Steve Jobs | Biography, Education, Apple, & Facts
Top Questions
Why is Steve Jobs significant?
Steve Jobs was a charismatic pioneer of the personal computer era. With Steve Wozniak, Jobs founded Apple Inc. in 1976 and transformed the company into a world leader in telecommunications. Widely considered a visionary and a genius, he oversaw the launch of such revolutionary products as the iPod and the iPhone.
What was Steve Jobs’s early life like?
Steve Jobs was born in 1955 and raised by adoptive parents in Cupertino, California. Though he was interested in engineering, his passions as a youth varied. After dropping out of Reed College, Jobs worked as a video game designer at Atari and later went to India to experience Buddhism. In 1976 he helped launch Apple.
How did Steve Jobs die?
In 2003 Jobs was diagnosed with a rare form of pancreatic cancer, and the following year he underwent a major reconstructive surgery known as the Whipple operation. In 2009 Jobs received a liver transplant. In August 2011 he resigned as CEO of Apple, and two months later, at age 56, he died.
Insanely great
Steve Jobs
During that same period, Jobs was heading the most important project in the company’s history. In 1979 he led a small group of Apple engineers to a technology demonstration at the Xerox Corporation’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) to see how the graphical user interface could make computers easier to use and more efficient. Soon afterward, Jobs left the engineering team that was designing Lisa, a business computer, to head a smaller group building a lower-cost computer. Both computers were redesigned to exploit and refine the PARC ideas, but Jobs was explicit in favouring the Macintosh, or Mac, as the new computer became known. Jobs coddled his engineers and referred to them as artists, but his style was uncompromising; at one point he demanded a redesign of an internal circuit board simply because he considered it unattractive. He would later be renowned for his insistence that the Macintosh be not merely great but “insanely great.” In January 1984 Jobs himself introduced the Macintosh in a brilliantly choreographed demonstration that was the centrepiece of an extraordinary publicity campaign. It would later be pointed to as the archetype of “event marketing.”
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However, the first Macs were underpowered and expensive, and they had few software applications—all of which resulted in disappointing sales. Apple steadily improved the machine, so that it eventually became the company’s lifeblood as well as the model for all subsequent computer interfaces. But Jobs’s apparent failure to correct the problem quickly led to tensions in the company, and in 1985 Sculley convinced Apple’s board of directors to remove the company’s famous cofounder.
NeXT and Pixar
Jobs quickly started another firm, NeXT Inc., designing powerful workstation computers for the education market. His funding partners included Texan entrepreneur Ross Perot and Canon Inc., a Japanese electronics company. Although the NeXT computer was notable for its engineering design, it was eclipsed by less costly computers from competitors such as Sun Microsystems, Inc. In the early 1990s Jobs focused the company on its innovative software system, NEXTSTEP.
Meanwhile, in 1986 Jobs acquired a controlling interest in Pixar, a computer graphics firm that had been founded as a division of Lucasfilm Ltd., the production company of Hollywood movie director George Lucas. Over the following decade Jobs built Pixar into a major animation studio that, among other achievements, produced the first full-length feature film to be completely computer-animated, Toy Story, in 1995. Pixar’s public stock offering that year made Jobs, for the first time, a billionaire. He eventually sold the studio to the Disney Company in 2006.
