an oscillator and it would jam television signals. Woz took it to the dorm where a group of people were watching TV. He would secretly hit the button and the screen would get all fuzzy with static. The minute someone would get up to whack the TV set, Woz would release the button and the picture would get restored. To make things more annoying, he would keep the picture fuzzy for a longer time, until one of the viewers would touch the antenna. He made them think that they had to hold the antenna while standing on one foot or touching the top of the set. Years later, at a keynote presentation, Jobs was having some trouble in getting a video to work. While the technicians were fixing it, he could not stop himself from sharing Woz’s prank with the audience.

Wozniak left to study engineering at Berkley, Michigan apparently around the time, when the magazine Esquire ran an interesting story on “Captain Crunch.” The title of the story was “Secrets of the Little Blue Box” written by Ron Rosenbaum. It described how Captain Crunch built electronic boxes that mimicked the tone used by the phone network’s call-routing switches. So what about it? With the help of this box, you could get free access to the long distance system and make long distance call without extra charge. It also told how hackers and phone phreakers had found ways to make long distance call for free. Wozniak’s mother thought that this would interest her son, so she sent him a copy of the magazine.

Wozniak recalled, “ Halfway through the article, I had to call my best friend, Steve Jobs and read parts of this long article to him. ” For the next few months, they ran through books and journals at technical libraries looking for information they could use to build their own blue boxes, which finally they did in 1971. To add to their thrill, they found the man behind Captain Crunch - John Draper. He worked at a Cupertino Radio station. He had discovered that the sound emitted by the toy whistle that came with the breakfast cereal was similar to the phone network’s call-routing switches.

The blue box that Wozniak built was smaller than John Draper’s Blue Box. It was cleverly designed and required $40 worth of parts instead of Draper’s $1500. If you remember, Steve had built a frequency counter, a device that could measure the pulse in an electrical signal. Using the frequency counter, they tried to calibrate the desired tones. But unfortunately, the oscillators that Woz used were not quite stable enough to replicate the right chirps and fool the phone company. Wozniak recalled, “ We could see the instability using Steve’s frequency counter, we just couldn’t make it work. I had to leave for Berkley the next morning, so we decided I would work on building a digital version once I got there. ”

Thanksgiving Day was round the corner and Wozniak was out with the digital version of Blue Box. He built it using electronic components such as diodes and transistors from an electronic company Radio Shack. Now all he required was, a perfect sound pitch. With the help of a music student in his dorm he got the required pitch he was looking for.

Ta-da! Wozniak picked up the box and drove down to Steve’s home at Santa Clara all the way from Berkley. They tried the first call to Wozniak’s uncle in Los Angeles, but the reply from the opposite end was “Sorry wrong number.”

In the bubble above their heads, you could read, “Wrong number, who cares, as long as the device works”. For them, nothing mattered as long as the box was working. Now with a box like this in the hands of pranksters what do you expect? Wozniak would shout, “ Hi! We’re calling you for free! We’re calling you for free! ” That was not all; they always took their gags to the next level. What do you think they did next?

They called the Vatican with Woz pretending to be Henry Kissinger( the secretary of State during President Nixon’s term) and said: “Ve are at de summit meeting in Mo scow, and ve need to talk to the pope. ” The answer from the opposite end was that it was 5:30 a.m. and the pope was sleeping. They tried calling back and this time it was a bishop on the line and again they missed on connecting with the pope. Steve recalled, “ They realized that Woz wasn’t Kissinger, we were at a public phone booth. ”

What Wozniak saw as an invention, Steve looked at it as a business opportunity. “ Let’s sell these ”, Steve said. Like the other phone phreaks such as “Captain Crunch”, Wozniak and Steve went by the pseudonym “Berkley Blues” and “Oaf Tobark” respectively.

They took the blue boxes to college dorms, gave strations and attracted good business. They sold these boxes for $150 to students and $300 to others. Concurrently, Wozniak was working on lowering the cost of the parts from $80 to $40. In one of the early joint ventures of Steve and Wozniak, the blue box can be said to be the early signs of Apple in the making. To put it in other words, the Apple came out of the box – the blue box.

It was the year 1971 and the end of high school days for Steve was nearing. He began to display the traits of a rebel. He began to experiment with his eating patterns by taking up to fasting and compulsive diets. He would eat only fruits and vegetables. He had a tendency of having one or two foods occasionally, like carrot and apple for weeks at a time. Steve also spent some time as a fruitarian, which meant that he ate only fruits, nuts, vegetables and grains. He believed that his commitment to vegan diets would enable his body to flush out mucus and make him odour free. And consequently, he would not need to use a deodorant or shower daily. Yes, it is weird but true, the man who gave us Apple products wouldn’t bathe for days. Sometimes, he would turn to fasting for days to create a feeling of euphoria and ecstasy which according to the dieticians and food experts was – experiencing ketosis. It develops after a period of fasting and can create mild euphoria. There were times when Steve would have bizarre diets like ‘The Roman meals that would consist of whole-grain cereals topped with milk from campus cafeteria.’His girl friend, Chrisann Brennan, whom he had met in the same university he studied in, recalled, “He shuffled around and look half mad.” He was skinny , had shoulder-length hair, scraggly beard and to add to it was the odd mix of intensity and aloofness. He would stare at people without blinking and sometimes use long silences in his staccato burst of fast talking. At times, he would be all charismatic and at times, creepy. If that’s not all, then in one of his stress relieving acts, he would sit on the toilet tank with his feet in the bowl and flush it. Ewww…!!! Brennan recalls that when they were together, he was quite, shy and funny. He was a teenager who loved poetry, Dylan and strumming his guitar.

“He told me on our first date that he would be a millionaire someday and I believed him.” Brennan added, “Steve could see the future.”

The rebellious seventeen year old Steve never liked to follow instructions. According to him, instructions were meant for others, not for him. The school year ended and the summer of 1972 was here. After graduation, Steve announced to his parents, “ I’m going to go live in a cabin with Chrisann. ” His father got furious as they had already fought over marijuana, and to add to that he came up with something rebellious again. His father in reply said, “Over my dead body.” But Steve just said goodbye and walked out. The owner of the cabin initially turned him down, but Steve wasn’t the one who would take no for an answer and he kept trying. The landlord finally rented him the room.

Steve, Brennan, Wozniak and other friend learned through California’s De Anza community college bulletin board that the Westgate Shopping Center in San Jose was looking out for college students who could dress up in costumes and amuse the kids. For $3 an hour, Steve, Wozniak and Brennan dressed up in the costumes of characters of the famous fairy tale Alice in Wonderland . Brennan played Alice and the boys played Mad Hatter and White Rabbit in turns.

