Steve Jobs was born on 24 February, 1955, in San Fransisco, U.S.A. Jobs was raised by adopted parents in Silicon Valley. He was keen on engineering. He grew up with Patty (his sister). In 1961 the family moved to Mountain View, California.
Paul Jobs was a technician and he fixed cars as a hobby. Steve Jobs recollects that his father was very capable of working with his hands.
When he was a child, he used to prefer doing things by himself. He wasn’t really interested in sports or any group activities. He showed an interest in electronics. He used to be preoccupied with working in the garage workshop of a neighbour who worked at Hewlett-Packard (an electronics manufacturer).
Jobs registered in the Hewlett-Packard Explorer Club. In the club, he saw engineers validate new products. Also, he saw his first computer at the age of 12. He was awestruck and he then decided that he wanted to work with computers.
In high school, he attended speeches at the Hewlett-Packard plant. Once, he asked William Hewlett, the president, for some parts he needed for a comprehensive class project. He was impressed and gave Jobs the parts. He also offered him a summer internship at Hewlett-Packard.
Linking Up With Wozniak
In 1972, he graduated from high school and attended Reed College in Portland, Oregon, for 2 years. In 1974, He dropped out of Reed College and took a job at Atari Corporation as a video game designer. The same year he linked with Stephen Wozniak, a former high school friend who worked for the Hewlett-Packard Company.
When Wozniak told Jobs of his advancement in making his own computer logic board, Jobs gave suggested they work together in, which they did after Hewlett-Packard formally bowed down to Wozniak’s design in 1976.
The Apple I, as they called the logic board, was built in the Jobs’ family garage with money they gained by retailing Jobs’ Volkswagen minivan and Wozniak’s programmable calculator.
He was the first entrepreneur as he understood that the personal computer would apply to an extensive audience. Because of Jobs cheering, Wozniak planned an enhanced model named the Apple II, complete with a keyboard, and they organised to have a sleek and moulded plastic case manufactured to enfold the unit.
Apple II was very successful. In 1981 the company had a record-setting public stock offering. Also, in 1983 the company made the most rapid entry into the Fortune 500 list of America’s top companies.
In 1979 Steve Jobs led a small group of Apple engineers to a technology protest at the Xerox corporation’s Palo Alto Research Center to analyse how the graphical user interface could be made more efficient.
He left the team that was designing a business computer to head a smaller group building a lower-cost computer. Both computers were reformed to adventure and perfect the PARC ideas.
In January 1984, Jobs introduced the Macintosh (a personal computer with a graphical user interface) in an ecstatically composed protest that was the centrepiece of an astonishing promotional campaign.
But the first Macs were insufficiently powered and expensive and they had a few software applications and these reasons led to disappointing sales. Apple progressively enhanced the machine so that it eventually became the company’s spirit in addition to the model for all succeeding computer boundaries.
However, Steve Jobs appeared to be disappointed to solve the problem quickly and this led to pressure in the company. Also, in 1985 John Sculley (the vice president and president of PepsiCo) influenced Apple’s board of directors to remove the company’s famous cofounder.
Jobs’ NEXTSTEP
Jobs started another company, NeXT Inc., conniving influential workstation computers for the education market. His funding partners included Texan entrepreneur Ross station and Canon Inc (a Japanese electronics company).
Though the NeXT computer was prominent for its engineering enterprise, it was comparatively cheap by providing less costly computers from competitors like Sun Microsystem Inc. In the 1990s, Jobs focused the company on its advanced software system, NEXTSTEP.
In 1986, Jobs developed a supervisory interest in Pixar, a computer graphics company, the production company of Hollywood movie director George Lucas. Jobs constructed Pixar into a major animatronics studio that, among other accomplishments, produced the first full-length feature film that was computer-animated, Toy Story in the year.
Pixar’s public stock offering increased and that year, Jobs was for the first time a billionaire. He eventually sold the studio to the Disney Company in 2006.
Back At Apple
In 1996 Apple, encumbered by financial losses and on the verge of collapse, employed a new chief executive, semiconductor device executive Gilbert Amelio.
