Steve Jobs biography -
The man that could.

Steven Paul Jobs was born on February 24, 1955 to Joanne Simpson and adopted by Paul and Clara Jobs. The family moved to Los Altos in California where Steve grew up. He attended Homestead High School and graduated in 1972. The following year he enrolled in Reed College but dropped out after one semester. He then returned to California working for Hewlett-Packard (summer) and later Atari as a technical technician.

It was during this time that he hooked up with Steve Wozniak (co-founder in Apple) in the Homebrew Computer Club. Jobs persuaded Wozniak, the technical wizard, to help him built a home computer, the Apple I, in the garage of the Jobs family. They had meagre success till a local electronic store placed an order for 25 of the machines (each one sold for $666). With advice from a former Intel CEO, they incorporated and formed Apple Inc. in 1976.

In 1977 they introduced the Apple II that became the standard for home computers and ushered in the new era of personal computing. Within three years their sales had rocketed to $139 million and they moved to list their company. When the company listed in 1980, the stock rose from $22 to $29 on the first day, giving Apple a market capitalization of $1.2 billion.

Though Apple had brought the Apple III on to the market, the years till 1984 (when they introduced the Apple Mac - first computer with a graphic user interface) saw the rise of competitors IBM (who passed them in dollar sales of PC's in 1983) and Microsoft (which separated hardware from software - unlike Apple), which sliced into their early lead. To counter this and help Apple grow, Jobs brought in different leaders to manage the company's growth. In 1985, he brought John Sculley from Pepsi Cola onboard. Unfortunately for Jobs (and Apple in the long run), a power struggle between him and Sculley erupted and resulted in Jobs being ousted from the company.

After taking some time of to lick his wounds, he founded NeXT computer in 1986. This venture, however, turned out to be less successful as its hardware had a considerable price tag to it (with Jobs insisting on quality). NeXT, did however, make significant (but often overlooked) contributions in software: NeXT had developed the interface that allowed Tim-Berners Lee to build the World-Wide Web 1.0; and his support for UNIX and Object Oriented Programming (OOP) was very intuitive of future trends.

He also used some of his 'retirement' money to buy Lucasfilm's computer animation division from George Lucas for $10 million, and co-founded Pixar Animation Studio with Edmin Catmull. Since then Pixar has released several award winning animation films including Toy Story (the first full length animation feature film), A Bug's Life, Toy Story 2, Monsters Inc., Finding Nemo and The Incredibles.

On March 18, 1991 Jobs married Laurene Powell and has three children with her. He also has a daughter Lisa Jobs from a woman he didn't marry.

In 1996, in an effort to get Jobs back into the Apple fold, Apple Inc. bought NeXT for $402 million and soon Jobs became the interim CEO (after poor share performance resulted in existing CEO Gil Amelio, being given the boot).

Since Jobs' return, Apple has regained their sparkle and has introduced several new innovations that had the marketplace buzzing. The first of these were the iMac that sold 278,000 units within the first six weeks of launch, making it one of the hottest computer launches ever (according to Forbes). Another favourite is the Apple iPod, a portable music (MP3) player as well as the iTunes and iTunes Music Store. Despite the success of Apple, Jobs' official salary is still $1, but at least he receives some nice 'executive gifts' (like a Jet or exclusive stock).

Two thoughts about Steve Jobs will stick with me, and both are from his recent speech to graduates at Stanford University: "Do what you love." and "Stay hungry. Stay foolish."

More Steve Jobs links

• Steve Jobs biography at Wikipedia.com
• Steve Jobs' Stanford speech transcript
• Steve Jobs at Amazon