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Steve Paul Jobs (San Francisco, 1955 – Palo Alto, California, 2011) was a prominent American computer scientist and entrepreneur. Creator of the first personal computer and founder of Apple Computer, an innovative company in the computing sector.
He was characterized by having visionary ideas in the field of personal computers, mobile phones and digital music. It revolutionized the sector for more than three decades through its products.
Steve Jobs Story
He was given up for adoption to the marriage formed by Paul and Clara Jobs (railway engineer and housewife, respectively). Her biological parents were two students who did not have the means to take charge.
Since he was a child, he lived in the Californian city of Mountain View, which is characterized by being an important center of the American electronic industry. All this influenced Steve Jobs when opting for a professional future related to the sector.
He was only twelve years old when he joined the Hewlett-Packard Explorer Club, a youth association in which Hewlett-Packard company engineers taught children and young people the latest creations in the field of computing.
He studied at the Homestead Institute in Mountain View, and later Steve Jobs entered Reed College, a university located in Portland, Oregon, but dropped out of college a semester later.
At that time he flirted with drugs and became interested in subjects such as philosophy, eventually traveling to India in search of a spiritual meaning.
On his return and after an internship at the Hewlett-Packard company in Palo Alto, in 1974 Jobs was hired as a designer by Atari, a pioneer company in the then nascent video game industry.
The birth of Apple
At that time he became a partner of the engineer Stephen Wozniak. He began to look at the potential Jobs of the home computer his friend worked on and in the garage they created their first office.
They launched a motherboard and then a complete computer, the Apple I, considered the first personal computer in history. In 1976, with the money obtained from the sale of their Volkswagen van, they founded the company Apple Computer, based in the SteveJobs family garage.
He chose the name Apple as a tribute to his favorite fruit, the apple.
From then on they created different versions of Apple, being more powerful than its predecessor. In 1985 they decided to end their collaboration. Since Stephen Wozniak was relegated to the background after an accident, although it is rumored that it was due to the complicated nature of Steve Jobs.
The result of both conflicts was that Wozniak left Apple in 1985. That same year 1,200 employees were fired as a result of an extensive restructuring at the company. Jobs was forced to resign. But this did not prevent him from starting a new business venture alone.
Steve Jobs at NeXT Computer and Pixar
He founded a new computer company, NeXT Computer in 1985. He then bought US film director George Lucas, for $ 10 million, the animation division of the filmmaker’s production company, Lucasfilm Limited.
In 1986 Pixar animation studios were born, focused on the computer production of animated films. Steve Jobs actively participated in the creation of the movie «Toy Story».
In 1989, NeXT Computer launched its first feature-packed computer, but it was not profitable due to its high price and its incompatibility with most of the existing systems on the market. Steve Jobs closed the computer division in 1993.
His return to Apple
In 1996 Apple decided to buy NeXT Computer. It was the return of Steve Jobs to the company he founded with an interim adviser position (for which Jobs, voluntarily, did not receive any salary).
Nine months later, the resignation of the Apple president caused Steve Jobs to return to the presidency. In August 1997, Jobs announced an agreement with the rival corporation, Microsoft, which decided to invest $ 150 million in Apple. The two companies needed and complemented each other, since Microsoft was the main manufacturer of programs for Macintosh, and Apple one of the main witnesses in the antitrust lawsuit that the North American justice had initiated against the company of Bill Gates.
In 1998, it revolutionized the computing market again with the launch of the iMac, a compact computer integrated into the monitor, which, in addition to its spectacular avant-garde design, was ready to surf the Internet. Its sales success placed Apple among the five largest personal computer manufacturers in the United States and led to a revaluation of 50% of the company’s shares.
New versions of the iMac, with greater power and increasingly sophisticated features would continue to appear in the following years, constantly revolutionizing the market.
He began to deploy his potential for inventive creativity in other areas, combining as he had always done the new functionalities with maximum simplicity of use and elegant minimalist designs. The first was digital music: in 2001 he landed in the music industry with a pocket audio player, the iPod, and two years later he created the iTunes music store, which led the sale of online music.
In 2004, his health problems forced him to leave his job since he was treated for an alleged pancreatic cancer.
Later, in 2007, it introduced the iPhone, the first of the high-end smartphone family developed by Apple.
The novel features of the iPhone were soon imitated by other companies.
What did Steve Jobs die of?
In 2009, he underwent a liver transplant, and Steve Jobs delegated most of his responsibilities to Timothy Cook. Even so, still in 2010 it surprised the world with the iPad, a hybrid of tablet and mobile phone without the need for a keyboard or mouse. Steve Jobs introduced the second version, the iPad 2, in March 2011, in what would be one of his last public appearances.
Some information subsequently revealed, although not entirely reliable, indicates that Jobs did not actually die from pancreatic cancer. According to these investigations, the founder of Apple would have died of Kaposi’s sarcoma whose effects, in HIV patients, are very similar to those of pancreatic cancer. In other words, according to this theory, Steve Jobs suffered from HIV and, as he also suffered from this type of sarcoma, his health worsened. However, this theory is not 100% confirmed.
On October 5, 2011, at the age of 56, he died at his home in Palo Alto.