Wozniak found it to be fun but Steve didn’t; after all they were donning huge heads that reached to their knees and it was pretty stuffy inside. Recalling how annoying it was, Steve said, “ It was hot, the costumes were heavy and after a while I felt like I wanted to smack some kids. ”

When Steve was put up for adoption, his biological mother had taken a promise from Paul and Clara, his adoptive parents, to provide the boy with college education. So, they worked hard and saved for their son’s college fund. At first, the willful Steve toyed with the idea of not going to college at all. However, on his parents’ insistence, he applied only to Reed College, a private liberal arts school in Portland, Oregon. He had his own take on the schools in the neighborhood. He did not consider public university like Berkeley even though it was an affordable option and was also the school where his friend Wozniak studied. Nor did he look at Stanford College that was just up the road and the most popular option among his classmates. He could have easily earned a scholarship and enrolled at Stanford. He said, “ The kids who went to Stanford, they knew what they wanted to do. ” Steve wanted something more artistic and interesting.

Reeds, compared to Homestead High, was a small set up. With only one thousand students, it was half the number of students at Homestead. Reeds had the reputation of attracting free thinkers and seekers. Steve was all set to get into Reed. But the tuition fee and school fee was more than his parents’ affordability. “Steve said that it was the only college he wanted to go to,” Steve’s mother recollects. Finally, his parents gave in and managed to arrange the money for his first semester.

The Jobs’ like any supportive parents were excited about their son’s college education. They drove him up to Portland. But after reaching the campus, Steve behaved in an irritable manner and spoke sharply. Neither did he let them come on campus nor did he say goodbye or thank you. While telling his biographer, he said that he recounted the moment later with utter regret. “ It’s one of the things in life I really feel ashamed about. I was not very sensitive, and I hurt their feelings. I shouldn’t have. They had done so much to make sure I got there, but I just didn’t want them around. I didn’t want anyone to know I had parents. I wanted to be like an orphan who had bummed around the country on trains and just arrived out of nowhere, with no roots, no connections, no background. ”

Here at Reed, Steve was all out to have an unusual college experience. He had expected a looser culture, whereas Reeds had demanding academic standards. The freshmen here were required to go through a serious reading list in the first semester. He would bitterly complain to his friend Wozniak, “They are making me take all these courses.” Steve always did what he wanted. With the idea to meet girls, he signed up for dance classes.

The popular track ‘The Times They Are A-Changing’ sung by Steve and Wozniak’s favorite singer Bob Dylan was out in the market. It was Dylan’s third studio album. Much to the times of late 1972, there was a fundamental change taking place in the American campus life. The country was involved in the Vietnam War, political activities at colleges retreated and many late night dorm conversations were replaced by an interest in inward fulfillment.

With ‘the times they are a-changing’, Steve found himself in the alleys of spiritualism. He was into spirituality and enlightenment in a big way. He would read lot into spiritualism and was impressed by Baba Ram Dass’ Be Here Now , a guide to meditation and the wonders of psychedelic drugs ( a chemical substance that crosses the blood–brain barrier and acts primarily upon the central nervous system where it affects brain function, resulting in alterations in perception, mood, consciousness, cognition and behavior).

The week after Steve arrived at Reed, he met Daniel Kottke. The two of them connected well because of the common denominator – Zen ( a Japanese school of Buddhism emphasizing the value of meditation and intuition rather than ritual worship or study of scriptures), Bob Dylan and Acid –that they shared. Besides this, they practiced meditation and read the book “Diet for a Small Planet” written by Francis Moore Lappe in 1971. They became committed vegetarians. Steve began spending much of his time with Kottke and his girlfriend Elizabeth Holmes. They hitchhiked to the coast, attended love festivals at the local Hare Krishna temple and went to Zen center for free vegetarian meals. Steve would share with Kottke his reading list on Zen books and enjoy playing a nineteenth-century German variant of chess called Kriegspiel.

Another friend which Steve made at Reed was the charismatic Robert Friedland. He was the campus leader and a salesman. He was behind the bars for two years for possession of LSD. Steve was enthralled by this campus leader who was four years elder to him. Like Steve, Friedland too was into Zen. The Zen triangle was now made up of Steve, Kottke and Friedland. The three of them were deeply into eastern spirituality. During the summer of 1973, Friedland travelled to India to meet Ram Dass’ Hindu guru – Neem Karoli Baba. When he returned in the fall, he took a spiritual name and walked around in sandals and Indian robes. Steve was entranced by Friedland’s conviction and it made him believe that the state of enlightenment truly existed and was attainable. “ He turned me on to a different level of consciousnes ” , Steve said. According to Kottke, Friedland had influenced Steve to a great extent. He recalled, “When I first met Steve he was shy and self effacing, a very private guy. I think Robert taught him a lot about selling, about coming out of his shell, opening up and taking charge of situation.” Friedland had this inescapable aura. “He would walk into a room and you would instantly notice him. Steve was absolute opposite when he came to Reed. After he spent time with Robert, some of it started to rub off.”

During the school days, it was difficult to keep Steve interested all the time. This problem persisted even in the college days. At Reed, Steve would enjoy dance classes and meeting girls, but wouldn’t like to attend classes he was assigned to. As a result, his grades weren’t good and his parents weren’t happy with him. They spent so much money on his education but did not find its returns worthwhile. Steve felt guilty about the whole thing and said, “ All of my working-class parents’ savings were being spent on my college tuition.” After weighing the situation, Steve felt lost and decided to drop out.

Talking about this decision in his famous commencement speech at Stanford, he said, “ I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust in myself, that it would work out okay. ” In retrospect, he added further, “ it was one of the best decisions I ever made .”

After dropping out what next? “ The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn’t interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting ”, Steve said. It was the calligraphy class that caught his interest. He liked the posters on campus and saw something that others didn’t. “ I learned about serif and sans serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating .” The calligraphy course had a significant impact on the products he later created. “ If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. ” Steve believed in the intersection of the arts and technology. In all of his products, he would wrap his technology under great design, elegance and human touch.

The idea of dropping out implied discontinuation of paying for tuition and classes that didn’t interest him. Interestingly, he impressed the Dean of students with his “inquiring mind”, good enough to be allowed to hang around and attend classes in Reed. Now that he was not paying for dorm, he had to sleep on the floor of a friend’s room or find empty rooms which the other disentranced students used to occupy. He would collect soft drink bottles for nickel deposit and buy food with that money. Every Sunday night, he would walk seven miles across town to get one good meal at the Hare Krishna temple.

