Teacher Robert Lee's sixth grade class at Mountain View's now-defunct San Ramon School. Steve Jobs is pictured at the bottom right in a red and white shirt. Photo courtesy of Steven Hatt, pictured bottom left in a white v-neck sweater.
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Young Steve Jobs
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Cupertino Junior High school yearbook.
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Steve Jobs' high school yearbook.
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Cupertino, California.
Steve Jobs (circled) at Homestead High School Electronics Club.
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Steve Jobs' high school yearbook.
College/University
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1991
Steve Jobs accepting the Howard Vollum Award at the 1991 Reed College Convocation.
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Young Steve Jobs
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Young Steve Jobs
Career
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1988
24 October 1988 - Steve Jobs holds a press conference after the NeXT Cube introduction.
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1995
Steve Jobs plays with his first child, Reed Jobs
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1996
20 December 1996 - Steve Jobs at a press event with Apple CEO Gil Amelio announcing the NeXT acquisition.
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1997
7 January 1997 - Steve Wozniak, Steve Jobs and Apple CEO Gil Amelio at the Macworld keynote.
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1998
6 May 1998 - Steve Jobs introducing iMac
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1998
6 January 1998 - Steve Jobs in front of a Think Different ad featuring Pablo Picasso, Macworld SF
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1998
Steve Jobs with a blue iMac
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1999
21 July 1999 - Steve Jobs after the first iBook introduction, Macworld NY 1999.
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2000
19 July 2000 - Jobs and a Power Mac G4 Cube
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2001
15 May 2001 - Steve Jobs holds a press conference introducing Apple Retail Stores
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2001
21 May 2001 - Steve Jobs evangelizing Mac OS X at the WWDC
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2001
23 October 2001 - Steve Jobs after the iPod introduction
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2002
Steve Jobs poses with iMac G4 and Apple's top execs: Jony Ive, Avie Tevanian, Jon Rubinstein, and Sina Tamaddon.
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2003
16 October 2003 - Introducing the Windows iTunes Store
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2004
6 January 2004 - Steve Jobs introducing the iPod mini
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2004
26 July 2004 - On the cover of Newsweek
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2005
6 June 2005 - Steve Jobs with Intel CEO Paul Otellini at WWDC
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2005
11 January 2005 - Steve Jobs introduces iPod shuffle
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2005
12 June 2005 - Steve Jobs delivering the commencement address to Stanford
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2005
12 October 2005 - Steve Jobs introduces iPod video
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2006
24 January 2006 - Ed Catmull, Steve Jobs, Bob Iger, and John Lasseter announcing the Pixar-Disney merger.
Gallery of Steve Jobs
2006
5th Avenue New York, NY, USA
19 May 2006 - In New York at the Apple Store 5th Avenue opening
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2007
9 January 2007 - Portrait with iPhone, 2007
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2007
9 January 2007 - The iPhone introduction, Macworld
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2008
6 March 2008 - Steve Jobs unveils the terms of the iOS App Store
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2008
15 January 2008 - Jobs unveiling MacBook Air
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2009
9 September 2009 - Steve Jobs smiles as the crowd cheers his return after his liver transplant
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2010
27 January 2010 - Steve Jobs at the iPad introduction
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2010
27 January 2010 - Steve Jobs at the iPad introduction
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2010
7 June 2010 - Steve Jobs presents iPhone 4
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2011
2 March 2011 - Apple at the intersection of Technology and Liberal Arts, a favorite of Steve Jobs.
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2011
6 June 2011 - Steve and his wife Laurene after the iCloud introduction, his last keynote
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1972
Steve Jobs in high school
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1975
Oregon, USA
1975 - At the All-One-Farm commune in Oregon. Robert Friedland can be seen in the red shirt.
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1975
Steve with Woz in the Jobs household, assembling Apple I computers
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1976
28 Aug 1976 - At the Personal Computing Festival
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1976
Woz, Jobs and an Apple I
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1977
1977 - Steve Jobs and Mike Markkula with a cheque symbolizing his investment in Apple
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1977
Steve and Woz at an Apple II warehouse
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1978
June 1978 - Steve and his newborn daughter Lisa
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1980
1980 - Steve Jobs poses with Apple II for an ad campaign
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1980
Steve Jobs poses with Apple II for an ad campaign
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1982
Los Gatos, CA, USA
16 December 1982 - Steve Jobs having tea in his first house in Los Gatos, CA
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1982
Steve Jobs, John Sculley, and Steve Wozniak unveil the Apple II in 1982: the machine revolutionized home computing
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1983
Armonk, New York, United States
1983 - Steve at the IBM HQ
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1983
Steve Jobs with the LISA computer
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1984
5 July 1984 - Steve with his mentor, PR specialist John McKenna
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1984
6 February 1984 - Steve Jobs poses with Macintosh while Sculley rests on a LISA
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1984
Steve Jobs with Lee Clow
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1984
Steve poses with the Macintosh team outside their office
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1984
Jobs and Sculley
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1984
30 January 1984 - Steve Jobs poses with Macintosh on a NY press tour
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1984
Portrait of Steve Jobs
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1985
2 May 1985 - Steve Jobs and a young Bill Gates at the Excel introduction - Excel was developed for the Macintosh originally.
