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Steve Jobs

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article is about the person. For the 2011 biography, see Steve Jobs (book). For the 2012
documentary, see Steve Jobs: The Lost Interview. For the 2015 biographical film, see Steve Jobs
(film).
Steve Jobs

Jobs in 2007

Born

Steven Paul Jobs


February 24, 1955
San Francisco, California, U.S.

Died

October 5, 2011 (aged 56)


Palo Alto, California

Cause of death

Cancer

Nationality

American

Ethnicity

German and Syrian

Education

Homestead High School ('72)

Reed College (dropped out)

Occupation
Cofounder, Chairman, and CEO of Apple Inc.

Funded Pixar

Founder and CEO of NeXT Inc.

Known for

Pioneer of the personal computer revolution with Steve Wozniak

Board member of
The Walt Disney Company[1]

Apple Inc.

Religion
Zen Buddhism

(previously Lutheran)[2]

Spouse(s)

Laurene Powell
(m. 19912011; his death)

Partner(s)

Chrisann Brennan (high school girlfriend and Lisa's mother)

Children
Lisa Brennan-Jobs (with Chrisann)

Reed (with Laurene)

Erin (with Laurene)

Eve (with Laurene)

Parent(s)
Paul and Clara Jobs (adoptive parents)

Joanne Schieble Simpson and Abdulfattah Jandali (biological parents)

Relatives
Mona Simpson (biological sister)

Patty Jobs (adopted sister)

Steven Paul "Steve" Jobs (/dbz/; February 24, 1955 October 5, 2011) was an American
pioneer of the personal computer revolution of the 1970s (along with engineer, inventor, and Apple
Computer co-founder,Steve Wozniak). Shortly after his death, Jobs' official biographer, Walter
Isaacson described him as the "creative entrepreneur whose passion for perfection and ferocious
drive revolutionized six industries: personal computers, animated movies, music, phones, tablet
computing, and digital publishing."
[2]

Adopted at birth in San Francisco and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area during the 1960s,
Jobs' countercultural lifestyle was a product of his time. As a senior at Homestead High School,
in Cupertino, California, his two closest friends were the older engineering student (and Homestead
High alumnus) Steve Wozniak and his countercultural girlfriend, the artistically inclined Homestead
High junior Chrisann Brennan. Jobs briefly attended Reed College in 1972 before dropping
out, deciding to travel through India in 1974, and study Buddhism.
In addition, Jobs' proximity to Silicon Valley influenced his interest in the budding personal computer
industry of the 1970s. After a brief period at Atari, Inc., he co-founded Apple in 1976 in his
parent's Los Altos home on Crist Drive in order to sell Wozniak's Apple I personal computer. "Jobs
and Woz" gained fame and wealth a year later for the Apple II (which was designed primarily by
Wozniak, but Jobs oversaw the development of its unusual case and Rod Holt developed the unique
power supply) one of the first highly successful mass-produced personal computers. The Apple II
dominated the personal computer market until it was destabilized by the introduction of the IBMPC (powered by MS-DOS) in 1981.
In 1979, after a tour of Xerox Park, Jobs saw the commercial potential of the Xerox Alto (which
was mouse-driven and had a graphical user interface or GUI). After failing to create such a device
with the Apple Lisa (which Jobs named after his daughter with Chrisann, Lisa, a fact that Jobs would
only admit years later after he initially denied paternity), he turned to the struggling Macintosh team.
In January 1984, Jobs launched the original Macintosh (the first mass-produced computer with a
graphical user interface) with the 1984 commercial broadcast during the Super Bowl. The Macintosh
also instigated the sudden rise of the desktop publishing industry in 1985 with the addition of the
Apple LaserWriter, the first laser printer to feature vector graphics.
Despite the fanfare, the Macintosh was an expensive machine that did not sell well and the board of
directors at Apple blamed Jobs for its poor financial performance. After a long power struggle, the
board forced him out of the company in September in 1985. In November 1985, Macintosh sales
continued to plummet after the release of Windows 1.0 (created by The Macintosh's software
partner, Bill Gates and his then-developing company, Microsoft), an operating system which
replicated the features of the Macintosh. Cheaper and lower quality IBM PC clones thus transitioned
to Windows worldwide, allowing them to dominate the market. In addition, Windows made Gates
(who had already amassed a fortune from MS-DOS) one of the most powerful and wealthiest
individuals in the world.
Jobs underwent a number of changes during the period of 1985-1996. After leaving Apple, he
subsequently took a few of its members with him to found NeXT, a computer platform development
company specializing instate of the art, higher end computers for higher-education and business
markets. A few years later in 1990, Tim Berners-Lee would use a NeXT Computer to create the first
browser for the World Wide Web. In addition to NeXT, Jobs helped to instigate the development of
the visual effects industry when he purchased the computer graphics division of George Lucas'
company Lucasfilm in February 1986. The new company, renamed Pixar, would eventually produce
the first fully computer-generated animated film, Toy Story, an event made possible in part due to
Jobs' financial support.
Jobs also focused on his family during this time period. After the passing of his adoptive mother from
cancer in 1986, he found his birth mother and discovered that his biological sister is the author Mona
Simpson. He also fully acknowledged paternity for Lisa, and had her name legally changed to Lisa

Brennan-Jobs. Finally, in 1991, Jobs married Stanford Business School graduate, Laurene Powell in
a Buddhist ceremony and had three more children with her.
By 1997, Apple was nearly bankrupt. Jobs thus negotiated Apple's purchase of NeXT
(the NeXTSTEP platform would become the foundation for Mac OS X) which would allow him to
return as the company's interim CEO. He would eventually became Apple's CEO and bring the
company back to profitability by 1998. Beginning in 1997 with the Think different campaign, Jobs
began to work closely with designer Jonathan "Jony" Ive towards a line of devices (named by ad
executive Ken Segall) that would have larger cultural ramifications: the iMac (1998); iTunes,
the Apple Stores, and the iPod (2001); the iTunes Store (2003); the iPhone (2007); the App
Store(2008); and the iPad (2010).

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