After hanging around in Reed for eighteen months, in February 1974, at the age of nineteen, Steve decided to move back to his parents’ home and look for a job. In a classified section of the paper San Jose Mercury , under ‘technology help-wanted’ ads, an ad read: “have fun and make money.” It was for an early maker of video games – Atari. Their first product and the first real video arcade game – Ping-Pong was introduced in 1972 and they were looking for technicians.

Atari’s chief engineer Al Alcorn recalls, Steve arrived in the Atari lobby wearing sandals, unkempt hair and attire. “I was told, ‘We’ve got a hippie kid in the lobby. He says he’s not going to leave until we hire him. Should we call the cops or let him in?’ I said bring him on in!” Alcorn introduced Steve to Don Lang, a straight-laced engineer with whom Steve had to work. However, Steve’s body odour was so disturbing that he was shifted to night duty.

At Atari, Steve did his bit of improving some of the games and coming up with interesting designs. Just after a few months, he told the bosses that he planned to quit and go to India. Despite considering Steve’s efforts, the company was not interested in paying for his trip. However, Alcorn came up with a partway. Atari Germany was having a technical problem that the German distributors could not fix. The partway was that Steve was sent to Germany to fix the problem and from there he could travel to India. Steve went to Germany, and along with him went his prickly nature and odd smell about which the German staff duly complained. After he was done, he stopped in Zurich, Switzerland and finally landed in India.

Steve reached New Delhi, India in April 1974. It was summer time and the soaring heat could drive anyone crazy. He went looking for the hotel he was told about, but much to his dismay, the accommodation at the hotel was full. In a bid to get some baksheesh , the driver got Steve’s accommodation done in one of the hotels he knew. In order to quench his thirst, Steve asked the hotel owner whether the water was safe to drink. On getting an affirmative reply, the naïve Steve believed him! What do you think must have happened? “ I got dysentery pretty fast. I was sick, really sick, a really high fever. I dropped from 160 pounds to 120 in about a week ”, Steve said. Once he felt better, he headed to a small town Haridwar, in western India near the river Ganges. Around that time of the year, one of the largest religious festivals ‘Kumbh Mela’ was being held there. More than ten million people poured into a town that usually accommodated fewer than 100, 000 residents . “There were holy men all around. Tents with this teacher and that teacher. There were people riding elephants you name it. I was there for a few days, but I decided that I needed to get out of there too.” Steve was out in the crowd. He recalled, “ I could smell good food. I hadn’t been fortunate enough to smell good food for a long time, so I wandered up to pay my respects and have some lunch . ” While Steve was eating, a holy man of the festival spotted him.

He came and sat next to Steve and started laughing. He grabbed Steve’s arm and led him up to a mountain trail to an area with a well and a small pond. What next? He dunked Steve’s head in water, pulled out a razor and shaved off his head. The holy man said that it was for his good health.

During the Indian sojourn, Steve’s friend – Kottke who was also into Zen Buddhism, joined Steve. Apparently, in an act of serendipity, where they were searching for a deeper spiritual awareness, they were struck by the pictures of poverty and religious holiness within the same frame. Steve and Kottke together were out to pay visit to a guru that Friedland had spoken about – Neem Karoli Baba. But unfortunately, the year before, Baba had passed away and his followers were scattered with plastic religious trinkets. Years later, while talking about his experience in India, Steve said: “ Coming back to America was, for me, much more of a cultural shock than going to India. The people in the Indian countryside don’t use their intellect like we do, they use their intuition instead, and their intuition is far more developed than in the rest of the world. Intuition is a very powerful thing, more powerful than intellect, in my opinion. That’s had a big impact on my work.

Western rational thought is not an innate human characteristic; it is learned and is the great achievement of Western civilization. In the villages of India, they never learned it. They learned something else, which is in some ways just as valuable but in other ways is not. That’s the power of intuition and experiential wisdom.

Coming back after seven months in Indian villages, I saw the craziness of the Western world as well as its capacity for rational thought. If you try to calm it, it only makes it worse, but over times it odes calm and when it does, there’s room to hear more subtle things – that’s when your intuition starts to blossom and you start to see things more clearly and be in the present more. Your mind just slows down, and you see a tremendous expanse in the moment. You see so much more than you could see before. It’s a discipline; you have to practice .” After seven months of stay in India, Steve and Kottke returned home to Oakland. As Steve would write sporadically to his parents, they were happy that morning when they received the message to come and pick him. Steve recalled, “ My head was shaved, I was wearing Indian cotton robes, and my skin had turned a deep chocolate brown-red from the sun. ”

Once Steve was back, he started dabbling between – working at Atari, auditing a Stanford Physics class and studying at a local Zen center. With his college friends, he would periodically stay and work at Friedland’s farm – ‘All One Farm’.

In the compulsive feeling of self-awareness, he enrolled for primal scream therapy. The therapy was based on the Freudian theory that psychological problems are caused by repressed pains of childhood. Arthur Janov, who developed the therapy, argues that these problems can be resolved by re-suffering these primal moments while fully expressing the pain sometimes in screams. Steve paid $1,000 for a twelve-week course but it did not help.

In the summer of 1975, Steve rejoined Atari as a consultant. Nolan Bushnell, the founder of Atari, asked him to design a game called Breakout in which the players could destroy a brick wall with a bouncing ball.

In those days, games were written into the chips and not as separate software or apps. The challenge for Steve was to enhance the game’s speed in just four days using as few chips as possible in the design. Steve approached Wozniak for this and promised him he would split the $700 he was offered. Wozniak worked through the nights and finally built the game with fewer chips, within stipulated number of days. Nolan was very happy with Steve and paid him a bonus of $5,000. However, Steve paid Wozniak just the $350.

Wozniak learned about the bonus amount, years later, after Apple was founded. He read it in the book that Atari had printed on its ten years completion. In the book, Nolan had mentioned about the bonus under the company’s history section. After reading this, Wozniak was truly hurt and felt betrayed. When Steve was confronted about this episode, he called up Wozniak and told him he did not recall of receiving any such amount.

Popular Electronics, the famous magazine, created a buzz in the circle of hobbyist, hackers and electronic engineers with its January 1975 issue. The cover page broke with the title: “World’s First Minicomputer Kit to Rival Commercial Models… ALTAIR 8800” Apparently, the Altair was similar to Wozniak’s Cream Soda Computer. However, it took hours to assemble and didn’t work well enough. Boring thing about Altair was that it did not come with accessories; there was no keyboard, no screen and no interactive format. The engineers would write the program on the chip and the light in the front of Altair would blink.