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Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs
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Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs
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Young Steve Jobs
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Steve Jobs
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Steve Jobs
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1985
21 Sep 1985 - Steve Jobs at his Woodside mansion after his resignation from Apple.
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1985
30 September 1985 - Jobs and the NeXT co-founders outside the Jackling mansion.
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1986
1986 - The NeXT founding team - From left to right and top to bottom: Rich Page, Steve Jobs, George Crow, Dan’l Lewin, Bud Tribble, and Susan Barnes.
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1986
1986 - Steve at his NeXT office, pouring over designs of the logo.
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1986
Steve with NeXT chairmen Ross Perot (left) and John Patrick Crecine
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1987
1 November 1987 - Steve Jobs at a NeXT retreat. The man on the left holds a prototype NeXT Cube.
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1988
1 October 1988 - Steve Jobs poses with a NeXT computer
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1988
12 October 1988 - Steve Jobs at the NeXT Cube introduction
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1989
13 June 1989 - Steve and Canon representatives at the NeXT factory, after signing an investment deal in NeXT
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1989
30 March 1989 - Steve Jobs and NeXT COO Peter van Cuylenburg
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1989
Steve Jobs with his daughter Lisa
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1991
18 March 1991 - Steve Jobs' wedding with Laurene Powell, presided over by Kobun Chino.
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1993
1 May 1993 - Steve Jobs with an Intel PC running NeXTstep
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NeXT computer
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NeXT computer
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NeXT computer
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NeXT computer
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NeXT computer
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1986
In 1986, Jobs funded the spinout of The Graphics Group (later renamed Pixar) from Lucasfilm's computer graphics division for the price of $10 million, $5 million of which was given to the company as capital and $5 million of which was paid to Lucasfilm for technology rights.
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1986
In 1986, Jobs funded the spinout of The Graphics Group (later renamed Pixar)
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1997
Jobs laughs with Chief Creative Officer John Lasseter in the latter’s office at Pixar in August 1997.
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1999
San Francisco, CA, USA
Aug 1999 San Francisco, Ca Steve Jobs, Apple's Interim Ceo, Demonstrates The Speed Of The New Macintosh G4 Computer Using Animation Trailer From The Film Toy Story During The Seybold Seminars In San Francisco.
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The first film produced by Pixar with its Disney partnership, Toy Story (1995)
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Steve Jobs at Pixar versus Apple
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San Francisco, CA, USA
Aug 1999 San Francisco, Ca Steve Jobs, Apple's Interim Ceo, Demonstrates The Speed Of The New Macintosh G4 Computer Using Animation Trailer From The Film Toy Story During The Seybold Seminars In San Francisco.
Gallery of Steve Jobs
Achievements
Graphisoft Park, Budapest
Statue of Jobs at Graphisoft Park, Budapest
Membership
Awards
National Medal of Technology
1985
1600 Pennsylvania Ave NW, Washington, DC 20500, United States
Apple Computer co-founders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak at the White House after receiving the National Medal of Technology from President Reagan on February 19, 1985.
PGA Vanguard Award
2002
Los Angeles, CA, USA
Steve Jobs, Ed Catmull, and John Lassiter hold their trophies at the13th Annual Producers Guild Awards March 3, 2002, in Los Angeles, CA. The trio was awarded the Vanguard Award at the event.
1600 Pennsylvania Ave NW, Washington, DC 20500, United States
Apple Computer co-founders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak at the White House after receiving the National Medal of Technology from President Reagan on February 19, 1985.
In 1986, Jobs funded the spinout of The Graphics Group (later renamed Pixar) from Lucasfilm's computer graphics division for the price of $10 million, $5 million of which was given to the company as capital and $5 million of which was paid to Lucasfilm for technology rights.
