Icon Steve Jobs They Gave Him the Name Steven Paul Jobs
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iCon Steve Jobs They gave him the name Steven Paul Jobs. He was born to an American mother, Joanne Simpson, and a Syrian father, Abdulfattah (“John”) Jandali, a political science professor, in Green Bay, Wisconsin on February 24, 1955. Soon after his birth, Jobs was put up for adoption. Subsequently he was adopted by Paul and Clara Jobs of Mountain View, Santa Clara County, California. They gave him the name Steven Paul Jobs. His biological parents later married and gave birth to Jobs’ biological sister the novelist Mona Simpson, who is married to Richard Appel. The marriage of his biological parents ended in divorce years later. To this day, Jobs dislikes Paul and Clara Jobs being called his adoptive parents, and prefers to simply refer to them as his “parents.” Page 2 Jobs went to Homestead High School in Cupertino, California and attended afterschool lectures at the Hewlett-Packard Co. in Palo Alto, California. Soon, he was hired there and worked with Stephen Wozniak as a summer employee. In 1972, Jobs graduated from high school and enrolled in Reed College in Portland, Oregon, but he dropped out after one semester. Years later, when speaking at a Stanford University graduation ceremony in 2005, Jobs said he remained at Reed attending classes, including one in calligraphy. “If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts,” he said. In the autumn of 1974, Jobs returned to California and began attending meetings of the “Homebrew Computer Club” with Steve Wozniak. He took a job at Atari, a manufacturer of popular video games, as a technician. During this time, it was discovered that a slightly modified toy whistle included in every “If I had never dropped box of Cap’n Crunch breakfast cereal was able to in on that single course reproduce the 2600 Hz supervision tone used by in college, the Mac the AT&T long distance telephone system. Jobs and would have never had Wozniak went into business briefly in 1974 to build multiple typefaces or “blue boxes” based on the idea that allowed for free long distance calls. proportionally spaced fonts,” he said. Page 3 Jobs Steve In 1976, Jobs, then 21, and Wozniak, 26, founded Apple Computer Co. in the Jobs family garage. The first personal computer Jobs and Wozniak introduced was called the Apple I. It sold for $666.66, in reference to the phone number of Wozniak’s Dial-A-Joke machine, which ended in -6666. In 1977, Jobs and Wozniak introduced the Apple II, which became a huge success in the home market and made Apple an important player in the nascent personal computer industry. In December 1980, Apple Computer became a publicly traded corporation, and with the successful IPO, Jobs’ stature rose further. That same year, Apple Computer released the Apple III, but it met with much less success. As Apple continued to grow, the company began looking for corporate management talent to help manage its expansion. In 1983, Jobs lured John Sculley, an executive with Pepsi-Cola, to serve as Apple’s CEO, challenging him, “Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water, or do you want a chance to change the world?” That same year, Apple also released the technologically advanced but commercially unsuccessful Lisa. 1984 saw the introduction of the Macintosh, the first commercially successful computer with a graphical user d fdfinterface. Page 4 Jobs married Laurene Powell, nine Jobs from his time at Reed College, years his junior, on March 18, 1991 as saying she “believed that Steve and has three children with her. He became the lover of Joan Baez in also has a daughter, Lisa Brennan- large measure because Baez had Jobs, by Chris Brennan, a woman been the lover of (Bob) Dylan.” In he did not marry. In “The Second iCon: Steve Jobs by Jeffrey S. Young Coming of Steve Jobs” author Alan & William L. Simon, the authors Deutschman reports that Jobs suggest that Jobs might have once dated Joan Baez. Deutschman married Baez if not for the fact that quotes Elizabeth Holmes, a friend of her age at the time (41) could have cancelled out the possibility of cell neuroendocrine tumor, which having children. Jobs is a pescetarian did not require chemotherapy (not a vegetarian or vegan as is or radiation therapy. During often claimed) — although he does his absence, Tim Cook, head of not eat meat, he reportedly eats worldwide sales and operations at fish from time to time. On July 31, Apple, ran the company. 2004 Jobs underwent surgery to remove a cancerous tumor in his pancreas. He had a very rare form of pancreatic cancer, called an islet Page 5 While Jobs was a persuasive and charismatic evangelist for Apple, critics also claimed he was an erratic and tempestuous manager. In 1985, after an internal power struggle, Jobs was stripped of his duties by the board of directors and resigned from Apple. Note that Jobs still remained chairman of Apple Computer at that time. After leaving Apple, Jobs founded another computer company, NeXT Computer. Like Lisa, NeXT was technologically advanced, but it never was able to break into the mainstream because of its high cost. For those who could afford it, it did, however, garner a strong following due to its technical strengths, chief among them being its object-oriented software development system. Jobs marketed NeXT products toward the scientific and academic fields because of the innovative, experimental new technologies it incorporated (such as the Mach kernel and the DSP chip). Jobs ran NeXT with an obsession for perfection at any cost. This eye for detail ultimately destroyed NeXT’s hardware division, but, on the other hand, it also showed the world that Jobs could design a Macintosh that was arguably better than the original. The NeXT Cube’s laser-cut magnesium case has popularly been cited as an example of the quest for perfection-at-any-cost. Page 6 In 1996, Apple bought NeXT for $402 million, bringing Jobs back to the company he founded. In 1997 he became Apple’s interim CEO after the directors lost confidence in and ousted then-CEO Gil Amelio. Upon returning to the leadership of Apple, Jobs used the title of “iCEO”. In March of 1997 Jobs abruptly terminated a number of projects such as Newton, Cyberdog, and OpenDoc. In the coming months, many employees developed a fear of encountering Jobs while riding in the elevator, “afraid that they might not have a job when the doors opened. The reality was that Steve’s summary executions were rare, but a handful of victims is enough to terrorize a whole company.” With the purchase of NeXT, much of the company’s technology found its way into Apple products, notably NeXTSTEP, which evolved into Mac OS X. Under Jobs’ guidance the company increased sales significantly with the introduction of the iMac. Since then, appealing designs and powerful branding have worked well for Apple. In recent years, the company has branched out. With the introduction of the iPod portable music player, iTunes digital music software, the iTunes Music Store, the company is making forays into personal electronics and online music. While stimulating innovation, Jobs also reminds his employees that “real artists ship,” by which he means that delivering working products on time is as important as innovation and killer design. Jobs worked at Apple for several years with an annual salary of $1, and this earned him a listing in Guinness World Records as the “Lowest Paid Chief Executive Officer”. At the 2001 keynote speech of Macworld Expo in San Francisco, the company dropped the “interim” from his title. His current salary at Apple officially remains $1 per year, although he has traditionally been the recipient of a number of lucrative “executive gifts” from the board, including a $90 million jet in 1999, and just under 30 million shares of restricted stock in 2000-2002. As such, Jobs is well compensated for his efforts at Apple despite the nominal one-dollar salary. Page 7 iCon Steve Jobs Eric Whitmer Typography.