FACTS about Steve Jobs - the co-founder of Apple

Photo: Baomoi

Who is Steve Jobs?

According to Biography, Steven Paul Jobs was an American inventor, designer and entrepreneur who was the co-founder, chief executive and chairman of Apple Computer. Apple's revolutionary products, which include the iPod, iPhone and iPad, are now seen as dictating the evolution of modern technology.

Born in 1955 to two University of Wisconsin graduate students who gave him up for adoption, Jobs was smart but directionless, dropping out of college and experimenting with different pursuits before co-founding Apple with Steve Wozniak in 1976. Jobs left the company in 1985, launching Pixar Animation Studios, then returned to Apple more than a decade later. Jobs died in 2011 following a long battle with pancreatic cancer.

Personal life

Jobs and Laurene Powell married on March 18, 1991. The pair met in the early 1990s at Stanford business school, where Powell was an MBA student. They lived together in Palo Alto, California, with their three children: Reed, Erin, and Eve, cited by Biography.

Jobs also fathered a daughter, Lisa, with girlfriend Chrisann Brennan in 1978, when he was 23. He denied paternity of his daughter in court documents, claiming he was sterile.

Lisa Brennan Jobs later wroteof her childhood and relationship with Jobs in her book Small Fry, published in 2018. In 1980, Lisa wrote, DNA tests revealed that she and Jobs were a match, and he was required to begin making paternity payments to her financially struggling mother. Jobs did not initiate a relationship with his daughter until she was 7 years old. When she was a teenager, Lisa came to live with her father.

Steve Jobs and his family. Photo: Pinterest

Career

Jobs began his professional career as a technician at Atari Inc. in Los Gatos, California, in 1973. There, he created a circuit board for the arcade video game Breakout. Next was the development of the digital ‘blue box’, which allowed free long-distance calls, as cited by Hindustantimes.

In 1976, he, along with Wozniak, founded the Apple Computer Company. In 1984, he launched Macintosh, the first mass-produced computer with a graphical user interface. In 1985, Jobs resigned from Apple. That same year, he established NeXT Inc., which became famous for its technical strengths, including an object-oriented software development system.

Steven Jobs (right) and Stephen Wozniak holding an Apple I circuit board. Photo: Biography.

In 1986, he bought The Graphics Group (later renamed Pixar). In 1996, when Apple acquired NeXT Inc, Jobs returned to the company he had co-founded as the de facto chief and was later appointed as the interim chief executive.

Two years later, Apple iMac was introduced to the world. In 2000, he became the permanent CEO of Apple. The following year, the company sortied into the world of music with the introduction of the iPod, iTunes digital music software and iTunes Store.

In 2005, with Disney’s purchase of Pixar, he became the largest shareholder of Walt Disney Company with approximately 7% of the company’s stock.

He launched the iPhone in 2007 and iPhone 4 in 2010. In 2011, he resigned as the CEO of Apple but continued to serve as the chairman of the company’s board.

Awards & honours

Besides receiving a large number of awards such as the National Medal of Technology in 1985 and the Jefferson Award for Public Service in 1987, Jobs was inducted into California Hall of Fame in 2007. He was named the most powerful person in business by Fortune magazine. In 2009, Fortune named him as the CEO of the decade. In the following year, he was ranked No. 17 in Forbes list of the World’s Most Powerful People, cited by Wikipedia.

Interesting Facts

1. As a child, Steve Jobs spent long hours with his father, dismantling and rebuilding electronic devices in their garage. Those experiences helped sharpen his mechanical prowess and tenacity.

2. Faced with frequent bouts of boredom during the years when he in elementary school, Jobs tended to lose focus on studies and became a prankster. In the fourth-grade, his teacher had to cajole him to study.

3. Steve Jobs asked William Hewlett, co-founder of Hewlett-Packard, for some parts to complete a school project when he was 12. Impressed, Hewlett offered the boy an internship in his company.

4. Jobs named his company Apple because it came before Atari — where he had worked earlier — in the phone book. He was the mentor to Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page when they launched Google.

5. In mid-1974, Jobs travelled to India to meet a saint named Neem Karoli Baba in the quest for spiritual enlightenment. The effort was however in vain because the holy man has passed away the previous year.

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