A group of engineers, hobbyists, electronic freaks and hackers would occasionally meet on Wednesdays. They would discuss news and latest buzz in the world of electronics. Wozniak, along with Allen Baum had attended the gathering. The best thing about that evening was – the stration of Altair that was arranged for. However, Wozniak was more interested in the specifications of the microprocessor.

Wozniak clearly recalls, “That night turned out to be one of the most important nights of my life.” After learning about the specifications of Altair 8080, he understood the working of the microprocessor. He said, “This whole vision of a personal computer just popped into my head. That night, I started to sketch out on paper what would later become known as the Apple I.”

Wozniak did not take much time to materialize what he had envisioned. In an arrangement of few electronic components that later got to be known as Apple I, he assembled together a power supply, a keyboard and a monitor. And now, for the first time you could see the output on the monitor.

If it was in Wozniak’s hands to make something out of this design, he would have gone ahead sharing the design and details with the club. Here is where Steve’s acumen came into picture. Steve stopped Wozniak from sharing the details of the computer with the club. Instead, during one of the club meets, he came up with a proposal. They would sell printed circuit boards to the members and all they would have to do was plug in their own chips and run programs. This seemed to be a simpler option than designing boards themselves. Initially, Wozniak was skeptical about the whole idea. He was doubtful whether people would care to buy these circuits. Also, he was worried whether they could even earn the cost incurred on each piece. However, a confident Steve said, “ Well, even if we lose our money, we’ll have a company. ”

The duo decided to build a company. “We’ll have a company,” easier said than done. The ‘Steves’ – Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs began to pull in resources for initial investment. They sold stuff they owned. Wozniak sold his $500 worth H-P calculator for which he got almost half the price. Steve had a red-and-white Volkswagen bus which fetched him $1,500. But as misfortune would have it, the buyer of the bus came back complaining about the engine, to which Steve agreed to pay half of the repair cost. Finally, together they managed to pull in $1,300.

Now, the initial investment was in place and all that the partnership needed was a name. Around those days, Steve had gone to visit the Friedland’s ‘All One Farm’ where he worked on an apple orchard. On his return, when Wozniak went to pick Steve up, they dabbled between some names, mainly some tech names. Apparently, in those days, Steve was on a fruitarian diet; just out of one of the prominent things on his mind, he came up with the name Apple – Apple Computers. Instantly, one advantage they could see with this name was, that it would feature on the top of any alphabetical company listings.

What did the Apple I look like? Wozniak had built a new circuit board and used an inexpensive microprocessor instead of the Intel 8080. With eight kilobytes memory, the computer had the BASIC version written by Wozniak and a keyboard. Having a keyboard for the computer made writing programs on to the chip easier than the Altair.

Steve roped in Ron Wayne, his former boss at Atari to create a logo for Apple Computer. Wayne came up with an image of Newton sitting under a tree and the apple glowing over his head. On one hand, Wozniak along with Steve was setting up a company, on the other, he was associated with HP. Wozniak was caught in work ethics dilemma. He was wondering how to delineate his process of ideation! He was finding it difficult to avoid mixing his Apple ideas with HP and vice versa. Thus, in a vindictive move, Woz showed his computer to the officials at HP. What their eyes could see, their imaginations couldn’t and they told Woz that they were not interested.

With Steve and Wozniak into the partnership, they started looking for a third partner to play the role of a tie-breaker. They made Ron Wayne the third partner, giving him 10 per cent stake in the business, leaving Steve and Wozniak with 45% each. So, finally on 1 st April , 1976, Apple Computers was officially created. Wayne, who had a series of business failures earlier in life , wasn’t sure this would work and therefore, he pulled out of the agreement and moved on.

Back to ‘Two is a Company’ – Steve and Wozniak. Building a company is never easy, especially when you do not have strong financial backing. However, if you have the right attitude then nothing is impossible.

At the Homebrew Club meet Steve made an impressive presentation of Apple I. He showed how Apple I was better than Altair. Somehow, people didn’t get it. However, when the audience left, there was one person who was impressed by Steve’s presentation, Paul Terrell. Terrell had a computer store - the Byte Shop. After the presentation he went up to Steve and Wozniak and handed over his business card saying, “Keep in touch.”

Steve, like any start-up entrepreneur was the last person to miss out on a business opportunity hidden in the words “Keep in touch.” He walked into the Byte Shop barefooted and met Terrell. Terrell was looking for fully built computers and not just circuit board like the ones that Wozniak and Steve were building. Terrell wanted a complete unit. He didn’t want the customer to take the trouble of buying the circuit board and then looking out for other parts. So he told Steve that if he could build 50 units at $500 each, the deal was on. Picture this: Steve’s eyes flashing dollar signs after calculating 50 units x $500 = $25,000.

The deal was made, but what about the initial money required for buying the parts? And the premises to build these computers? The solution came in the form of Allen Baum, the friend from Homestead High. His father agreed to help the duo with $5,000. But they needed more, say about additional $15,000. So, they went looking out for financial assistance, but hard luck! The banks said NO; people at Atari said NO; they tried asking some old parts store for credit, the answer was NO! Somehow, Steve convinced the manager of Cramer Electronics and he agreed to sell them parts on a thirty-day credit.

Bill Fernandez and Daniel Kottke joined Wozniak and Steve on this venture. In the beginning, the group worked at Steve’s house, but slowly it started getting crowded. Steve’s dad moved up the setting to their garage. He got them a phone line, plasterboard and added lighting. This was how the first fifty revolutionary products were built in a garage and delivered to the Byte Shop. The first fifty Apple I were dispatched to the Byte Shop, the next lot was sold to friends and now they were building hundred more for retail outlets.

Only in evolution lies the quotient of continuity. While Apple I was creating a buzz, Steve was already toying on the idea – Apple II, an integrated package. If Apple I was for hobbyist and geeks, then Apple II would be for people. This was the idea behind Apple II.

But big dreams need big bucks. To make the dream of Apple II come true, the duo needed more than $100,000. In Steve’s words, “ Big thinkers often do big things. Small thinkers never do big things. ” They approached Atari again, but this time, Atari was sold to Warner Communications. Although, Nolan Bushnell, the founder of Atari wasn’t interested in investing, he did one good thing, he directed Steve to Don Valentine, a venture capitalist. Sadly, things didn’t work out with Don Valentine as he found the youngsters naïve and lacking sense of market. However, he put them to another investor, A.C. “Mike” Markkula.

