From a college dropout to heading an over $350 billion Apple empire, Steve Jobs dramatically transformed the worlds of personal computing, music and mobile phones, ushering in a new digital era
Jobs, who died on Oct 5, 2011 at the age of 56 after a seven-year battle with pancreatic cancer, was also the man behind the stupendous success of the computer animation firm Pixar, makers of Toy Story and Finding Nemo.Though he himself never designed a computer in his life, it was because of him that the Apple products, while largely providing the same services as those from other companies, are perceived to be different.
Born on February 24, 1955 to Joanne Carole Schieble and Abdulfattah Jandali, Steven Paul Jobs was adopted by Paul and Clara Jobs. Jandali was a graduate student from Syria who later became a political science professor. Paul Jobs, who worked in finance and real estate before moving back to his original trade as machinist, moved his family down the San Francisco Peninsula to Mountain View and then to Los Altos in the 1960s. When asked about his "adoptive parents," Jobs replied emphatically that Paul and Clara Jobs "were my parents." He later stated in his authorized biography that they "were my parents 1,000%."
From an early age, Steve Jobs was interested in electronics. As an eighth grader, after discovering that a crucial part was missing from a frequency counter he was assembling, he telephoned William Hewlett, the co-founder of Hewlett-Packard. Hewlett spoke with the boy for 20 minutes, prepared a bag of parts for him to pick up and offered him a job as a summer intern, according to The New York Times.
Jobs met Stephan Wozniak, with whom he co-founded Apple in 1976, while attending Homestead High School in neighbouring Cupertino.
After enrolling at Reed College in 1972, Jobs left after one semester, but remained in Portland for another 18 months auditing classes. In a commencement address given at Stanford in 2005, Jobs said he had decided to leave college because it was consuming all of his parents' savings. Jobs returned to Silicon Valley in 1974 and took a job as a technician at Atari, the video game manufacturer. But, he left after several months and travelled to India with a college friend, Daniel Kottke, in search of spiritual enlightenment.Jobs left India after staying for seven months and returning to the US ahead of Daniel Kottke,with his head shaved and wearing traditional Indian clothing.
Jobs returned to Atari and along with Wozniak, then working as an engineer at HP, began attending meetings of the Homebrew Computer Club, a hobbyist group that met at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center in Menlo Park, California in 1975. Personal computing had been pioneered at research laboratories close to Stanford and was spreading. Wozniak designed the original Apple I computer simply to show it off to his friends at the Homebrew. It was Jobs who had the inspiration that it could be a commercial product. In early 1976, he and Wozniak, using their own money, began Apple in the Jobs family garage in Los Altos with an initial investment of $1,300 before securing the backing of former Intel executive A C Markkula, who lent them $250,000.
Wozniak would be the technical half and Jobs the marketing half of the original Apple I Computer.
In April 1977, Jobs and Wozniak introduced Apple II at the West Coast Computer Faire in San Francisco, creating a sensation. The company went public in 1981, when its sales touched $600 million from $2 million in 1977. By 1983, Apple was in the Fortune 500, an achievement for a new firm. In 1981, Jobs joined a small group of Apple engineers pursuing a separate project, a lower-cost system code-named Macintosh, which was introduced in January 1984.
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 sell sugar water for the rest of your life, or do you want to come with me and change the world? Apple president Mike Markkula also wanted to retire and believed that Jobs lacked the discipline and temperament needed to run Apple on a daily basis and that Sculley's conventional business background and recent successes would give a more favorable image.Eventually , the two men became estranged and a power struggle ensued when the Lisa failed commercially and early Macintosh sales proved disappointing, leading to Jobs losing control of the Lisa project.
The Apple board of directors instructed Sculley to "contain" Jobs and limit his ability to launch expensive forays into untested products.Sculley learned that Jobs—believing Sculley to be "bad for Apple" and the wrong person to lead the company—had been attempting to organize a boardroom coup,and on May 24, 1985 he called a board meeting to resolve the matter. Apple's board of directors sided with Sculley and removed Jobs from his managerial duties as head of the Macintosh division. Jobs resigned from Apple five months later and founded NeXT Inc. the same year.
"I don't wear the right kind of pants to run this company," he told a small gathering of Apple employees before he left, a member of the original Macintosh development team was quoted as saying by NYT.
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 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.He also established a personal philanthropic foundation after leaving Apple but soon decided, instead, to spend much of his fortune $10 million on acquiring Pixar, a struggling graphics supercomputing firm owned by filmmaker George Lucas.
The purchase, though a significant gamble as there was little market then for computer-animated movies, proved profitable when the company, in 1995, along with Walt Disney Pictures, released 'Toy Story', collecting box-office receipts of $362 million.When Pixar went public in a record-breaking offering, Jobs became a billionaire. In 2006, the Walt Disney Company agreed to purchase Pixar for $7.4 billion, making Jobs its largest single shareholder, with about 7 per cent of the firm's stock.
Meanwhile, Apple, after unsuccessful efforts to develop next-generation operating systems in 1996 with Gilbert Amelio in command, acquired NeXT for $430 million. The next year, Jobs returned to Apple as an adviser and became its chief executive again in 2000.
With his rise, Jobs personal life also became more public. He had a number of well-publicised romantic relationships, including one with folk singer Joan Baez before he married Laurene Powell. Jobs and Laurene had three children -- two daughters Eve Jobs and Erin Sienna Jobs and a son, Reed. Jobs had one more daughter, Lisa Brennan-Jobs, from a relationship with Chrisann Brennan.
Well Jobs had been batttling with pancreatic cancer since 2003 , he initially refused to undergo proper medical treatment and tried a vegan diet, acupuncture, herbal remedies and other treatments he found online, and even consulted a psychic. He also was influenced by a doctor who ran a clinic that advised juice fasts, bowel cleansings and other unproven approaches, before finally having surgery in July 2004. He eventually underwent Whipple procedure. in July 2004, that appeared to successfully remove the tumor. Jobs apparently did not receive chemotherapy or radiation. During Jobs's absence Tim Cook, head of worldwide sales and operations at Apple, ran the company. Jobs announced his resignation as Apple's CEO on August 24, 2011. "Unfortunately, that day has come," wrote Jobs, for he could "no longer meet [his] duties and expectations as Apple's CEO" . Jobs became chairman of the board and named Tim Cook his successor.Jobs had worked for Apple until the day before his death.
Jobs died at his California home around 3 p.m. on October 5, 2011, due to complications from relapse of his previously treated islet-cell neuroendocrine pancreatic cancer resulting in respiratory arrest. He had lost consciousness the day before, and died with his wife, children and sister at his side.
Well … quoting Jobs would be the best way to end this ………. “Here's to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes... the ones who see things differently - they're not fond of rules... You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them, but the only thing you can't do is ignore them because they change things... they push the human race forward, and while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius, because the ones who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world, are the ones who do.”