Aug 1999 San Francisco, Ca Steve Jobs, Apple's Interim Ceo, Demonstrates The Speed Of The New Macintosh G4 Computer Using Animation Trailer From The Film Toy Story During The Seybold Seminars In San Francisco.
Steve Jobs, Ed Catmull, and John Lassiter hold their trophies at the13th Annual Producers Guild Awards March 3, 2002, in Los Angeles, CA. The trio was awarded the Vanguard Award at the event.
Aug 1999 San Francisco, Ca Steve Jobs, Apple's Interim Ceo, Demonstrates The Speed Of The New Macintosh G4 Computer Using Animation Trailer From The Film Toy Story During The Seybold Seminars In San Francisco.
Teacher Robert Lee's sixth grade class at Mountain View's now-defunct San Ramon School. Steve Jobs is pictured at the bottom right in a red and white shirt. Photo courtesy of Steven Hatt, pictured bottom left in a white v-neck sweater.
Steve Jobs, in full Steven Paul Jobs, was an American entrepreneur and business magnate. He was a co-founder of Apple Computer, Inc. (now Apple Inc.), and a charismatic pioneer of the personal computer era.
Background
Ethnicity:
Jobs was ethnically Arab from his father, who belongs to a prominent family of Syrian Arab origin. His mother was of Swiss-German and German descent.
Steven Jobs was born on February 24, 1955. He was adopted shortly thereafter by a California couple, Paul and Clara Jobs.
Steve Jobs's biological parents were Abdulfattah Jandali and Joanne Schieble. His parents were unmarried students. Joanne studied in the magistracy of the University of Wisconsin, and Jandali also worked as an assistant teacher. As Joan's relatives objected to their relationship, and her father, who was at death, threatened to deprive her of his inheritance, she had to leave to a private doctor in San Francisco, and then she gave the child for adoption.
Stephen's adoptive parents could not have their own children. They named the adoptive son Stephen Paul. Joan wanted Stephen's adoptive parents to have a higher education, and when she found out that Clara did not graduate from college and Paul studied only in high school, she signed adoption papers only after they had made a written commitment to pay for Stephen's college education.
When Jobs was two, he was joined by an adopted sister, Patricia. Seeking more space for their growing family, the Job's family moved to Mountain View, California in 1961. In a bigger house, Paul Jobs returned to his hobby of rebuilding cars, constructing a workbench for his son. Young Steve jobs would help his father rebuild cars as well as with a wide range of household building and repair projects. These projects would serve as a background for Jobs’ early interest in electronics, one he shared with the many engineers who lived in his new neighborhood.
Jobs always thought of Paul and Clara as a father and mother, he was very annoyed if someone called them adoptive parents: "They are my real parents by 100%". According to the rules of formal adoption, biological parents didn't have any information about their son's location, and Steve met with his own mother and younger sister only 31 years later.
Education
For Jobs, who have learned to read as a toddler, school was tedious, and he often ran into disciplinary and academic problems. Although he was in the advanced programs in Mountain View, his parents drained their savings when Jobs was 12 to move to Los Altos, California, so he could go to school in the far superior Cupertino school district.
His education in Cupertino accelerated in more ways than one, as his new home was situated in a neighborhood even more saturated with engineers. At a young age, Jobs’ interest in electronics turned a few heads. When he was 13, Bill Hewlett of Hewlett Packard offered Jobs a summer job assembling frequency counters.
The next fall, Jobs began studying at Homestead High School, where he would meet Steve Wozniak, the school’s resident electronics whiz. It was also while at Homestead that Jobs developed his lifelong identification with the counterculture that was redefining America during the late 1960s. He grew his hair long and became interested in music, literature, and religion, especially Eastern religions.
Jobs was 16 when Wozniak, who was older, began classes at the University of California, Berkeley, where Jobs would often go visit his friend. At the same time, he was taking English classes at Stanford and working on an underground film project.
Dropped Out of College After graduating from high school in 1972, Jobs attended Reed College in Portland, Oregon, for two years before dropping out, partly to ease his family's financial burden and partly to find himself.
In 1972, Steve Wozniak built a circuit board with his own version of the video game Pong, which he gave to Jobs. With the board as his resume, Jobs convinced Atari, Inc. to give him a job as a technician, after which he left off his studies at Reed College in Oregon. He was an official college dropout but continued his education by informally auditing classes.
