Wednesday, March 7, 2012

The Late Great Steve Job

Personal Life

Born in 1955 and was put up for adoption by his unwed parents shortly after his birth. Paul and Clara Jobs of Mountainview, California, adopted him. The father was a machinist who worked on lasers, while his wife was an accountant.

They moved to Los Altos, California, before he entered high school. A statement the preteen made to his parents allegedly precipitated the move: he said that he wouldn’t return to school in Mountainview, so his parents decided to move. While a high school student, he contacted William Hewlett, the president of Hewlett Packard, and asked for some parts for an electronics project. He not only obtained the parts he desired; he was offered a summer job at Hewlett Packard.

Jobs graduated from high school in 1972 and briefly attended Reed College in Portland, Oregon. In 1974, he went to work for Atari Incorporated as a video game designer. After saving some money from his stint at Atari, Jobs was able to embark on a spiritual sojourn to the Indian subcontinent during the summer of 1974. While in India, Jobs sought to immerse himself in the Eastern way of life. A bout with dysentery in the autumn of 1974 cut his trip short and Jobs moved back to California and into a commune.

Career Details

By 1975, Jobs started to get involved with the Homebrew Computer Club, which was headed by Steve Wozniak, an acquaintance of his from Hewlett Packard. Wozniak was starting to develop what would become the prototype for the Apple Computer series. Jobs had persuaded him to market his designs and prototypes and the two of them began, in earnest, to develop what would ultimately become the first Apple Computer.

Jobs and Wozniak worked on the Apple I in Jobs’ garage and by 1976 they offered models for sale. The most uniquely innovative feature of the $700 machine was its single board read-only memory (ROM), which instructed the computer to load and read other programs from outside sources.

The development and sale of the Apple II, which retained the unique features of its predecessor in an updated format, began in 1977. Jobs then got in touch with the former marketing manager at Intel and brought him to Apple. Jobs began to encourage independent programmers to create software for the Apple II, and soon everything from business management tools to video games became available for use on the Apple II.


Overview

Maverick computer innovator Steve Jobs, along with his friend and partner, Steve Wozniak, formed the Apple Computer Company in the late 1970s. They pioneered the design and development of desktop computers for the general public. The creation of the Macintosh computer in the mid-1980s ushered in a new era of tremendously widespread user friendly machines. After being ousted from Apple, Jobs went on to form the NeXT Computer Company. He also bought Pixar Animation Studios, where Toy Story, the first wholly computer generated and animated film, was created.