Steve Jobs
Steven Paul Jobs was an American businessman, inventor, and investor best known for co-founding the technology company Apple Inc. Jobs was also the founder of NeXT and chairman and majority shareholder of Pixar. He was 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 in 1955 and adopted shortly afterwards. He attended Reed College in 1972 before withdrawing that same year. In 1974, he traveled through India, seeking enlightenment before later studying Zen Buddhism. He and Wozniak co-founded Apple in 1976 to further develop and sell Wozniak's Apple I personal computer. Together, the duo gained fame and wealth a year later with production and sale of 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. This led to the development of the largely unsuccessful Apple Lisa in 1983, followed by the breakthrough Macintosh in 1984, the first mass-produced computer with a GUI. The Macintosh launched the desktop publishing industry in 1985 with the addition of the Apple LaserWriter, the first laser printer to feature vector graphics and PostScript.
In 1985, Jobs departed Apple after a long power struggle with the company's board and its then-CEO, John Sculley. That same year, Jobs took some Apple employees with him to found NeXT, a computer platform development company that specialized in computers for higher-education and business markets, serving as its CEO. In 1986, he bought the computer graphics division of Lucasfilm, which was spun off independently as Pixar. Pixar produced the first computer-animated feature film, Toy Story, and became a leading animation studio, producing dozens of commercially successful and critically acclaimed films.
In 1997, Jobs returned to Apple as CEO after the company's acquisition of NeXT. He was largely responsible for reviving Apple, which was on the verge of bankruptcy. He worked closely with British designer Jony Ive to develop a line of products and services that had larger cultural ramifications, beginning with the "Think different" advertising campaign, and leading to the iMac, iTunes, Mac OS X, Apple Store, iPod, iTunes Store, iPhone, App Store, and iPad. Jobs was also a board member at Gap Inc. from 1999 to 2002. In 2003, Jobs was diagnosed with a pancreatic neuroendocrine tumor. He died of tumor-related respiratory arrest in 2011; in 2022, he was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Since his death, he has won 141 patents; Jobs holds over 450 patents in total.
Early life
Family
Steven Paul Jobs was born in San Francisco, California, on February 24, 1955, to Joanne Carole Schieble and Abdulfattah "John" Jandali. Abdulfattah Jandali was born in a Muslim household to wealthy Syrian parents, the youngest of nine siblings. After obtaining his undergraduate degree at the American University of Beirut, Jandali pursued a PhD in political science at the University of Wisconsin. There, he met Joanne Schieble, an American Catholic of Swiss-German descent whose parents owned a mink farm and real estate in Green Bay. The two fell in love but faced opposition from Schieble's father due to Jandali's Muslim faith. When Schieble became pregnant, she arranged for a closed adoption, and travelled to San Francisco to give birth. His cousin Bassma Al Jandaly has claimed that Jobs' birth name was Abdul Lateef Jandali.Schieble requested that her son be adopted by college graduates. A lawyer and his wife were selected, but they withdrew after discovering that the baby was a boy, so Jobs was instead adopted by Paul Reinhold Jobs and his wife Clara. Paul Jobs, an American of German descent, was the son of a dairy farmer from Washington County, Wisconsin. After dropping out of high school, Paul Jobs worked as a mechanic, then joined the US Coast Guard. After he was discharged at San Francisco, Paul married Clara Hagopian of Armenian descent in February 1946 and they moved to Wisconsin, then Indiana, where Paul worked as a machinist and later as a car salesman. Since Clara missed San Francisco, she convinced Paul to move back. There, Paul worked as a repossession agent, and Clara became a bookkeeper. In 1955, after having an ectopic pregnancy, the couple looked to adopt a child. Since they lacked a college education, Schieble initially refused to sign the adoption papers, and went to court to request that her son be removed from the Jobs household and placed with a different family, but changed her mind after Paul and Clara promised to pay for their son's college tuition.