Jobs took a job at Atari Corporation as a video game designer in early 1974 and saved enough money for a pilgrimage to India to experience Buddhism. Back in Silicon Valley in the autumn of 1974, Jobs reconnected with Stephen Wozniak, a former high school friend who was working for the Hewlett-Packard Company. When Wozniak told Jobs of his progress in designing his own computer logic board, Jobs suggested that they go into business together, which they did after Hewlett-Packard formally turned down Wozniak’s design in 1976. The Apple I, as they called the logic board, was built in the Jobses’ family garage with money they obtained by selling Jobs’ Volkswagen minibus and Wozniak’s programmable calculator.
Jobs was one of the first entrepreneurs to understand that the personal computer would appeal to a broad audience, at least if it did not appear to belong in a junior high school science fair. With Jobs’s encouragement, Wozniak designed an improved model, the Apple II, complete with a keyboard, and they arranged to have a sleek, molded plastic case manufactured to enclose the unit.
Though Jobs had long, unkempt hair and eschewed business garb, he managed to obtain financing, distribution, and publicity for the company, Apple Computer, incorporated in 1977, the same year that the Apple II was completed. The machine was an immediate success, becoming synonymous with the boom in personal computers. In 1981 the company had a record-setting public stock offering, and in 1983 it made the quickest entrance (to that time) into the Fortune 500 list of America’s top companies. In 1983 the company recruited PepsiCo, Inc., president John Sculley to be its chief executive officer (CEO) and, implicitly, Jobs’s mentor in the fine points of running a large corporation. Jobs had convinced Sculley to accept the position by challenging him: “Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life?” The line was shrewdly effective, but it also revealed Jobs’s own near-messianic belief in the computer revolution.
During that same period, Jobs was heading the most important project in the company’s history. In 1979 he led a small group of Apple engineers to a technology demonstration at the Xerox Corporation’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) to see how the graphical user interface could make computers easier to use and more efficient. Soon afterward, Jobs left the engineering team that was designing Lisa, a business computer, to head a smaller group building a lower-cost computer. Both computers were redesigned to exploit and refine the PARC ideas, but Jobs was explicit in favoring the Macintosh, or Mac, as the new computer became known. Jobs coddled his engineers and referred to them as artists, but his style was uncompromising; at one point he demanded a redesign of an internal circuit board simply because he considered it unattractive. He would later be renowned for his insistence that the Macintosh be not merely great but “insanely great.” In January 1984 Jobs himself introduced the Macintosh in a brilliantly choreographed demonstration that was the centerpiece of an extraordinary publicity campaign. It would later be pointed to as the archetype of “event marketing.”
However, the first Macs were underpowered and expensive, and they had few software applications - all of which resulted in disappointing sales. Apple steadily improved the machine, so that it eventually became the company’s lifeblood as well as the model for all subsequent computer interfaces. But Jobs’s apparent failure to correct the problem quickly led to tensions in the company, and in 1985 Sculley convinced Apple’s board of directors to remove the company’s famous co-founder.
Jobs quickly started another firm, NeXT Inc., designing powerful workstation computers for the education market. His funding partners included Texan entrepreneur Ross Perot and Canon Inc., a Japanese electronics company. Although the NeXT computer was notable for its engineering design, it was eclipsed by less costly computers from competitors such as Sun Microsystems, Inc. In the early 1990s Jobs focused the company on its innovative software system, NEXTSTEP.
Meanwhile, in 1986 Jobs acquired a controlling interest in Pixar, a computer graphics firm that had been founded as a division of Lucasfilm Ltd., the production company of Hollywood movie director George Lucas. Over the following decade, Jobs built Pixar into a major animation studio that, among other achievements, produced the first full-length feature film to be completely computer-animated, Toy Story, in 1995. Pixar’s public stock offering that year made Jobs, for the first time, a billionaire. He eventually sold the studio to the Disney Company in 2006.
In late 1996 Apple, saddled by huge financial losses and on the verge of collapse, hired a new chief executive, semiconductor executive Gilbert Amelio. When Amelio learned that the company, following intense and prolonged research efforts, had failed to develop an acceptable replacement for the Macintosh’s aging operating system (OS), he chose NEXTSTEP, buying Jobs’s company for more than $400 million - and bringing Jobs back to Apple as a consultant. However, Apple’s board of directors soon became disenchanted with Amelio’s inability to turn the company’s finances around and in June 1997 requested Apple’s prodigal co-founder to lead the company once again. Jobs quickly forged an alliance with Apple’s erstwhile foe, the Microsoft Corporation, scrapped Amelio’s Mac-clone agreements, and simplified the company’s product line. He also engineered an award-winning advertising campaign that urged potential customers to “think different” and buy Macintoshes. Just as important is what he did not do: he resisted the temptation to make machines that ran Microsoft’s Windows OS; nor did he, as some urged, spin-off Apple as a software-only company. Jobs believed that Apple, as the only major personal computer maker with its own operating system, was in a unique position to innovate.
