Biography of Steve Jobs
Steve Jobs (full name Steven Paul Jobs) is the co-founder as well as CEO of Apple and until recently, was the CEO of Pixar before Disney acquired the company. A member of the Board of Directors at Disney, he is at present time the largest shareholder at the company. After almost forty years in the computer industry, Steve Jobs remains one if it’s leading figures, making an impressive name for himself in the entertainment industry as well.
The oft-depicted image of the maverick Silicon Valley tech-wizard with a touch of eccentricity owes a lot to Steve Jobs’ actual work ethos and business sense. From early on in his career he has always strove to merge sophistication in design with aesthetic appeal, recognizing the importance that consumers placed on both elements. For many people, Jobs’ products have always embodied functional elegance and this philosophy has made him an icon in the computer industry.
Steve Jobs first came into attention when he, along with Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, introduced the widespread use of personal computers into the public consciousness in the late 70s. Apple grew quickly to become an early giant in the then fledgling computer industry and the company’s growth continued on into the 80s.
Jobs was an early advocate of the mouse-driven graphical user interface for computers realizing the immense market potential for such a device. He along with a few others realized that the ease of use and flexibility provided by a mouse-driven interface would draw large numbers of new computer users.
Steve Jobs was born on February 24, 1955 in San Francisco to Abdulfattah John Jandali and Joanne Carole Schieble. Jandali was a Syrian emigrant who was then a graduate student and later a political science professor. Job’s mother was also a graduate student at that time and very shortly after Jobs was born, she put him up for adoption. A couple from Mountain View in Santa Clara County, Paul and Clara Jobs subsequently adopted him and gave him the name Steven Paul Jobs. To this day, Jobs refers to Paul and Clara as his only parents and refuses to refer to them as his adoptive parents.
Steve Jobs’ long career in computers had a somewhat modest beginning when as a student at Cupertino Middle School and later Homestead High School in Cupertino, California, he regularly attended lectures at the Hewlett-Packard offices after school. He started working there during summer along with friend and future Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak. After graduating from high school in 1972, Jobs then enrolled in Reed College in Portland, Oregon. He would later drop out after only attending one semester at Reed College, but he continued to take classes there including one in calligraphy. This class would later turn out to have a significant effect upon his later career. Job’s has himself has attributed that course with giving him the idea of introducing multiple typefaces, as well as aesthetically spaced fonts, in the later Macintosh computers manufactured by Apple.
The autumn of 1974 found Jobs returning to California where he became a member of the Homebrew Computer Club again along with Steve Wozniak. It was also during this time that Jobs took a job at Atari as a technician. Atari was then (and in fact continues to be) a leader in the popular video game industry and while it would be appropriate to say that Steve Jobs took on the position as a means to advance his own career, the truth was he merely wanted the job in order to save up money for a planned spiritual retreat to India!
It was also in 1974 that Steve Jobs again with Steve Wozniak at his side embarked on a business venture that was somewhat unethical, to put it mildly. The two had heard about phone phreakers (people who used the telephone networks illegally to make long-distance calls and to collect personal information among other things) who in the 1960s used a modified toy whistle to make illegal long-distance calls. These phreakers discovered that the toy whistle, which came included in the box of a popular breakfast cereal, could reproduce the tone used by the AT&T Long Distance Telephone Company to allow supervisors to access their networks. This trick was popularized by John Draper and after meeting with him in 1974, Jobs and Wozniak set out to establish a company that sold what came to be known as “blue boxes” to allow users to make free, unlimited long distance calls.
After Jobs had saved enough money, he went on to India as planned in search of spiritual enlightenment. Accompanying him on his journey was a friend of his from Reed College named Daniel Kottke. Kottke would later have the distinction of becoming the first ever employee of the Apple Corporation.
After his journey to India, Jobs came back to the United States garbed in traditional Indian attire and sporting a new look with his head shaved. Nevertheless, he resumed working for Atari in his former capacity as a technician and was quickly involved with the video game Breakout.
Atari founder Nolan Bushnell was eager to reduce the number of computer chips that were used in the game’s circuitry and he offered Steve Jobs $100 for every chip that he could discard from the machine’s design. Jobs had very little experience in circuit design and frankly had no inclination to learn any more, so he turned to his friend Steve Wozniak for help. Jobs offered Wozniak half of whatever bonus money would be paid if Wozniak would work on optimizing the chip design. Wozniak performed the task admirably much to Atari’s astonishment and when he was done with the redesign, they were able to reduce the number of chips in the circuitry by 50! In fact so exacting was Wozniak’s design that his model was impossible to reproduce on the company’s assembly line. For some reason, Jobs paid Wozniak only $350 for his work claiming that Atari had only paid them $700. Atari had in fact given Jobs $5000 for the work.
Nevertheless, Jobs and Wozniak continued working together and would later form the Apple Corporation, an event that would revolutionize the computer industry the world over.