Infancy
In his youth, Jobs's parents took him to a Lutheran church. When Steve was in high school, Clara admitted to Steve's girlfriend, Chrisann Brennan, that she "was too frightened to love 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 later said that he had been deeply loved and indulged by Paul and Clara. Jobs would "bristle" when Paul and Clara were referred to as his "adoptive parents", and he regarded them as his parents "1,000%". Jobs referred to his biological parents as "my sperm and egg bank. That's not harsh, it's just the way it was, a sperm bank thing, nothing more."Childhood
Paul Jobs 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 1957, and by 1959 the family had moved to the Monta Loma neighborhood in Mountain View, California. 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."File:Apple Garage.jpg|thumb|The childhood family home of Steve Jobs on Crist Drive in Los Altos, California, is the original site of Apple Computer. The home was added to a list of historic Los Altos sites in 2013.|alt=Home of Paul and Clara Jobs, on Crist Drive in Los Altos, California
Jobs had difficulty functioning in a traditional classroom, tended to resist authority figures, frequently misbehaved, and was suspended a few times. He frequently played pranks on others at Monta Loma Elementary School in Mountain View. His father Paul never reprimanded him, however, and instead blamed the school for not challenging his brilliant son. Jobs skipped the 5th grade and transferred to the 6th grade at Crittenden Middle School in Mountain View, where he became a "socially awkward loner". Jobs was often "bullied" at Crittenden Middle, and in the middle of 7th grade, he gave his parents an ultimatum: either they would take him out of Crittenden or he would drop out of school.
The Jobs family was not affluent, and only by expending all their savings were they able to buy a new home in 1967, allowing Steve to change schools. The new house was in the better Cupertino School District, in Cupertino, California. The house was declared a historic site in 2013, as the first site of Apple Computer., it was owned by Jobs's sister, Patty, and occupied by his stepmother, Marilyn. When he was 13, in 1968, Jobs was given a summer job by Bill Hewlett after Jobs cold-called him to ask for parts for an electronics project.
Homestead High
The location of the Los Altos home meant that Jobs would be able to attend nearby Homestead High School, which had strong ties to Silicon Valley. He began his first year there in late 1968 along with Bill Fernandez, who introduced Jobs to Steve Wozniak, and would become Apple's first employee. Neither Jobs nor Fernandez came from engineering households and thus decided to enroll in John McCollum's Electronics I class. Jobs had grown his hair long and become involved in the growing counterculture, and the rebellious youth eventually clashed with McCollum and lost interest in the class.Jobs underwent a change during mid-1970. He later noted to his official biographer that "I started to listen to music a whole lot, and I started to read more outside of just science and technology — Shakespeare, Plato. I loved King Lear... when I was a senior I had this phenomenal AP English class. The teacher was this guy who looked like Ernest Hemingway. He took a bunch of us snowshoeing in Yosemite." During his last two years at Homestead High, Jobs developed two different interests: electronics and literature. These dual interests were particularly reflected during Jobs's senior year, as his best friends were Wozniak and his first girlfriend, the artistic Homestead junior Chrisann Brennan.
In 1971, after Wozniak began attending University of California, Berkeley, Jobs would visit him there a few times a week. This experience led him to study in nearby Stanford University's student union. Instead of joining the electronics club, Jobs put on light shows with a friend for Homestead's avant-garde jazz program. He was described by a Homestead classmate as "kind of brain and kind of hippie... but he never fit into either group. He was smart enough to be a nerd, but wasn't nerdy. And he was too intellectual for the hippies, who just wanted to get wasted all the time. He was kind of an outsider. In high school everything revolved around what group you were in, and if you weren't in a carefully defined group, you weren't anybody. He was an individual, in a world where individuality was suspect." By his senior year in late 1971, he was taking a freshman English class at Stanford and working on a Homestead underground film project with Chrisann Brennan.
Around that time, Wozniak designed a low-cost digital "blue box" to generate the necessary tones to manipulate the telephone network, allowing free long-distance calls. He was inspired by an article titled "Secrets of the Little Blue Box" from the October 1971 issue of Esquire. Jobs decided then to sell them and split the profit with Wozniak. The clandestine sales of the illegal blue boxes went well and perhaps planted the seed in Jobs's mind that electronics could be both fun and profitable. In a 1994 interview, he recalled that it took six months for him and Wozniak to design the blue boxes. Jobs later reflected that had it not been for Wozniak's blue boxes, "there wouldn't have been an Apple". He states it showed them that they could take on large companies and beat them.
By his senior year of high school, Jobs began using LSD. He later recalled that on one occasion he consumed it in a wheat field outside Sunnyvale, and experienced "the most wonderful feeling of my life up to that point". In mid-1972, after graduation and before leaving for Reed College, Jobs and Brennan rented a house from their other roommate, Al.