Innovate he did. In 1998, Jobs introduced the iMac, an egg-shaped, one-piece computer that offered high-speed processing at a relatively modest price and initiated a trend of high-fashion computers. (Subsequent models sported five different bright colors.) By the end of the year, the iMac was the nation’s highest-selling personal computer, and Jobs was able to announce consistent profits for the once-moribund company. The following year, he triumphed once more with the stylish iBook, a laptop computer built with students in mind, and the G4, a desktop computer sufficiently powerful that (so Apple boasted) it could not be exported under certain circumstances because it qualified as a supercomputer. Though Apple did not regain the industry dominance it once had, Steve Jobs had saved his company, and in the process re-established himself as a master high-technology marketer and visionary.
In 2001 Jobs started reinventing Apple for the 21st century. That was the year that Apple introduced iTunes, a computer program for playing music and for converting music to the compact MP3 digital format commonly used in computers and other digital devices. Later the same year, Apple began selling the iPod, a portable MP3 player, which quickly became the market leader. In 2003 Apple began selling downloadable copies of major record company songs in MP3 format over the Internet. By 2006 more than one billion songs and videos had been sold through Apple’s online iTunes Store. In recognition of the growing shift in the company’s business, Jobs officially changed the name of the company to Apple Inc. on January 9, 2007.
In 2007 Jobs took the company into the telecommunications business with the introduction of the touch-screen iPhone, a mobile telephone with capabilities for playing MP3s and videos and for accessing the Internet. Later that year, Apple introduced the iPod Touch, a portable MP3 and gaming device that included built-in Wi-Fi and an iPhone-like touch screen. Bolstered by the use of the iTunes Store to sell Apple and third-party software, the iPhone and iPod Touch soon boasted more games than any other portable gaming system. Jobs announced in 2008 that future releases of the iPhone and iPod Touch would offer improved game functionality. In an ironic development, Apple, which had not supported game developers in its early years out of fear of its computers not being taken seriously as business machines, was now staking a claim to a greater role in the gaming business to go along with its move into telecommunications.
In October 2003, Jobs was diagnosed with cancer. In mid-2004, he announced to his employees that he had a cancerous tumor in his pancreas.
On August 24, 2011, Jobs announced his resignation as Apple's CEO, writing to the board, "I have always said if there ever came a day when I could no longer meet my duties and expectations as Apple's CEO, I would be the first to let you know. Unfortunately, that day has come." Jobs became chairman of the board and named Tim Cook as his successor as CEO. Jobs continued to work for Apple until the day before his death six weeks later.
Jobs died at his Palo Alto, California, home around 3 p.m. (PDT) on October 5, 2011, due to complications from a relapse of his previously treated islet-cell pancreatic neuroendocrine tumor, which resulted in respiratory arrest. A small private funeral was held on October 7, 2011.
Popularly known as the "Father of the Digital World", Steve Jobs was and still continues to remain the legendary, futurist visionary who created a sensation across the globe with his personal computer revolution. He moved on to make history in the world of consumer electronics with his foray into the music and cellular industry. The founder of Apple Inc, Pixar Animation Studios and NeXT Inc, Jobs gave information technology its life and blood.
A master of innovation, he was known for his perfectionist attitude and futuristic vision. He foresaw trends in the field of information technology and worked hard to embrace the same in his line of products. With about 346 US patents by his side, Steve Jobs created a revolution in his field with his novel ideas and unique concepts. During his years at Apple, he administered the development of the iMac, iTunes, iPod, iPhone, and iPad. He was the mastermind behind the working of the company's Apple Retail Stores, iTunes Store, and the App Store.
In 1985, he was awarded the National Medal of Technology (with Steve Wozniak), by US President Ronald Reagan. In 1987, he received Jefferson Award for Public Service. In 1991 Job received the Howard Vollum Award from Reed College.
In 2007 he was named the most powerful person in business by Fortune magazine. In 2007 Steve was inducted into the California Hall of Fame, located at The California Museum for History, Women and the Arts. In 2017 the Steve Jobs Theatre opened at Apple Park.
Regarding Christianity, Jobs once told an interviewer that at age 13, he asked a preacher if God knew about starving children and the preacher replied that yes, God knew everything. Jobs never again considered Christianity.
He once said: "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. The wisdom you’ve accumulated. Somehow it lives on."