Like Don Valentine, Markkula dropped by to check what the youngsters were upto. The moment he saw the computer, he said, “It was what I had wanted since I left high school.” After that he met the duo couple of times, had some discussions and offered to guarantee a credit line of $ 250,000 to get them started on Apple II. Markkula was the one to take Apple to the next level. A former marketing manager for Intel, Markkula saw what Steve didn’t and was officially responsible for creating the Apple Computer Company in January 1977.

To complete the team, Makkrula got on board his old friend Mike Scott(director of manufacturing at National Semiconductor). With Scott’s arrival, Apple moved out of the garage. Now roles were defined and numbers on the payroll were out. Wozniak was number one, Steve number two and others followed. For Steve, the number two spot was upsetting. And in a typical Steve fashion, he got a badge with the number zero on it. However, on the payroll his number was still two. In times to come, Steve did not have a fine equation with Scott.

It was in the spring of 1977 that the West Coast held its first computer fair. And it was also the first time, Steve got himself a suit. At the fair, three impressive Apple II units were put on display and by the end of the fair the company took home orders for three hundred units. The sales graph was now slowly climbing north. More and more people outside Apple began to write programs and games that were compatible with Apple I & II.

Apple I and Apple II found great demand amongst gamers, hobbyists and common users. The part that got skipped was the business segment or computer for offices. In 1979, a program VisCalc the portmanteau of visible calculator was written for Apple supported calculations. This program added more utility to the computer. When a stock analyst at Morgan Stanley, Benjamin Rosen was shown in a how his calculations could be taken care of, he went “wow.” After that, the office working patterns were never the same.

The relationship between Steve and his girlfriend Brennan was on a ‘on-and-off basis’. Brennan took up a job at Apple and moved in with Steve. They were doing well together until she got pregnant. When Steve learnt about the pregnancy, he clearly denied that the child was his.

They say that history repeats itself! Both Steve and Brennan were twenty three when Brennan got pregnant; the same age that Steve’s biological mother too had got pregnant outside marriage. Feeling frustrated and broken, Brennan left for Friedland’s ‘All One Farm’. On 17 th May, 1978, she gave birth to a baby girl. Steve went to visit the baby three days later. The child was named Lisa Nicole Brennan.

In a DNA test later, it was found that Steve was the father of the child. By now, Steve was doing well and Apple was worth millions of dollars. The County of San Mateo sued Steve for his irresponsible act and made him pay $385 a month in child support. Not only this, it also made him repay the county the welfare payments it had taken care of, an amount of $5,856.When in conversation with his biographer, Steve said: “ I wish I had handled it differently, I could not see myself as a father then so I didn’t face up to it .”

Do you know?

Steve had a unique dress code. His signature wear was mock black turtlenecks, denim jeans and sneakers. In the early years of his career he was known to visit people barefoot, in unkempt hair, bearded face and a hippie look.

With Apple II doing good business, what could possibly be next in Steve’s mind? Apple III? Yes and No. Yes it was the next Apple, Apple III, but due to its design of a piggyback board with loose connectors, it flopped after the first shipment, in May 1980. So, Steve started working on another project named Lisa. He hired two engineers from HP to come up with a completely new computer. Lisa was a 16-bit microprocessor compared to Apple II’s 8-bit microprocessor. However, it couldn’t do anything much exciting and thus turned out to be a disappointment.

Now, action was happening elsewhere. It was at Xerox Corporation’s Palo Alto Research Center, better known as Xerox PARC. Here, they were using a pointing device, a small rolling rectangular box called a mouse. With the help of this rolling box, they could navigate around the screen. Besides, they used the Graphical User Interface to develop windows, menus, radio button, check boxes and icons. Bitmapping and Graphical User Interface were the highlighting features of Xerox’s PARC computers. The moment Steve saw this, he got ecstatic and said, “ You’re sitting on a gold mine! ” He saw what people at Xerox failed to see. Later, he incorporated these features and more in his project, Macintosh.

Around second half of 1980, Apple decided to go public as it was the best way to raise money and help the company grow. On December 12, 1980, Apple went public. The bankers had priced the stock at $22 a share which later that day shot up to $29. Steve was then only twenty-five and was 15% owner of a company worth $220 million.

By 1981, the enhanced version of Apple II was doing great business. It’s annual sales were recorded to be $335 million. On the other hand, Apple III and Lisa weren’t doing well. Amidst all the development, Scotty planned the reorganization of the company. He was made the Chairman and Steve was removed from the project Lisa. Now Steve would only be the face and voice of the company. This move caused a lot of pain to Steve.

Meanwhile, the manager of one of Apple’s publications department, Jef Rakin, envisioned an inexpensive machine that would sell for $1,000. To back up this concept, he came up with a five-inch screen and a very cheap microprocessor. Steve quite liked Rakin’s project as for him it was not the price but the making of an “insanely great” product that was important. He began interfering and dictating people around. Rakin could not take it and he fired a memo to the Apple president, calling Steve “a dreadful manager.” He also wrote that if the idea was good, Steve would tell people about it as though it was his own.

On the other hand, Scott too was having a tough time handling Steve. In an entry-exit move, Rakin left and Steve took over the Macintosh. Steve put up a team that worked on Macintosh. Working with Steve closely was not easy. The group had to put up with his hurtful criticism, arrogance and “reality distortion field.” Steve was known for getting things done his way, and Bud Tribble, a member of the Macintosh team named that trait as, “reality distortion field(RDF).” The term was taken from the popular television series Star Trek . RDF is said to distort an audience’s sense of proportion and scales of difficulties and make them believe that the task at hand is possible.

In other team member’s words, RDF was said to be “Steve Jobs’ ability to convince himself and others to believe almost anything with a mix of charm, charisma, bravado, hyperbole, marketing, appeasement and persistence.”

Macintosh was doing pretty well, but Steve was worried that the computer took a long time to boot up. The booting up time was later reduced and Macintosh( Mac) was now the first computer that wouldn’t have a floppy disk drive and fan. Steve made the Mac so compact that there was no room left to add memory. While there was much work happening on Mac, Apple Lisa was scheduled to be launched.

In September 1982, Apple sold seven hundred thousand computers. The $583 million sales got them in the Fortune 500 list of America’s largest companies. While all of this was happening, the market dynamics were changing. The computer giant, IBM, entered the desktop market and Microsoft announced that they would create an operating system for IBM computers.

