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Steve Jobs
Jobs holding an iPhone 4 at Worldwide Developers Conference 2010 Born Steven Paul Jobs February 24, 1955 San Francisco, California, US Died October 5, 2011 (aged 56) Palo Alto, California, US Cause of death Metastatic Insulinoma Residence Palo Alto, California, US Alma mate r Reed College (dropped out) Occupatio n Co-founder, Chairman and CEO, Apple Inc. Co-founder and CEO, Pixar Founder and CEO, NeXT Inc. Years acti ve 19742011 Net worth $US 8.3 billion (July 2010) Board member o f The Walt Disney Company[1] Apple Inc. Religion Zen Buddhism (previously Lutheran)[2] Spouse(s) Laurene Powell (19912011; his death) Children Lisa Brennan-Jobs Reed Jobs Erin Jobs Eve Jobs Relatives Patricia Ann Jobs (adoptive sister), Mona Simpson (biological sister) Signature
Steven Paul "Steve" Jobs (/dbz/; February 24, 1955 October 5, 2011)[3][4] was an American entrepreneur,[5] marketer,[6] and inventor,[7] who was the co-founder, chairman, and CEO of Apple Inc. Through Apple, he is widely recognized as a charismatic pioneer of the personal computer revolution[8][9] and for his influential career in the computer and consumer electronics fields, transforming "one industry after another, from computers and smartphones to music and movies".[10] 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. Jobs was among the first to see the commercial potential of Xerox PARC's mouse-driven graphical user interface, which led to the creation of the Apple Lisa and, a year later, the Macintosh. He also played a role in introducing the LaserWriter, one of the first widely available laser printers, to the market.[11] After a power struggle with the board of directors in 1985, Jobs left Apple and founded NeXT, a computer platform development company specializing in the higher-education and business markets. In 1986, he acquired the computer graphics division of Lucasfilm, which was spun off as Pixar.[12] He was credited in Toy Story (1995) as an executive producer. He served as CEO and majority shareholder until Disney's purchase of Pixar in 2006.[13] In 1996, after Apple had failed to deliver its operating system, Copland, Gil Amelio turned to NeXT Computer, and the NeXTSTEP platform became the foundation for the Mac OS X.[14] Jobs returned to Apple as an advisor, and took control of the company as an interim CEO. Jobs brought Apple from near bankruptcy to profitability by 1998.[15][16][17] As the new CEO of the company, Jobs oversaw the development of the iMac, iTunes, iPod, iPhone, and iPad, and on the services side, the company's Apple Retail Stores, iTunes Store and the App Store.[18] The success of these products and services provided several years of stable financial returns, and propelled Apple to become the world's most valuable publicly traded company in 2011.[19] The reinvigoration of the company is regarded by many commentators as one of the greatest turnarounds in business history.[20][21][22] In 2003, Jobs was diagnosed with a pancreas neuroendocrine tumor. Though it was initially treated, he reported a hormone imbalance, underwent a liver transplant in 2009, and appeared progressively thinner as his health declined.[23] On medical leave for most of 2011, Jobs resigned in August that year, and was elected Chairman of the Board. He died of respiratory arrest related to the tumor on October 5, 2011. Jobs received a number of honors and public recognition for his influence in the technology and music industries. He has been referred to as "legendary", a "futurist" and a "visionary",[24][25][26][27] and has been described as the "Father of the Digital Revolution",[28] a "master of innovation",[29][30] "the master evangelist of the digital age"[31] and a "design perfectionist".[32][33]
Contents [hide] 1 Early life 2 Career 2.1 Early work 2.2 Apple Computer 2.3 NeXT Computer 2.4 Pixar and Disney 2.5 Return to Apple 2.6 Resignation 3 Business life 3.1 Wealth 3.2 Stock options backdating issue 3.3 Management style 3.3.1 Reality distortion field 3.4 Innovations and designs 3.4.1 The Macintosh Computer 3.4.2 The NeXT Computer 3.4.3 iMac 3.4.4 iPod 3.4.5 iPhone 3.5 Philanthropy 4 Personal life 4.1 Health issues 5 Death 5.1 Media coverage 6 Honors and public recognition 7 Portrayals and coverage in books, film, and theater 7.1 Books 7.2 Documentary films 7.3 Short film 7.4 Feature films 7.5 Theater 8 References 9 Further reading 10 External links 10.1 Articles 10.2 Interviews
Early life Jobs's birth parents met at the University of Wisconsin, where his Syrian-born biological father, Abdulfattah "John" Jandali (Arabic: ),[34][35][36][37][38] was a student, and later taught, and where his biological mother, Swiss-American Catholic Joanne Carole Schieble, was also a student. Jandali, who was teaching in Wisconsin when Jobs was born, said he had no choice but to put the baby up for adoption because his girlfriend's family objected to their relationship.[39] Jobs was born in San Francisco, California on February 24, 1955.[40][41] He was adopted at birth by Paul Reinhold Jobs (1922 1993) and Clara Jobs (ne Hagopian) (19241986), an Armenian American.[42][43] Paul and Clara had gotten married ten days after they met. Clara had an ectopic pregnancy and couldn't bear children. Nine years after their marriage, they decided to adopt a child.