He took a trip to India which changed his life dramatically. He returned with a shaved head and began to practice Buddhism. While he visited the oldest monastery in America, nearly taking up residence, he didn't stay that close to the religion. Still, zen influenced all parts of his life including his design work. He practiced meditation, studied eastern culture and religion, and even shaved his head.
Politics
Jobs was a Democrat and supported Barack Obama, even though, as the owner of a multinational corporation, he took many views of business-friendly Republicans.
Jobs was, above all else, a businessman - but with a Southern California liberal twist. His upbringing turned him into a social liberal who expressed concern over environmental issues, race issues, and generally had a progressive view towards society.
His corporate side, however, was aligned more with Republican values. He once told Obama that regulations on businesses made it impossible to have factories in America and that education in America was just plain screwed.
Still, Apple actually managed to stay mostly un-political, at least compared to Microsoft and other tech companies. Jobs just wanted to focus on making a good product and, as a result, Apple never even started a political lobbying organization.
Views
Jobs believed that Everything Happens for a Reason. Everything that you study or learn in life would contribute in one way or the way in your success in the future. All you need to have is confidence in what you are doing. In Steve Jobs’ words, it’s all about connecting the dots and you can connect the dots only by looking backward and see what all reasons and causes have together contributed to your success. If Steve Jobs had not left college, he wouldn’t have entered the calligraphy class and so, personal computers might not have the beautiful typography they do. If he had not left college, he would have developed Apple products. A belief that the dots would connect in the future gives one confidence in what one wishes to do.
Jobs harbored an intense dislike for PCs, and is quoted as saying to one friend, "I'd rather sell dog shit than PCs."
Jobs was no philanthropist. In fact, in Apple's early days, he cut the company's philanthropic programs, saying they would return when the company was more profitable. Despite Apple's enormous success, the charitable programs were never reinstated.
Quotations:
"I want to put a ding in the universe."
"Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works."
"We hire people who want to make the best things in the world."
"Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower."
"Sometimes life is going to hit you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith."
"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."
"Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren't used to an environment where excellence is expected."
"Sometimes when you innovate, you make mistakes. It is best to admit them quickly, and get on with improving your other innovations."
"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."
"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."
“Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice.”
“Creativity is just connecting things.”
“Have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”
“You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.”
“Sometimes when you innovate, you make mistakes. It is best to admit them quickly, and get on with improving your other innovations.”
“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.”
“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life.”
“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.”
“You have to be burning with an idea, or a problem, or a wrong that you want to right. If you’re not passionate enough from the start, you’ll never stick it out.”
“Stay hungry. Stay foolish.”
“When you grow up you tend to get told that the world is the way it is and your life is just to live your life inside the world. Try not to bash into the walls too much. Try to have a nice family life, have fun, save a little money. That’s a very limited life. Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact: Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it, you can influence it… Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again.”
Personality
Steve wasn't an ordinary person, he had a rare combination of very special traits that helped him move forward in spite of the setbacks he faced. He was very far-sighted. Steve Jobs saw the future beforehand. He wasn't talking about imaginary products that he wanted to create, but he was just describing what already existed in his mind. He saw his products changing the world inside his mind first then he decided to bring them to reality.
He was extremely perseverance: Steve had that kind of perseverance that could only be attained if a person believed in himself to a degree that he would know that his success is going to be a fact of life. In some of his interviews, Steve jobs revealed the secret behind his perseverance. He said that passion fuels a person's journey and that if there was no passion than an ordinary person will certainly quit.
He was extremely confident and sometimes arrogant. Steve Jobs believed in his products, mind, and creations more than any man. Whenever something went wrong he never blamed his products, but he always believed something can be done to turn things around. He had a rebellious nature. Steve Jobs wasn't just an ordinary Rebel, but he was a one who had no respect for the status quo and who refused to live by the rules of others. This was clear in his habit of walking barefoot in public places. Jobs was moved to the night shift when working at Atari due to complaints about his hygiene. He rarely showered and would walk around barefoot in the Atari offices.
Steve was insanely ambitious - he was clear about his mission since his early days. He mentioned more than once that he wanted to change the world, influence it and leave a great mark behind.
Jobs was a vegan, which was not known to many people. He started his veganism through college at the age of 19 when he started exploring unusual diets. This is true until this day, but he has a soft spot for some fish. It is rumored that one of Jobs’ favorite meals is plain raw carrot without any dressing or accompaniment. A strong believer in Eastern medicine, he sought to treat his own cancer through alternative approaches and specialized diets before reluctantly seeking his first surgery for a cancerous tumor in 2004.
Jobs has called experimenting with LSD as "one of the two or three most important things I have done in my life."