When Amelio learned that the company, following intense and protracted research efforts, had failed to develop an acceptable standby for the Macintosh’s ageing operating system (OS), he chose to buy Jobs’s company for more than $400 million— taking Jobs back to Apple as a consultant.
But the board of directors of Apple were disappointed with Amelio’s inability to turn the company’s finances. In June 1997, they urged Apple’s dissolute cofounder to lead the company again.
Steve Jobs made an alliance with Apple’s erstwhile foe, the Microsoft Corporation, fought Amelio’s Mac-clone agreements and shortened the company’s product line. Also, he engineered an award-winning advertising campaign that admonished latent customers to think differently and buy Macintosh.
He fought the attraction to make machines that ran on Microsoft’s Windows OS. Some urged to develop Apple into a software-only company. He believed that Apple, as the only main personal computer maker with its own operating system, was in an exclusive position to revolutionise.
Revolutionising The Tech Industry
In 1998, Jobs introduced the iMac, an egg-shaped, one-piece computer that had high-speed dispensation at a moderately modest price and started a trend of high-fashion computers. It was available in five different colours. Soon, the iMac became the nation’s highest-selling personal computer.
Steve Jobs declared steady profits for the once-declining company. The same year, i.e. 1998, he succeeded with the stylish iBook (a laptop computer made with students in mind), the G4, a desktop computer adequately powerful that it could not be transferred under certain situations because it was competent as a supercomputer.
Although Apple did not recover the industry domination that it earlier had, Jobs had saved his company, establishing himself as a high-technology marketer.
In 2001 Jobs started to reinvent Apple and the same year iTunes, a computer program, was introduced by Apple for playing music and for adapting music to the compact MP3 digital format frequently used in computers.
Also, Apple began selling the iPod (a portable MP3 player), which was tremendously successful and became the market leader. In 2003 Apple began selling downloadable copies of major record company songs in MP3 format over the Internet.
By 2006 more than one billion songs and videos were sold through Apple’s online iTunes Store. On 9 January, 2007, Steve Jobs officially changed the name of the company to Apple inc.
In 2007 Steve Jobs took the company into the telecommunications business with the introduction of the touch-screen iPhone, a mobile telephone with abilities to play MP3s and videos and retrieve the Internet.
Apple introduced the iPod Touch (which was basically a movable MP3, a gaming device that comprised built-in Wifi and an iPhone-like touch screen), which was very successful and useful. In 2008 Steve Jobs proclaimed that future declarations of the iPhone and iPod Touch would offer improved game utility.
Apple claimed to have a greater role in the gaming business to go along with its handover into telecommunications.
Health Issues
In 2003 Jobs identified that he was suffering from pancreatic cancer. In 2004 he experienced a major rehabilitative surgery which is known as the Whipple operation (a major surgical operation that is mostly done to remove cancerous tumours from the head of the pancreas). After a short recovery, he was fit and returned to work at Apple.
Throughout 2008 Steve Jobs lost a lot of weight and because of this, there were speculations that his cancer may have revived. Also, as compared to Apple’s stock market shares were secured to the health of its CEO, which ultimately led to demands by investors because of his poor health (noticeably when the first motives given for his weight loss seemed inadequate to explain his skinny appearance).
Then seeing the condition and status on January 9, 2009, Steve Jobs put out a statement that he had been suffering from a hormonal imbalance and his treatment was going on and that he would continue his corporate duties. But later, he announced that he was taking an instant leave in order to improve his health.
In June 2009, the Wall Street Journal reported that Jobs had a liver transplant in April, and the operation was performed in Tennessee. On 29 June, 2009, Jobs came back to work, keeping his promise to return before the end of June. But in January 2011, he took another medical leave of absence and in August, he resigned as CEO but became chairman.
On 5 October 2011, he eventually died. His perseverance and dedication to inventing new things have really inspired me because it took him years to build the company and his ups and downs teach a lesson to never look back.
“Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only work to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet keep looking. Don’t settle.
“As with all matters of the heart, you will know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on.”