[44] According to Steve Jobs's commencement address at Stanford, Schieble wanted Jobs to be adopted only by a college graduate couple. Schieble learned that Clara Jobs hadn't graduated from college and Paul Jobs had only attended high school, but signed final adoption papers after they promised her that the child would definitely be encouraged and supported to attend college. Later, when asked about his "adoptive parents", Jobs replied emphatically that Paul and Clara Jobs "were my parents."[45] He stated in his authorized biography that they "were my parents 1,000%."[46] Walter Isaacson wrote in his authorized biography about Steve Jobs that Steve had told him, Paul and Clara are 100% my parents. And Joanna and Abdulfatah - are only a sperm and an egg bank. Its not rude, it is the truth.[44] Unknown to him, his biological parents would subsequently marry (December 1955), have a second child, novelist Mona Simpson, in 1957, and divorce in 1962.[46] The Jobs family moved from San Francisco to Mountain View, California when Jobs was five years old.[40][41] The parents later adopted a daughter, Patty.[40] Paul worked as a mechanic and a carpenter, and taught his son rudimentary electronics and how to work with his hands.[40] Paul showed Steve how to work on electronics in the family garage, demonstrating to his son how to take apart and rebuild electronics such as radios and televisions. As a result, he became interested in and developed a hobby of technical tinkering.[47] Clara was an accountant[45] who taught him to read before he went to school.[40] Clara Jobs had been a payroll clerk for Varian Associates, one of the first high-tech firms in what became known as Silicon Valley.[48] Jobs's youth was riddled with frustrations over formal schooling. At Monta Loma Elementary school in Mountain View, he frequently played pranks on others.[49] Though school officials recommended that he skip two grades on account of his test scores, his parents elected for him only to skip one grade.[46][49] [ not in citation given ]
Jobs then attended Cupertino Junior High and Homestead High School in Cupertino, California.[41] At Homestead, Jobs became friends with Bill Fernandez, a neighbor who shared the same interests in electronics. Fernandez introduced Jobs to his neighbor, Steve Wozniak, a computer and electronics whiz kid, who was also known as "Woz". In 1969 Wozniak started building a little computer board with Fernandez that they named "The Cream Soda Computer", which they showed to Jobs; he seemed really interested.[50] Wozniak has stated that they called it the Cream Soda Computer because he and Fernandez drank cream soda all the time whilst they worked on it and that he and Jobs had gone to the same high school, although they did not know each other there.[51] Following high school graduation in 1972, Jobs enrolled at Reed College in Portland, Oregon. Reed was an expensive college which Paul and Clara could ill afford. They were spending much of their life savings on their son's higher education.[50] Jobs dropped out of college after six months and spent the next 18 months dropping in on creative classes, including a course on calligraphy.[52] He continued auditing classes at Reed while sleeping on the floor in friends' dorm rooms, returning Coke bottles for food money, and getting weekly free meals at the local Hare Krishna temple.[53] Jobs later said, "If I had never dropped in on that single calligraphy course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts."[53] Career Early work
Homebrew Computer Club Newsletter, September 1976 In 1972, Steve Wozniak designed his own version of the classic video game, Pong. After finishing it, Wozniak gave the board to Jobs, who then took the game down to Atari, Inc. in Los Gatos, California. Atari thought that Jobs had built it and gave him a job as a technician.[54][55] Atari's co-founder Nolan Bushnell later described him as "difficult but valuable", pointing out that "he was very often the smartest guy in the room, and he would let people know that".[56] Jobs travelled to India in mid-1974[57] to visit Neem Karoli Baba[58] at his Kainchi ashram with a Reed College friend (and, later, an early Apple employee), Daniel Kottke, in search of spiritual enlightenment. When they got to the Neem Karoli ashram, it was almost deserted because Neem Karoli Baba had died in September 1973.[55] Then they made a long trek up a dry riverbed to an ashram of Haidakhan Babaji. In India, they spent a lot of time on bus rides from Delhi to Uttar Pradesh and Himachal Pradesh.[55] After staying for seven months, Jobs left India[59] and returned to the US ahead of Daniel Kottke.[55] Jobs had changed his appearance; his head was shaved and he wore traditional Indian clothing.[60][61] During this time, Jobs experimented with psychedelics, later calling his LSD experiences "one of the two or three most important things [he had] done in [his] life".[62][63] He also became a serious practitioner of Zen Buddhism, engaged in lengthy meditation retreats at the Tassajara Zen Mountain Center, the oldest St Zen monastery in the US.[64] He considered taking up monastic residence at Eihei-ji in Japan, and maintained a lifelong appreciation for Zen.[65] Jobs would later say that people around him who did not share his countercultural roots could not fully relate to his thinking.