Steve Jobs

    Steve Paul Jobs (1955-2011) was an American entrepreneur and inventor. He was co-founder, chairman and CEO of Apple Inc.He was best known as pioneer in personal computer revolution and consumer electronics fields. He transformed 'one industry after another, from computers and smartphones to music and movies. Jobs also co-founded and served as chief executive of Pixar Animation Studios. When Disney acquired Pixar, in 2006 he became a member of the board of directors of the Walt Disney Company.

      Steve was Adopted by Clara and Paul Jobs. When Steve was five years old, his family moved from San Francisco to Mountain View, in California. Paul was a mechanic and carpenter. He taught Steve how to work with basic electronics. Paul would demonstrate to his son how to take apart and rebuild electronics such as radios and televisions. It rose the Steve interest in and developed a hobby out of technical toying. Clara Jobs was an accountant on pay roll for Varian Associates. It was one of the first high-tech companies. Clara taught Steve to read before going to school. Jobs's youth was riddled with frustration over formal schooling. At Monta Loma Elementary School in Mountain View, he was frequently misbehaved and joked about others. So, school officials punished him by skipping Steve's grade in test.

      Jobs then attended Cupertino Junior High School in Cupertino, California. In hostel he became friend with Bill Fernandez, a neighbour guy, who had a common interest in electronics. Fernandez also intro duced Jobs to Steve Wozniak (also known as 'Woz').

      In 1972, Jobs entered Reed College in Portland, Oregon. Reed was an expensive college that Paul and Clara could hardly afford. They were spending most of their life saving on his son's higher education. Jobs dropped out of college after six months. But his interest in a creative class, made him to stay there for 18 months. So, he continued auditing classes at Reed. For this he slept in friends' hostel dorm rooms on the floor, returned coke bottles for food money, and received weekly free meals at the local Hare Krishna temple. Jobs later said, "If I had never dropped in on that single calligraphy course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts". 

      In the early 1970s, Jobs and Wozniak were drawn to technology like magnet. Wozniak had designed a low-cost digital blue box to generate the necessary tones to manipulate telephone network, allow ing for free long-distance telephone calls. The clandestine sales of the illegal 'blue boxes' went well. And jobs thought electronics could be not only fun but also profitable.Jobs began attending meetings of the Homebrew Computer Club with Wozniak in 1975. He greatly admired Edwin H. Land, the inventor of instant photography and founder of the Polaroid Corporation.

      In 1976, Jobs and Wozniak formed their own business, named *Apple Computer Company'. Firstly, they started off selling circuit boards. In the late 1970s, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, engineered one of the first commercially successful lines of personal computers, the Apple II series. Then, Steve created the Apple Lisa and, one year later, the Macintosh. He also played a role in introducing the Laser Writer.

       In 1985, Jobs fived from Apple and founded NeXT, a computer platform development company specialising in the higher-education and business markets. At Stanford University speech in 2005, he said that being fired from Apple was the best thing that could have happened to him: 'The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life'. And he added, 'I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was awful-tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it'.

      The current CEO of Apple, Tim Cook, stated that the most underappreciated thing about Steve was that he had the courage to change his mind'. The NeXT workstation was known for its technical strengths, chief among them its object-oriented software development system. Jobs marketed NeXT products to financial, scientific, and academic community, highlighting its innovative, experimental new technologies, such as the Mach kernel, the digital signal processor chip, and the build-in ethernet port. Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web on a NeXT computer at CERN.

      In 1986, Jobs acquired the computer graphics division of Lucasfilm. He was credited in 'Toy Story' (1995) as an executive producer. In 1996, after Apple had failed to deliver its operating system it turned to NeXT computer. NeXTSTEP platform became the foundation for the Mac OS X. Finally, Steve returned to Apple company as interim CEO. Jobs brought Apple from near bankruptcy to profitability by 1998. As the new CEO of the company, Jobs oversaw the development of the company. The success of products and services provided several years of stable financial returns. And propelled Apple to become the world's most valuable publicly traded company in 2011.

      Jobs later also involved himself with product design. He is listed as either primary inventor or co-inventor in 346 United States patents. Jobs' contributions to most of his patents were to the look and feel of the product'. His industrial design chief Jonathan Ive's name features in 200 of the patents. Jobs never compromise with quality and work. Jobs sketched new devices in a hospital bed. He also suggested way to revise the design of the oxygen monitor on his finger for simplicity.

       In 2003, Jobs was diagnosed with a neuroendocrine tumour in the pancreas. Though it was initially treated, he reported a hormone imbalance, underwent a liver transplant in 2009, and appeared progres sively thinner as his health declined. On medical leave for most of 2011, Jobs resigned in August that year, and was elected Chairman of the Board. He died of respiratory arrest related to his metastatic tumour on 5 October 2011.