In 1983, with much fanfare the Apple Lisa was introduced. This was the computer that was built after the visit to Xerox. Thus, you could see the GUI(Graphic user Interface) in this computer. Features such as a mouse, great memory and two floppy drives along with few easy-to-use programs were the hallmark of the new Apple offering. Steve was promoting this machine big time to the press. He did not leave the opportunity to talk about Apple’s next big thing on the way. However, Apple Lisa did not do well because of its high price. The year end of 1982 saw the exit of the president of Apple, Mike Markkula. In the spring of 1983, Sculley, the president of Pepsi-Cola division, filled in the top seat at Apple.

Sculley was a marketing guy and he joined Apple at a time when Macintosh was getting ready to hit the market. Sculley strategized a massive publicity for the launch of Macintosh. The year was 1984, the product: Macintosh, the event: Super Bowl XVIII, the venue: Tampa Stadium, Florida. The third quarter of the match ran the ad of Apple 1984. And the next day, you had the newspapers and magazines talk about the new computer in town – the Macintosh. About seventy thousand Macintosh were sold in hundred days which way surpassed the sale of IBM PCs.

Here, Mac was on a roll, there, Apple III and Lisa were struggling. And thus began the blame game. Sculley and Steve would have frequent arguments and heated discussions. Steve in one of his unblinking stares told Sculley that his presence was alarming for Apple and he was a wrong person to run the company. In his incisive way, Steve accused Sculley of failing to understand the product development process in computer business. The mudslinging was two ways. In return, Sculley called Steve a petulant brat. The tables had turned at Apple. Sculley was hired as the CEO and it was he who drew the reorganization plan. The board had given Sculley enough powers to run the ship. In a major shuffle plan, Steve was kicked out of Macintosh and Lisa division and was given the namesake tag “global visionary.” To make things worse, in one of the interviews, Sculley told a Wall Street analyst that there was no role either that day or in the future for Steve Jobs.

Things were unpleasant and Steve felt like the Shakespearean character Richard II( a king betrayed by his own people and sentenced to life imprisonment). He could slowly see the apple that he had taken a bite into, being taken away from him. By the end of 1985, began Steve’s journey – without Apple. Now, what NeXT?

Steve, a born doer, turned the Apple leaf and started working on the idea of powerful computers. After making computers for the hobbyists, gamers, individuals and businessmen, the next market which he wanted to cater were the scientists. The scientists associated with universities, companies or working independently wanted to have a powerful computer that could empower their research with speed and accuracy. And Steve’s high end computer NeXT could do all of this.

After Apple, Steve decided to invest the amount he received from Apple in his next venture – NeXT. Steve was happy with Paul Rand’s work on the logo for his new venture NeXT. The e according to Rand could mean “education, excellence, expertise, exceptional, excitement, e=mc 2 .” NeXT was a new venture without any financial backing from any big name. It was around this time Mr. H. Ross Perot, the Texas computer billionaire saw a PSB television show on NeXT and called Steve to express his interest in the NeXT. Bill Gates and Steve had worked together on Mac, obviously in the software domain. On the NeXT venture, Steve wanted Gates to continue doing the same. Gates was pretty impressed by Mac, but when he saw the NeXT Workstation, he was upset. He not only called the machine crap but also pointed out the tardiness of the optical disk. It may sound rude but he told InfoWorld(Information Technology online media company), “Develop for it? I’ll piss on it.” Steve however was clear that NeXT was the next wave in computing, despite of what Gates had to say about the machine.

You may succeed in stopping the flow of running water, but Steve, no way! Steve went to IBM and gave them a of NeXT. What do you think might have happened? Yes, you are right, they were impressed. He showed them how the NeXTSTEP, an object oriented software development system worked. People at IBM were ready to license the current version of NeXTSTEP. If all went well, they were willing to use it on their workstations.

Finally, on 12 th October, 1988, NeXT was launched in a theatrical fashion. While addressing the audience, Steve said that after three years of consulting with universities across the coordinates of the country, they realized that there was a need of a personal mainframe for the academicians, researchers and scientists. In his charismatic way, he said that events like this occur only once or twice in a decade. All this turned out to be ingratiating, for when the $6,500 price tagged machine was out for sale by mid-1989, it had a different story to tell. What supposedly was to sell as hot cakes – ten thousand machines in a month, in reality had only four hundred machines off the shelf.

When Steve was working at NeXT the workplace was closer to Chrisann Brennan, his girlfriend. He would visit her place to see her and their daughter Lisa. The father and daughter would go out for dinner, rollerblading and long walks. He would also take her to his office and soon, a fine bond began to develop between the two.

George Lucas, the maker of Star Wars, had completed his first Star Wars movie and was looking to sell off his computer division of Lucasfilm. It was into making hardware and software for rendering digital images and also into animation. Now see how three dots connect. Dot one: Steve was interested in the animation business; Dot two: Alan Kay of Xerox PARC was friends with Steve; Dot three: Ed Catmull, friends with Alan Kay was the one calling shots at Lucasfilm’s computer division.

So, Alan Kay connected Steve with Catmull. Catmull along with his colleague Alvy Ray Smith met up with Steve. And the result of the synergy was that Graphic Group( then a computer division of Lucasfilm) came to be known as Pixar under the trio in 1986. From the $10 million that Steve brought in, $5 million was kept as capital and the rest of the amount was used to make the company a stand-alone one. Under the creative head of John Lasseter ,chief creative officer at Pixar and Walt Disney Animation Studios, the partnership took off with Toy Story and went ahead to make some of the finest and award winning movies in the world of animation and 3D.

By 1988, the animation division was doing well, but due to floundering performances of hardware and software sales, Pixar was soon running low on capital. It was soon learnt that to have the whole show running, an additional $300,000 was required. Weighing the options they had, Steve said he would provide the capital. That’s what leaders are all about – they rise to the occasion and show what they are made of. Hence, it did not come as a surprise when in 1989, Inc magazine declared Steve Jobs as the Entrepreneur of the decade. A title well-earned, a title well deserved!

At Disney, the CEO, Michael Eisner and his colleague Jeffery Katzenberg were very impressed by John Lasseter’s work in the movie ‘Tin Toy’ and wanted him to work for Disney. But in every sense of the word ‘gratitude,’ Lasseter was clear about what Steve and Pixar was to him. Disney and Pixar got talking and finally a deal was struck in May 1991 between the two. As per the deal, Disney would own the picture, its characters and also have control over the creative process. Toy Story was Pixar’s baby, conceived and developed by Pixar’s John Lasseter; however, the creative control was with Disney and as a result, there arose creative differences over characters’ portrayal. By November 1993, the first half of the movie was ready. In the process of making the movie, Steve could see one thing clearly : in future projects, Pixar had to get its own funding. The release of the movie was scheduled for November 1995, and around that time Pixar also planned to go public. Come Thanksgiving Day 1995, Toy Story hit the screens and the result was record breaking. Toy Story touched the highest collection for the year. It broke the records of Batman Forever and Apollo 13 .