He never put license plates on his silver Mercedes (despite driving it constantly). California has a rule that a car owner has six months to put plates on a new car. Jobs just changed cars (to the identical model) every six months, allowing him to drive without plates. Jobs often parked in spots reserved for the handicapped.
Steve Jobs was passionate about music and enjoyed listening to music in his past-time as a keen hobby. It is known that Jobs’ favorite artist was Bob Dylan, and he used to play a lot of his music during his youth days on his Guitar. Jobs loved the Beatles and Grateful Dead, who were big in the 1960s. He described himself as an audiophile and spent a whopping $100,000 on a stereo system for his home once he made it.
Jobs was no sports heavy. He swam competitively as a kid but abandoned the endeavor as he got older, spending his time instead at Hewlett-Packard seminars and other computing-related ventures. He briefly took up golf in the 1990s before concluding, as so many have done, that he could never put in the hours required to get good at it.
While Steve Jobs famously once said that people don’t read anymore, he’s wasn’t one of them. The innovator, salesman and tech and marketing visionary was also a prolific reader with a penchant for poetry, LSD, Bauhaus, and Zen Buddhism. Jobs was a voracious reader and a curious learner all throughout his life. Success came as a result of his abundant knowledge and awareness about his work and life in general. The following books had a great impact on him: "King Lear" by William Shakespeare, "Moby Dick" by Herman Melville, "The Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas" by Dylan Thomas, "Be Here Now" by Ram Dass, "Diet For A Small Planet" by Frances Moore Lappe, "Mucusless Diet Healing System" by Arnold Ehret, "Autobiography Of A Yogi" by Paramhansa Yogananda, Zen Mind and "Beginner’s Mind" by Shunryu Suzuki.
Physical Characteristics:
Jobs' height was 6 feet and weigh 160 pounds. He had dark brown hair and dark brown eyes. With age, his hair started turning gray.
Quotes from others about the person
Very often, when told of a new idea, he will immediately attack it and say that it is worthless or even stupid and tell you that it was a waste of time to work on it. This alone is bad management, but if the idea is a good one he will soon be telling people about it as if it was his own." - Jef Raskin
"Steve insists that we're shipping in early 1982, and won't accept answers to the contrary. The best way to describe the situation is a term from Star Trek. Steve has a reality distortion field.… In his presence, the reality is malleable. He can convince anyone of practically anything. It wears off when he's not around, but it makes it hard to have realistic schedules." - Macintosh project manager Bud Tribble.
"I never really get to see, except second hand, how abrupt he is with people. I couldn't be that way with people. But maybe that's what you need to run a business, to find things that are worthless and get rid of them." - Steve Wozniak
"One lesson many people took from the Steve Jobs story is that great entrepreneurs can anticipate what their customers want even before they ask for it." - Steve Blank
"My point is that Steve could make these products and make them likable, slip them under the door, and people would slip back a tray of food. It worked. He was right. That cult of Apple, this love for Steve - when he died, I was overwhelmed by the eulogizing, which I hadn’t seen since John Lennon. I’ll be honest with you, I didn’t really understand it, even though I was asked to eulogize him for Time magazine and accepted. But I thought, There’s something I’m not getting here, but plainly I should - I’ve missed something." - Aaron Sorkin
"When I wasn't sure what the word "charisma" meant, I met Steve Jobs, and then I knew." - Larry Tesler
"He wanted you to be great, and he wanted you to create something that was great, and he was going to make you do that." - Larry Tesler
Interests
Politicians
Barack Obama
Writers
King Lear by William Shakespeare, Moby Dick by Herman Melville, The Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas by Dylan Thomas, Be Here Now by Ram Dass, Diet For A Small Planet by Frances Moore Lappe, Mucusless Diet Healing System by Arnold Ehret, Autobiography Of A Yogi by Paramhansa Yogananda, Zen Mind and Beginner’s Mind by Shunryu Suzuki
Sport & Clubs
swimming, golf
Connections
Steve Jobs and Laurene Powell married on March 18, 1991. The pair met in the early 1990s at Stanford business school, where Powell was a Master of Business Administration student. They lived together in Palo Alto, California, with their three children.
Although he remained a private man who rarely disclosed information about his family, it is known that Jobs fathered a daughter, Lisa, with girlfriend Chrisann Brennan when he was 23. He denied the paternity of his daughter in court documents, claiming he was sterile. Chrisann struggled financially for much of her life, and Jobs did not initiate a relationship with his daughter until she was seven years old. When she was a teenager, Lisa came to live with her father.
