steve jobs

 Steven Paul Jobs  February 24, 1955 – October 5, 2011) was an American business magnate, industrial designer, investor, and media proprietor. He was the chairman, chief executive officer (CEO), and co-founder of Apple Inc.; the chairman and majority shareholder of Pixar; a member of The Walt Disney Company's board of directors following its acquisition of Pixar; and the founder, chairman, and CEO of NeXT. Jobs is widely recognized as a pioneer of the personal computer revolution of the 1970s and 1980s, along with his early business partner and fellow Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak.

Jobs was born in San Francisco, California, and put up for adoption. He was raised in the San Francisco Bay Area. He attended Reed College in 1972 before dropping out that same year, and traveled through India in 1974 seeking enlightenment and studying Zen Buddhism.

Jobs and Wozniak co-founded Apple in 1976 to sell Wozniak's Apple I personal computer. Together the duo gained fame and wealth a year later with the Apple II, one of the first highly successful mass-produced microcomputers. Jobs saw the commercial potential of the Xerox Alto in 1979, which was mouse-driven and had a graphical user interface (GUI). This led to the development of the unsuccessful Apple Lisa in 1983, followed by the breakthrough Macintosh in 1984, the first mass-produced computer with a GUI. The Macintosh introduced the desktop publishing industry in 1985 with the addition of the Apple LaserWriter, the first laser printer to feature vector graphics. Jobs was forced out of Apple in 1985 after a long power struggle with the company's board and its then-CEO John Sculley. That same year, Jobs took a few of Apple's members with him to found NeXT, a computer platform development company that specialized in computers for higher-education and business markets. In addition, he helped to develop the visual effects industry when he funded the computer graphics division of George Lucas's Lucasfilm in 1986. The new company was Pixar, which produced the first 3D computer animated feature film Toy Story (1995), and went on to become a major animation studio, producing over 20 f

ilms since then.

Jobs became CEO of Apple in 1997, following his company's acquisition of NeXT. He was largely responsible for helping revive Apple, which had been on the verge of bankruptcy. He worked closely with designer Jony Ive to develop a line of products that had larger cultural ramifications, beginning in 1997 with the "Think different" advertising campaign and leading to the iMac, iTunes, iTunes Store, Apple Store, iPod, iPhone, App Store, and the iPad. In 2001, the original Mac OS was replaced with the completely new Mac OS X (now known as macOS), based on NeXT's NeXTSTEP platform, giving the OS a modern Unix-based foundation for the first time. Jobs was diagnosed with a pancreatic neuroendocrine tumor in 2003. He died of respiratory arrest related to the tumor at age 56 on October 5, 2011.

Background

Biological and adoptive families

Steven Paul Jobs was born on February 24, 1955, to Abdulfattah Jandali and Joanne Schieble, and was adopted by Paul and Clara Jobs (née Hagopian).His biological father, Abdulfattah 'John' al-Jandali  grew up in Homs, Syria, and was born into an Arab Muslim household. While an undergraduate at the American University of Beirut in Lebanon, he was a student activist and spent time in prison for his political activities. He pursued a PhD at the University of Wisconsin, where he met Joanne Carole Schieble, a Catholic of Swiss and German descent. As a doctoral candidate, Jandali was a teaching assistant for a course Schieble was taking, although both were the same age. Mona Simpson, Jobs's biological sister, notes that her maternal grandparents were not happy that their daughter was dating a Muslim. Walter Isaacson, author of the Steve Jobs biography, additionally states that Schieble's father "threatened to cut Joanne off completely" if she continued the relationship.

Jobs's adoptive father, Paul Reinhold Jobs,was a Coast Guard mechanic. After leaving the Coast Guard, Paul Jobs married Clara Hagopian in 1946. Their attempts to start a family were halted after Clara had an ectopic pregnancy, leading them to consider adoption in 1955.

Birth

"Of all the inventions of humans, the computer is going to rank near or at the top as history unfolds and we look back. It is the most awesome tool that we have ever invented. I feel incredibly lucky to be at exactly the right place in Silicon Valley, at exactly the right time, historically, where this invention has taken form."

—Steve Jobs, 1995. From the documentary, Steve Jobs: The Lost Interview.

Schieble became pregnant with Jobs in 1954, when she and Jandali spent the summer with his family in Homs, Syria. According to Jandali, Schieble deliberately did not involve him in the process: "without telling me, Joanne upped and left to move to San Francisco to have the baby without anyone knowing, including me."

Schieble gave birth to Jobs on February 24, 1955, in San Francisco and chose an adoptive couple for him that was "Catholic, well-educated, and wealthy,"but the couple later changed their mind. Jobs was then placed with Paul and Clara Jobs, neither of whom had a college education, and Schieble refused to sign the adoption papers.She then took the matter to court in an attempt to have her baby placed with a different family,and only consented to releasing the baby to Paul and Clara after the couple pledged to pay for the boy's college education.

When Steve Jobs was in high school, Clara admitted to his girlfriend, Chrisann Brennan, that she "was too frightened to love [Steve] for the first six months of his life ... I was scared they were going to take him away from me. Even after we won the case, Steve was so difficult a child that by the time he was two I felt we had made a mistake. I wanted to return him."When Chrisann shared this comment with Steve, he stated that he was already aware, and would later say he was deeply loved and indulged by Paul and Clara.^[ Many years later, Steve Jobs's wife Laurene also noted that "he felt he had been really blessed by having the two of them as parents." Jobs would become upset when Paul and Clara were referred to as his "adoptive parents"; he regarded them as his parents "1,000%". With regard to his biological parents, Jobs referred to them as "my sperm and egg bank. That's not harsh, it's just the way it was, a sperm bank thing, nothing more."

Childhood

"I always thought of myself as a humanities person as a kid, but I liked electronics … then I read something that one of my heroes, Edwin Land of Polaroid, said about the importance of people who could stand at the intersection of humanities and sciences, and I decided that's what I wanted to do."

—Steve Jobs

Paul worked in several jobs that included a try as a machinist, several other jobs, and then "back to work as a machinist."

Paul and Clara adopted Jobs's sister Patricia in 1957and by 1959 the family had moved to the Monta Loma neighborhood in Mountain View, California. It was during this time that Paul built a workbench in his garage for his son in order to "pass along his love of mechanics."Jobs, meanwhile, admired his father's craftsmanship "because he knew how to build anything. If we needed a cabinet, he would build it. When he built our fence, he gave me a hammer so I could work with him ... I wasn't that into fixing cars  but I was eager to hang out with my dad." By the time he was ten, Jobs was deeply involved in electronics and befriended many of the engineers who lived in the neighborhood.He had difficulty making friends with children his own age, however, and was seen by his classmates as a "loner."