The outcome of the success of the movie was also reflected in Pixar’s stock prices that opened in 1995 at $22 and closed at a whooping $39.

In the Post-Apple world when Steve was busy building NeXT and Pixar, his mother, Clara Steve was diagnosed with lung cancer. She was sixty-two when she died in November 1986. During the last days, in one of the visits, Steve learnt that she was married before meeting his father, Paul. But as her husband had not returned from the war, she had preferred not to mention it. She also told him a few things about his biological parents. Not until his mother died did Steve express an interest in learning more about his biological parents. After her death, Steve confided in his father that he would like to find his biological parents. His father did not stop him. Steve hired detective services and was able to track down his mother and sister. He got along very well with his sister, Mona Simpson. In fact, she became a good friend of Steve.

In late 1989, during one of the lectures that Steve gave at Stanford Business School, he met his life partner Laurene Powell. It was quite an interesting episode. Steve was at the business school to deliver a lecture. Powell with her friend arrived late and sat in the aisle. One of the ushers asked them to move; seeing the front seats vacant, Powell with her friend, went ahead and occupied them. Apparently, it happened to be next to the speaker Steve Jobs’ seat. They got talking and before Steve could let go of this opportunity, they were in a relationship.

His relationship with Powell started developing pretty well and during this period she got pregnant. Steve for the second time, was facing problem of confronting the option: marriage. Finally, on 18 th March, 1991, Steve married Powell according to the Zen practice, performed by a Zen Buddhist monk Kobun Chino Otogawa.

Laurene Powell, daughter of Marine Corps pilot was originally from New Jersey. As she had lost her father in a crash and her mother’s second marriage was a disappointment, she grew up to be a resilient and self-sufficient girl. Before she joined the business school, she worked at Gold Sachs.

Much before the marriage, Lisa, Steve’s daughter with Brennan, moved into his country house Palo Alto and stayed with Steve throughout her high school years. She later moved to Harvard. In times to come, Palo Alto housed Steve’s entire family, his three kids from Powell, Lisa and his sister Mona Simpson. At home, he was a loving father and a great husband. It was through his sister Mona that Steve learned about his father’s whereabouts. However, as Steve was not keen on meeting his father, nothing much could develop between the two.

In September 1991, Steve had a new member join the family. Laurene delivered a baby boy who was named Reed Paul Steve. As Steve Jr. was growing, his grandfather bid adieu to the family in March 1993.

NeXT Workstation was a personal mainframe and a high edition computer for researchers and scientists. This apparently was incompatible with other computers and did not support the prevalent standard operating systems and software apps. The software which was compatible with this machine was NeXTSTEP. The only company that was building such workstations and was by-and-far a leader, was Sun Microsystems. Things started to look better when Intel agreed to have NeXTSTEP on the IBM/Intel platform.

While Steve was busy with his NeXT serve, Apple was still milking on the innovations that Steve had left Apple with. For Sculley, it was always about the profit margin and market share. Somewhere in the pursuit of making affordable products and gaining market share, Apple was losing its charm. It now seemed to be similar to the story of the hare and the tortoise , the part when the hare falls asleep and the tortoise takes him over. Apple seemed to have slept with no innovations and nothing new on card while Microsoft marched ahead with their product sales.

There were lot of talks going on in the background. Upside: there were talks going on between Steve’s friend and chairman of Oracle, Larry Ellison on Steve’s prospects of restoring Apple’s charm. Downside: Michael Spindler, the man who replaced Sculley in June 1993 was up to selling Apple to Sun, IBM and HP.

Michael Spindler was replaced by Gil Amelio who was one of the guys on the I-hate-Steve list. Steve approached Amelio over joining Apple but things did not go well. Later in 1996, when Amelio realized that Apple’s new operating system Copland wasn’t living up to their expectations, he thought that the most sensible thing would be to bring in the Superman – Steve Jobs. In a very calculated move, Apple bought NeXT for $427 million in late 1996. With NeXT came the NeXTSTEP, which later on went to become Mac OS. As a part of this move, Steve Jobs was named the interim CEO of Apple.

Once Amelio was out, Steve called up Gates but was not sure from where to begin. To state the exact words, Steve told Gates, “ I need help. ” What can be seen as vouching-for-Apple’s credibility, Microsoft made a tiny investment in the company. Steve was looking for ways to reinforce the brand Apple, so he called up the advertising team that had worked on the 1984 campaign. Thus, “Think Different” campaign was launched.

For Steve, innovation was the only way to grow, as he did not believe in existing, but in growing. He called in for Joanathan Ive, Apple’s top designer, to come up with new design for the new Macintosh. The new Macintosh was named iMac. The ‘i’ in iMac stood for: individual, instruct, inform and inspire. The new Macintosh was the beginning of revolution in the domain of personal computers. Its design skipped the need of floppy disk drive, introduced a tray that popped out and had a new improved operating system. In May 1998, Steve unveiled the iMac and in the same year, his youngest child, Eve was born. It was not even six weeks since the launch of iMac and three hundred thousand iMacs were already sold. With the success of iMac, Apple was on a roll. In mid-1999, the carpet was rolled out for iBooks, the candy-colored laptops. Now that things were falling into place, Steve contemplated on dropping the word “interim” from his title CEO. At the 2000 Macworld Expo, Steve announced that he was now the permanent CEO. Considering the success of iMac, he preferred keeping it as iCEO. Like any business, Apple too wasn’t free from ups and downs.It’s Apple Power Mac G4 Cube(an entirely new class of computing designed to deliver big performance) introduced in summer 2000 was shown thumbs down because of high price tag.

Steve wanted to take Apple into a new business and the domain he was toying with, was Retail. He got in touch with Gap’s president, Millard “Mickey” Drexler and asked him to come on board to work on the same. Apple had a proud product line, and going retail would add value to the business. Mickey knew the man who could give physicality to the idea. He roped in Ron Johnson from Target Chain to design the Apple store. And by the spring of 2001, Apple had opened two retail outlets, one in Virginia and another in California.

The dot com bust in the year 2001 and the plummeting tech stocks brought a lull in the market. It was the time when Steve started working on a new grand strategy – the digital hub. Way back in 1990s, Apple had developed a technology called FireWire. It used a high-speed serial port that could transfer digital files from one device to another. A Japanese camcorder company applied this technology to transfer videos and picture files. Steve’s idea of digital hub was to have as many devices connected to the personal computers as possible. This would not only increase the utility of the computer but also serve the multi-purpose requirements of the consumer.

