Steve Jobs: Biography
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| Steve Jobs
Steve Jobs:
Biography
Steve Jobs co-founded Apple Computers
with Steve Wozniak. Under Jobs' guidance, the company pioneered a series of
revolutionary technologies, including the iPhone and iPad.
Steve Jobs was born in San Francisco, California, on February 24, 1955,
to two University of Wisconsin graduate students who gave him up for adoption.
Smart but directionless, Jobs experimented with different pursuits before
starting Apple Computers with Steve Wozniak in 1976. Apple's revolutionary
products, which include the iPod, iPhone and iPad, are now seen as dictating
the evolution of modern technology. He died in 2011, following a long battle
with pancreatic cancer.
Early Life
Steven Paul Jobs was born on February
24, 1955, in San Francisco, California, to Joanne Schieble (later Joanne
Simpson) and Abdulfattah "John" Jandali, two University of Wisconsin
graduate students who gave their unnamed son up for adoption. His father,
Abdulfattah Jandali, was a Syrian political science professor, and his mother,
Joanne Schieble, worked as a speech therapist. Shortly after Steve 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.
As an infant, Steven 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. The family lived in Mountain
View, California, within the area that would later become known as Silicon
Valley. As a boy, Jobs and his father would work on electronics in the family
garage. Paul would show his son how to take apart and reconstruct electronics,
a hobby that instilled confidence, tenacity and mechanical prowess in young
Jobs.
While Jobs was always an intelligent
and innovative thinker, his youth was riddled with frustrations over formal
schooling. Jobs was a prankster in elementary school, 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.
A few years later, while Jobs was
enrolled at Homestead High School (1971), he was introduced to his future partner,
Steve Wozniak, through a friend of Wozniak's. Wozniak was attending the
University of California, Berkeley, at the time. In a 2007 interview with PC World,
Wozniak spoke about why he and Jobs clicked so well: "We both loved
electronics and the way we used to hook up digital chips," Wozniak said.
"Very few people, especially back then, had any idea what chips were, how
they worked and what they could do. I had designed many computers, so I was way
ahead of him in electronics and computer design, but we still had common
interests. We both had pretty much sort of an independent attitude about things
in the world. ..."
After high school, Jobs enrolled at
Reed College in Portland, Oregon. Lacking direction, he dropped out of college
after six months and spent the next 18 months 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 Atari to find
spiritual enlightenment in India, traveling the continent and experimenting
with psychedelic drugs. In 1976, when Jobs was just 21, he and Wozniak started
Apple Computer. The duo started in the Jobs family garage, and funded their
entrepreneurial venture by Jobs selling his Volkswagen bus and Wozniak selling
his beloved scientific calculator.
Jobs and Wozniak are credited with
revolutionizing the computer industry by democratizing the technology and
making the machines smaller, cheaper, intuitive and accessible to everyday
consumers. Wozniak conceived 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 by 700 percent, 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
very first day of trading. Jobs looked to marketing expert John Sculley of
Pepsi-Cola to help fill the role of Apple's president.
Departure from
Apple
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. In 1984, 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
position with the company he co-founded, Jobs left Apple in 1985 to begin a new
hardware and software enterprise called NeXT, Inc. The following year 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. Pixar Studios went on to produce
wildly popular animation films such as Toy Story, Finding Nemo and The Incredibles. Pixar's films have netted $4
billion. The studio merged with Walt Disney in 2006, making Steve Jobs Disney's
largest shareholder.
Reinventing
Apple
Despite Pixar's success, NeXT, Inc.
floundered in its attempts to sell its specialized operating system to
mainstream America. Apple eventually bought the company in 1996 for $429
million. The following year, Jobs returned to his post as Apple's CEO.
Just as Steve 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. His ingenious
products such as the iMac, effective branding campaigns and stylish designs
caught the attention of consumers once again.
Pancreatic
Cancer
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 pescovegetarian 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 their CEO was ill. But
in the end, Jobs' confidentiality took precedence over shareholder disclosure.
In 2004, he had a successful surgery to remove the pancreatic tumor. True to
form, in subsequent years Jobs disclosed little about his health.
Later
Innovations
Apple introduced such revolutionary
products as the Macbook Air, iPod and iPhone, all of which have dictated the
evolution of modern technology. Almost immediately after Apple releases a new
product, competitors scramble to produce comparable technologies. Apple's
quarterly reports improved significantly in 2007: 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, iTunes became the
second-biggest music retailer in America—second only to Wal-Mart. Half of
Apple's current revenue comes from iTunes and iPod sales, with 200 million
iPods sold and 6 billion songs downloaded. For these reasons, Apple has been
ranked No. 1 on Fortune
magazine's list of "America's Most Admired Companies," as well as No.
1 among Fortune 500 companies for returns to shareholders.
Early in 2009, reports circulated
about Jobs' weight loss, some predicting his health issues had returned, which
included a liver transplant. Jobs had responded to these concerns by stating he
was dealing with a hormone imbalance. After nearly a year out of the spotlight,
Steve Jobs delivered a keynote address at an invite-only Apple event September
9, 2009.
In respect to his personal life, Steve
Jobs remained a private man who rarely discloses information about his family.
What is known is Jobs fathered a daughter with girlfriend Chrisann Brennan when
he was 23. Jobs denied paternity of his daughter Lisa in court documents,
claiming he was sterile. Jobs did not initiate a relationship with his daughter
until she was 7, but when she was a teenager she came to live with her father.
In the early 1990s, Jobs met Laurene
Powell at Stanford business school, where Powell was an MBA student. They
married on March 18, 1991, and lived together in Palo Alto, California, with
their three children.
On October 5, 2011, Apple Inc.
announced that its co-founder had passed away. After battling pancreatic cancer
for nearly a decade, Steve Jobs died in Palo Alto. He was 56 years old.
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