Father:
Paul Reinhold Jobs
When Steve was growing up, his father, Paul Jobs, built a workbench for him in his garage so that he could pass his love of mechanics to his son. Paul showed his son how to take apart and reconstruct electronics, a hobby that instilled confidence, tenacity and mechanical prowess in young Jobs.
Mother:
Clara Hagopian Jobs
Spouse:
Laurene Powell Jobs
Laurene Powell Jobs met Apple founder Steve Jobs when she was a 25-year-old student at Stanford Graduate School of Business. They married in 1991, and they were together until he died of pancreatic cancer in 2011.
Biological mother:
Joanne Schieble Simpson
Joanne and Abdulfattah wanted to marry, but her father wouldn’t let her marry a Syrian immigrant. She left and when their son was born in 1955 and gave him up for adoption.
biological father:
Abdulfattah John Jandali
Steve and Abdulfattah have never met. Jandali has sent Jobs emails on his birthdays.
Daughter:
Lisa Brennan-Jobs
Despite his refusal to accept her, Jobs did name an early Apple computer Lisa. At the time, he claimed "Lisa" was simply an acronym for Local Integrated Systems Architecture. But later he admitted that it was "obviously" named after the daughter he refused to acknowledge.
Many years later, Steve Jobs relented to the idea that he could be Lisa’s father. But by that point, the damage to their relationship was so extreme that it took a long time to repair it.
"All I wanted was closeness and sweetness and for him to relieve me. To let me be the star, probably. To be like, ‘Well, how was your day?’ And to listen. And at such a young age, and so used to the spotlight, and to everybody fawning on him… he didn’t know how to be with me," Brennan-Jobs said of their relationship.
Daughter:
Eve Jobs
In the biography "Steve Jobs," Walter Isaacson describes Jobs as growing up to become "a strong-willed, funny firecracker" who knew how to take on her famous father.
Isaacson wrote that Jobs would even call her father's assistant at work to ensure that she was "put on his calendar."
Son:
Reed Jobs
Reed is Steve Jobs's only son and his first child with his wife Laurene. Named after Steve's alma mater (something Jobs denied), he always had a special relationship with his father.
For example, Steve said to his biographer Walter Isaacson "When I was diagnosed with cancer, I made my deal with God or whatever, which was that I really wanted to see Reed graduate". Isaacson describes him as an intense young man like his father, but who inherited the sweetness of his mother. After his father was diagnosed with cancer, Reed apparently decided to become a cancer researcher.
Daughter:
Erin Siena Jobs
Following the demise of Steve Jobs, Erin, along with Reed and Eve, has maintained a modest lifestyle away from all the limelight.
Despite all of the attention that her father received during his life and passing, Erin Siena remained out of the spotlight and was noted as one of the more private persons in the Jobs family.
Sister:
Mona Simpson
Mona Simpson gave a moving eulogy for the Apple co-founder at the memorial service: "I'd been waiting for a man to love, who could love me. For decades, I'd thought that man would be my father. When I was 25, I met that man and he was my brother."
Bill Gates and Steve Jobs weren't always enemies - Microsoft made software early on for the mega-popular Apple II PC, and Gates would routinely fly down to Cupertino to see what Apple was working on.
In the early '80s, Jobs flew up to Washington to sell Gates on the possibility of making Microsoft software for the Apple Macintosh computer, with its revolutionary graphical user interface. Gates wasn't particularly impressed with what he saw as a limited platform - or Jobs' attitude.
Microsoft and Apple worked hand-in-hand for the first few years of the Macintosh. At one point, Gates quipped that he had more people working on the Mac than Jobs did.
ex-girlfriend:
Chrisann Brennan
Chrisann Brennan is an American painter and writer who wrote the autobiography The Bite in the Apple about her relationship with Apple co-founder Steve Jobs. They had one child, Lisa Brennan-Jobs.
In partnership with his friend Wozniak, Steve Jobs invented the Apple I computer. The pair founded Apple Computers in 1976 with Ronald Wayne, releasing some of the first personal computers on the market.
Friend:
Daniel Kottke
Daniel Kottke was a college friend of Steve Jobs and one of the first employees of Apple Inc.
successor :
Tim Cook
In August 2011, Jobs formally resigned from the post of CEO. He assumed the role of chairman of the board and announced Tim Cook as the new CEO of the company.
Jobs was friends with President Bill Clinton and allowed him to stay at his California mansion whenever Clinton visited his daughter Chelsea Clinton, then a student at Stanford University. Clinton, in turn, hosted Jobs as a guest of the Lincoln Bedroom.