The iMac that was out in 1999 had the FireWire feature. In what was to be a part of the hub, the iMac came up with newer applications to edit photo and video, to create and mix music and to burn music on a disc. Around that time, Apple was working on music-management application – iTunes. It was being created to manage music and help you have a customized playlist.

Will you believe this – the most phenomenal phase in the history of music was the early 2000s. People would download free music from sharing sites like Napster and burn them onto their blank CDs. And there was a time when the number of CDs burned in America was more than the number of people living there. Watching this trend, Steve added a CD burner to the Mac.

Steve, along with Jeff Robbin and Dave Heller( both Apple engineers) worked on the music management software. He made sure that iTunes offered a text box that would help you search for the artist, track or album. All that you had to do was just type in the text box and manage your music. The iTunes was launched in January 2001 and was initially offered to the Mac users only. Considering the overwhelming success, it was later made available to non-Mac users too.

What could be seen as an extension of Apple were basically the elements of the hub. The iTunes team was working on a portable device to store and play music. In one of the initial attempts, only sixteen songs could be stored on it and it’s functionality was unclear. One of the iTunes team members – Jon Rubinstein who would make regular visits to Japan, learned about an 1.8 inch drive with storage capacity of five gigabytes built by the engineers at Toshiba. Bingo! Rubinstein with a poker face picked up the drive and left for US. With this drive, the storage problem was taken care of.

What about human interface? Phil Schiller, another team member, came up with the idea of a navigating wheel with a button in the centre and thats how the iPod was built . In October 2001, the $399 priced pocket music device – the iPod ,was unveiled. The best thing about this device was that you could enjoy your music on the go. Say, “Bye-bye walkman. Hello iPod.”

Soon the walkmans were going to be replaced by iPods, but the music industry still had to find a way out of piracy. In such times, Steve worked on the idea of iTunes Store. The concept of iTunes Store helped the music industry battle out the piracy threat. Music lovers could now buy their music online. But the music magnates were not happy with two things. One, the user need not buy the complete album even if there were only one or two of his favourite tracks on it; Two, the tracks were priced only 99 cents. Steve knew the only way to stop piracy was by offering lucrative options to the users. He began talks with five major record companies and also spoke to some of his friends in the music industry. As you know, it’s never easy to get people be a part of change. But the charismatic, determined and visionary Steve finally did it. With 200,000 tracks in the new music store, the iTunes Store was launched on April 28, 2003. Steve was no less than the ‘Pied Piper of Hamlin’, he launched the iTunes Store and within six days, the iTunes store had sold over a million songs.

The iPods were selling like hot cakes and by 2005, a smacking twenty million pieces had been sold. The camera business was now being decimated as the cell phones came along with a built-in camera. Cell phones were a booming market. The mobile phone giant, Motorola, had a popular model RAZR that became a hit because it was a phone equipped with camera. It was cute enough to have an iPod in it and what you would have is a three-in-one device in hand.

Steve, along with the CEO of Motorola, worked on the project that merged the portable music player into the phone. Moto’s RAZR could do both, be a phone and a music player as well. But Steve wasn’t happy with the way people at Moto worked and thus, he decided to get this worked out more aesthetically at Apple. Steve had an eye on the phone market and knew this was the next gadget to drive the world, so he came up with iPhone. In January 2007 Macworld Expo, Steve launched the iPhone, the second most revolutionary product that changed the world, first being the iPod. In 2009, the Fortune magazine named Steve, “CEO of the Decade.” Now, recognition, accolades and appreciation were pouring in from all sides. After all, he was making “insanely great” products.

Do you know? Before Steve could come up with the iPhone, he had started working on the tablet PC, the iPad?

Steve went to attend the fiftieth birthday party of an engineer friend who worked at Microsoft. The birthday boy was one of the team members working on the Microsoft tablet PC. And during the party he kept talking about the tablet PC which kind of irked Steve. The next day at work, Steve got a team together to work on a tablet PC that would have a touch screen and could be operated by finger and not a stylus.

In January 2010, the third revolutionary product that changed the world was launched, the iPad. It was a sleek device with features such as touch screen, internet surfing, watching videos, listening to music and reading e-books. With a product line that has iPod, iPhone and iPad, Steve Jobs’ Apple became the third Apple to change the world.

It was in October 2003 that Steve was diagnosed with cancer. However, it all began when he was managing portfolios at Apple and Pixar. Around late 1990s, the time when Steve was busy restoring Apple, his health began to show early signs of what it would later develop to be, pancreatic cancer. Steve knew he did not have much time and he had to do all that he had planned.

At the initial stage of pain, Steve would visit the urologist and take a shot of narcotic pain killer. But five years later, in 2003, his new scan had a different story to tell. The scan showed something on his pancreas. After certain tests and scans, the doctors established that they had found a tumour. To stop the cancer from spreading, the doctors advised Steve to undergo a surgery. Undergoing a surgery meant removing the tumour and tissues around it. It also meant realigning the digestive tract. Steve thought he would maintain an aggressive diet and alternative treatments. But things only got worse and in a scan taken a year later in 2004, it was found that the tumour had not only increased in size but had also spread in the body. Steve finally consented to be operated on. The operation was followed by the much obvious chemotherapy. For a person like Steve, missing on to the action was the last thing he would like. The next day after the operation, he emailed his colleagues that he would be back soon. It is said, that had Steve been operated in the early stage, he would have been around for a longer time.

In 2009, Steve called the managing editor of TIME magazine, Walter Isaacson to pen his biography. Walter Isaacson had already written the biographies of Henry Kissinger, Albert Einstein and Benjamin Franklin. Oblivious to the reason behind the call, Isaacson said that it was too early to write a biography. Later when he met with Steve he learnt about the cancer.

When the iPhone/iPad/iPod is low on battery, it displays the icon ‘low battery’; so was Steve’s health –‘ battery low’. Finally, surrounded by his near ones in his house, Steve breathed his last with the words, “OH WOW. OH WOW. OH WOW” , on 5th October, 2011.

So, this was Steve Jobs, the man who said “ the journey is the reward ”, the man who never took no for an answer, the man who in his belief of giving the best products gave his best to the world. And the man who dared to Think Different!

To sum up in few words about the life of the visionary Steve Jobs, here is the text of Apple’s Think Different commercial, 1997 :

“Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. But the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. While some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do. – Apple Inc.”

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Famous People

In this lesson, students read a short biography about Steve Jobs. They practice writing questions and statements. They also think back to their interests as kindergarteners.