Steve Jobs 1 Steve Jobs
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Steve Jobs 1 Steve Jobs Steve Jobs Jobs holding a white iPhone 4 at Worldwide Developers Conference 2010 [1] [1] Born Steven Paul JobsFebruary 24, 1955 San Francisco, California, USA [2] Residence Palo Alto, California, USA Nationality American Alma mater Reed College (dropped out in 1972) [3] Occupation Chairman and CEO, Apple Inc. [4] [5] [6] [7] Salary $1 [8] Net worth $6.1 billion (2010) [9] Board member of The Walt Disney Company [10] Religion Buddhism Spouse Laurene Powell (1991–present) Children 4 Signature Steven Paul Jobs (born February 24, 1955) is an American business magnate and inventor. He is the co-founder and chief executive officer of Apple Inc. Jobs also previously served as chief executive of Pixar Animation Studios; he became a member of the board of The Walt Disney Company in 2006, following the acquisition of Pixar by Disney. He was credited in the 1995 movie Toy Story as an executive producer.[11] In the late 1970s, Jobs, with Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, Mike Markkula,[12] and others, designed, developed, and marketed one of the first commercially successful lines of personal computers, the Apple II series. In the early 1980s, Jobs was among the first to see the commercial potential of the mouse-driven graphical user interface which led to the creation of the Macintosh.[13] [14] After losing a power struggle with the board of directors in 1984,[15] [16] Jobs resigned from Apple and founded NeXT, a computer platform development company specializing in the higher education and business markets. Apple's subsequent 1996 buyout of NeXT brought Jobs back to the company he Steve Jobs 2 co-founded, and he has served as its CEO since 1997. In 1986, he acquired the computer graphics division of Lucasfilm Ltd which was spun off as Pixar Animation Studios.[17] He remained CEO and majority shareholder at 50.1% until its acquisition by The Walt Disney company in 2006.[3] Consequently Jobs became Disney's largest individual shareholder at 7% and a member of Disney's Board of Directors.[18] [19] [20] [21] Jobs' history in business has contributed much to the symbolic image of the idiosyncratic, individualistic Silicon Valley entrepreneur, emphasizing the importance of design and understanding the crucial role aesthetics play in public appeal. His work driving forward the development of products that are both functional and elegant has earned him a devoted following.[22] Early years Jobs was born in San Francisco[1] and was adopted by Paul and Clara Jobs (née Hagopian[23] ) of Mountain View, California, who named him Steven Paul. Paul and Clara later adopted a daughter, who they named Patti. Jobs' biological parents — Abdulfattah Jandali, a Syrian[24] graduate student who later became a political science professor,[25] and Joanne Simpson, an American graduate student[24] who went on to become a speech language pathologist[26] — later married, giving birth to and raising Jobs' biological sister, the novelist Mona Simpson.[27] [28] [29] [30] [31] [32] Steve Jobs at the WWDC 07 Jobs attended Cupertino Junior High School and Homestead High School in Cupertino, California,[22] and frequented after-school lectures at the Hewlett-Packard Company in Palo Alto, California. He was soon hired there and worked with Steve Wozniak as a summer employee.[33] In 1972, Jobs graduated from high school and enrolled in Reed College in Portland, Oregon. Although he dropped out after only one semester,[34] he continued auditing classes at Reed, such as one in calligraphy, while sleeping on the floor in friends' rooms, returning Coke bottles for food money, and getting weekly free meals at the local Hare Krishna temple.[16] Jobs later stated, "If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts."[16] In the autumn of 1974, Jobs returned to California and began attending meetings of the Homebrew Computer Club with Wozniak. He took a job as a technician at Atari, a manufacturer of popular video games, with the primary intent of saving money for a spiritual retreat to India. Jobs then traveled to India with a Reed College friend (and, later, the first Apple employee), Daniel Kottke, in search of spiritual enlightenment. He came back a Buddhist with his head shaved and wearing traditional Indian clothing.[35] [36] During this time, Jobs experimented with psychedelics, calling his LSD experiences "one of the two or three most important things [he had] done in [his] life".[37] He has stated that people around him who did not share his countercultural roots could not fully relate to his thinking.