[62] Jobs then returned to Atari, and was assigned to create a circuit board for the arcade video game Breakout. According to Bushnell, Atari offered $100 for each chip that was eliminated in the machine. Jobs had little specialized knowledge of circuit board design and made a deal with Wozniak to split the fee evenly between them if Wozniak could minimize the number of chips. Much to the amazement of Atari engineers, Wozniak reduced the number of chips by 50, a design so tight that it was impossible to reproduce on an assembly line. [ further explanation needed ] According to Wozniak, Jobs told him that Atari gave them only $700 (instead of the offered $5,000), and that Wozniak's share was thus $350.[66] Wozniak did not learn about the actual bonus until ten years later, but said that if Jobs had told him about it and had said he needed the money, Wozniak would have given it to him.[67] Wozniak had designed a low-cost digital "blue box" to generate the necessary tones to manipulate the telephone network, allowing free long-distance calls. Jobs decided that they could make money selling it. The clandestine sales of the illegal "blue boxes" went well, and perhaps planted the seed in Jobs's mind that electronics could be fun and profitable.[68] Jobs, in a 1994 interview, recalled that it took six months for him and Wozniak to figure out how to build the blue boxes.[69] Jobs said that if not for the blue boxes, there would have been no Apple. He states it showed them that they could take on large companies and beat them.[70][71] Jobs began attending meetings of the Homebrew Computer Club with Wozniak in 1975.[41] He greatly admired Edwin H. Land, the inventor of instant photography and founder of Polaroid Corporation, and would explicitly model his own career after that of Land's.[72][73] In 1976, Jobs and Wozniak formed their own business, which they named "Apple Computer Company" in remembrance of a happy summer Jobs had spent picking apples. At first they started off selling circuit boards.[74] Apple Computer See also: History of Apple
Home of Paul and Clara Jobs, on Crist Drive in Los Altos, California. Steve Jobs formed Apple Computer in its garage with Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne in 1976. Wayne stayed only a short time, leaving Jobs and Wozniak as the primary co-founders of the company. In 1976, Wozniak single-handedly invented the Apple I computer. After Wozniak showed it to Jobs, who suggested that they sell it, they and Ronald Wayne formed Apple Computer in the garage of Jobs's parents in order to sell it.[75] Wayne stayed only a short time leaving Jobs and Wozniak as the primary co-founders of the company.[76] They received funding from a then-semi-retired Intel product-marketing manager and engineer Mike Markkula.[77] Scott McNealy, one of the co-founders of Sun Microsystems, said that Jobs broke a "glass age ceiling" in Silicon Valley because he'd created a very successful company at a young age.[71] In 1978, Apple recruited Mike Scott from National Semiconductor to serve as CEO for what turned out to be several turbulent years. In 1983, Jobs lured John Sculley away from Pepsi-Cola to serve as Apple's CEO, asking, "Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water, or do you want a chance to change the world?" [78] In the early 1980s, Jobs was among the first to see the commercial potential of Xerox PARC's mouse-driven graphical user interface, which led to the creation of the Apple Lisa. A year later, Apple completed the Macintosh.[79][80] The following year, Apple aired a Super Bowl television commercial titled "1984". At Apple's annual shareholders meeting on January 24, 1984, an emotional Jobs introduced the Macintosh to a wildly enthusiastic audience; Andy Hertzfeld described the scene as "pandemonium".[81]
Apple logo introduced May 17, 1976, created by Rob Janoff with the rainbow scheme used until August 26, 1999. While Jobs was a persuasive and charismatic director for Apple, some of his employees from that time described him as an erratic and temperamental manager. Disappointing sales caused a deterioration in Jobs's working relationship with Sculley, which devolved into a power struggle between the two.[82] Jobs kept meetings running past midnight, sent out lengthy faxes, then called new meetings at 7:00 am.[83] During an April 10 & 11 board meeting, Apple's board of directors gave Sculley the authority to remove Jobs from all roles, except chairman, to reassign him to an undetermined position. John delayed a reassignment. But when Sculley learned that Jobswho believed Sculley to be "bad for Apple" and the wrong person to lead the companyhad been attempting to organize a boardroom coup, on May 24, 1985, called a board meeting to resolve the matter. Apple's board of directors sided with Sculley once again and removed Jobs from his managerial duties as head of the Macintosh division. With no duties and exiled from the rest of the company to an otherwise-empty building, Jobs stopped coming to work and later resigned as chairman.[82][84][85] After unsuccessfully applying to fly on the Space Shuttle as a civilian astronaut, and briefly considering starting a computer company in the Soviet Union,[86] he resigned from Apple five months later.[82] In a speech Jobs gave at Stanford University in 2005, he said being fired from Apple was the best thing that could have happened to him; "The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life." And he added, "I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was awful-tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it."[53][87][88]