Personal computing was invented with
the launch of the Apple II in 1977. Legal digital music recordings were
brought into the mainstream with the
and
iTunes in the early 2000s, and mobile phones were never the same after
the 2007 debut of the iPhone. Jobs played an instrumental role in the
development of all three, and managed to find time to transform the art
of computer-generated movie-making on the side.
The invention of
the iPad in 2010, a touch-screen tablet computer his competitors
flocked to reproduce, was the capstone of his career as a technologist. A
conceptual hybrid of a touch-screen iPod and a slate computer, the
10-inch mobile device was Jobs' vision for a more personal computing
device.
Jobs was considered brilliant yet brash. He valued elegance in
design yet was almost never seen in public wearing anything but a black
mock turtleneck, blue jeans, and a few days worth of stubble. A master
salesman who considered himself an artist at heart, Jobs inspired both
reverence and fear in those who worked for him and against him, and was
adored by an army of loyal Apple customers who almost saw him as
superhuman.
Jobs was born in San Francisco in 1955 to young
parents who gave him up for adoption. Paul and Clara Jobs gave him his
name, and moved out of the city in 1960 to the Santa Clara Valley, later
to be known as Silicon Valley. Jobs grew up in Mountain View and
Cupertino, where Apple's headquarters is located.
He attended
Reed College in Oregon for a year but dropped out, although he sat in on
some classes that interested him, such as calligraphy. After a brief
stint at Atari working on video games, he spent time backpacking around
India, furthering teenage experiments with psychedelic drugs and
developing an interest in Buddhism, all of which would shape his work at
Apple.
Back in California, Jobs' friend Steve Wozniak was
learning the skills that would change both their lives. When Jobs
discovered that Wozniak had been assembling relatively (for the time)
small computers, he struck a partnership, and Apple Computer was founded
in 1976 in the usual Silicon Valley fashion: setting up shop in the
garage of one of the founder's parents.
Wozniak handled the
technical end, creating the Apple I, while Jobs ran sales and
distribution. The company sold a few hundred Apple Is, but found much
greater success with the Apple II, which put the company on the map and
is largely credited as having proven that regular people wanted
computers.
Flowers sit near a sign at Apple headquarters in Cupertino, Calif.
It also made Jobs and Wozniak rich. Apple went public
in 1980, and Jobs was well on his way to becoming one of the first tech
industry celebrities, earning a reputation for brilliance, arrogance,
and the sheer force of his will and persuasion, often jokingly referred
to as his "reality-distortion field."
The debut of the Macintosh
in 1984 left no doubt that Apple was a serious player in the computer
industry, but Jobs only had a little more than a year left at the
company he founded when the Mac was released in January 1984.
By
1985 Apple CEO John Sculley--who Jobs had convinced to leave Pepsi in
1983 and run Apple with the legendary line, "Do you want to spend the
rest of your life selling sugared water or do you want a chance to
change the world?"--had developed his own ideas for the future of the
company, and they differed from Jobs'. He removed Jobs from his position
leading the Macintosh team, and Apple's board backed Sculley.
Jobs resigned from the company, later telling an audience of Stanford
University graduates "what had been the focus of my entire adult life
was gone, and it was devastating." He would get the last laugh.
He went on to found NeXT, which set about making the next computer in
Jobs' eyes. NeXT was never the commercial success that Apple was, but
during those years, Jobs found three things that would help him
architect his return.
The first was Pixar. Jobs snapped up the
graphic-arts division of Lucasfilm in 1986, which would go on to produce
"Toy Story" in 1995 and set the standard for computer-graphics films.
After making a fortune from Pixar's IPO in 1995, Jobs eventually sold
the company to Disney in 2006.
The second was object-oriented
software development. NeXT chose this development model for its software
operating systems, and it proved to be more advanced and more nimble
than the operating system developments Apple was working on without
Jobs.
The third was Laurene Powell, a Stanford MBA student who
attended a talk on entrepreneurialism given by Jobs in 1989 at the
university. The two wed in 1991 and eventually had three children; Reed,
born in 1991, Erin, born in 1995, and Eve, born in 1998. Jobs has
another daughter, Lisa, who was born in 1978, but Jobs refused to
acknowledge he was her father for the first few years of her life,
eventually reconciling with Lisa and her mother, his high-school
girlfriend Chris-Ann Brennan.
Jobs returned to Apple in 1996,
having convinced then-CEO Gil Amelio to adopt NeXTStep as the future of
Apple's operating system development. Apple was in a shambles at the
time, losing money, market share, and key employees.
By 1997, Jobs was once again in charge of Apple. He immediately
brought buzz back to the company, which pared down and reacquired a
penchant for showstoppers, such as the 1998 introduction of the iMac;
perhaps the first "Stevenote." His presentation skills at events such as
Macworld would become legendary examples of showmanship and star power
in the tech industry.
Jobs also set the company on the path to
becoming a consumer-electronics powerhouse, creating and improving
products such as the iPod, iTunes, and later, the iPhone and iPad. Apple
is the most valuable publicly-traded company in the world, surpassing
ExxonMobil's market capitalization in August. He did so in his own
fashion, imposing his ideas and beliefs on his employees and their
products in ways that left many a career in tatters. Jobs enforced a
culture of secrecy at Apple and was an extremely demanding leader,
terrorizing Apple employees when he returned to the company in the late
1990s with summary firings if he didn't like the answers they gave when
questioned.
Jobs was an intensely private person. That quality
put him and Apple at odds with government regulators and stockholders
who demanded to know details about his ongoing health problems and his
prognosis as the leader and alter ego of his company. It spurred a 2009
SEC probe into whether Apple's board had made misleading statements
about his health.
In the years before he fell ill in 2008, Jobs
seemed to soften a bit, perhaps due to his bout with a rare form of
pancreatic cancer in 2004.
In 2005, his remarks to Stanford
graduates included this line: "Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the
most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big
choices in life. Because almost everything--all external expectations,
all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure--these things just fall
away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important."
Later, in 2007, he appeared onstage at the D: All Things Digital
conference for a lengthy interview with bitter rival Bill Gates,
exchanging mutual praise and prophetically quoting the Beatles: "You and
I have memories longer than the road that stretches out ahead."
Jobs leaves behind his wife, four children, two sisters, and 49,000 Apple employees.
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