[37] Jobs returned to his previous job at Atari and was given the task of creating a circuit board for the game Breakout. According to Atari founder Nolan Bushnell, Atari had offered US$100 for each chip that was eliminated in the machine. Jobs had little interest or knowledge in circuit board design and made a deal with Wozniak to split the bonus evenly between them if Wozniak could minimize the number of chips. Much to the amazement of Atari, Wozniak reduced the number of chips by 50, a design so tight that it was impossible to reproduce on an assembly line. At the time, Jobs told Wozniak that Atari had only given them $700 (instead of the actual $5000) and that Wozniak's share was thus $350.[38] [39] [40] [41] [42] [43] Steve Jobs 3 Career Beginnings of Apple Computer In 1976, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne,[44] with later funding from a then-semi-retired Intel product-marketing manager and engineer A.C. "Mike" Markkula Jr.,[12] founded Apple. Prior to co-founding Apple, Wozniak was an electronics hacker. Jobs and Wozniak had been friends for several years, having met in 1971, when their mutual friend, Bill Fernandez, introduced 21-year-old Wozniak to 16-year-old Jobs. Steve Jobs managed to interest Wozniak in assembling a computer and selling it. As Apple continued to expand, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates at the fifth D: All Things Digital conference the company began looking for an experienced executive to help manage its (D5) in 2007. expansion. In 1978, Apple recruited Mike Scott from National Semiconductor to serve as CEO for what turned out to be several turbulent years. In 1983, Steve Jobs lured John Sculley away from Pepsi-Cola to serve as Apple's CEO, asking, "Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life, or do you want to come with me and change the world?"[45] [46] 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."[47] The Macintosh became the first commercially successful small computer with a graphical user interface. The development of the Mac was started by Jef Raskin, and eventually taken over by Jobs. While Jobs was a persuasive and charismatic director for Apple, some of his employees from that time had described him as an erratic and temperamental manager. An industry-wide sales slump towards the end of 1984 caused a deterioration in Jobs's working relationship with Sculley, and at the end of May 1985 – following an internal power struggle and an announcement of significant layoffs – Sculley relieved Jobs of his duties as head of the Macintosh division.[48] NeXT Computer Around the same time, Jobs founded another computer company, NeXT Computer. Like the Apple Lisa, the NeXT workstation was technologically advanced; however, it was largely dismissed by industry as cost-prohibitive. Among those who could afford it, however, the NeXT workstation garnered a strong following because of its technical strengths, chief among them its object-oriented software development system. Jobs marketed NeXT products to the scientific and academic fields because of the innovative, experimental new technologies it incorporated (such as the Mach kernel, the digital signal processor chip, and the built-in Ethernet port). The NeXTcube was described by Jobs as an "interpersonal" computer, which he believed was the next step after "personal" computing. That is, if computers could allow people to communicate and collaborate together in an easy way, it would solve many of the problems that "personal" computing had come up against. "1990 CERN: A Joint proposal for a hypertext system is presented to the management. Mike Sendall buys a NeXT cube for evaluation, and gives it to Tim [Berners-Lee]. Tim's prototype implementation on NeXTStep is made in the space of a few months, thanks to the qualities of the NeXTStep software development system. This prototype offers WYSIWYG browsing/authoring! Current Web browsers used in "surfing the Internet" are mere passive windows, depriving the user of the possibility to contribute. During some sessions in the CERN cafeteria, Tim and I try to find a catching name for the system. I was determined that the name should not yet again be taken from Greek mythology. Tim proposes "World-Wide Web". I like this very much, except that it is difficult to pronounce in French..." by Robert Cailliau, 2 November 1995. [49] Steve Jobs 4 During a time when e-mail for most people was plain text, Jobs loved to demo the NeXT's e-mail system, NeXTMail, as an example of his "interpersonal" philosophy. NeXTMail was one of the first to support universally visible, clickable embedded graphics and audio within e-mail. Jobs ran NeXT with an obsession for aesthetic perfection, as evidenced by such things as the NeXTcube's magnesium case.