Steve Jobs: The Story Of Apple
Did you ever wonder who thought of the idea to put an apple that looks like someone took a bite out of it on the back of your iPhone, or who thought of the MAC computers? Steve jobs was notorious for being the co-founder of Apple. He was a big part in developing a lot of well-known products we use every day.
Steve Jobs was born on February 24th, 1955 in San Francisco, California. Steve was put up for adoption right after he was born. He was adopted as a baby by Paul and Ciara Jobs. Steve grew up to be one of the most respected inventers in history. He spent his whole life creating and inventing things until the day he died. Steve had a wife named Lauren Powell and four kids, three by his wife and one from a past relationship. He was a creative, charismatic, and happy person. Apple wouldn’t be what it is today without Steve Jobs.
As a child, Steve was a smart kid who tested high but didn’t like to do the work because he would get bored. Steve did not like school to the point where he would get bribed to do his work. Steve tested out of high school, but his parents didn’t allow him to skip any grades. Steve went on to college at Reed College in Portland, Oregon in 1974 for about a semester and then dropped out to take creative classes. Sources are claiming when Steve was in college he was using drugs such as Marijuana and LSD. An article by ZDNET stated Steve jobs “… said that taking LSD was one of the “two or three” most important things he had done in his life.” LSD was legal in the 1900’s and was used by multiple inventors to boost creativity. Steve was offered his first job at Atari as a Part- time video game designer. Steve saved up and went to India for a few months to study eastern culture and religion. He was looking to find unanswered questions about science and technology.
Once Steve returned, he partnered with Steve Wozniak to work on the first Apple computer. Steve was introduced to Wozniak while he was in high school, Wozniak was a sophomore in college at the time. In a PC World interview Wozniak stated, “We both loved electronics and the way we used to hook up digital chips”. They worked together in the basement of Steve Jobs house until they finally finished the first Apple Computer I. This computer was a hit and generated about $774,000 in revenue. This was how it all started.
Three years later the Apple Computer 2 came out and this one skyrocketed the profits to $139 million! Years went by and several Apple products were suffering from malfunction and recall. IBM a computer company had eventually passed apple in sales causing Steve Jobs to leave Apple in 1985 and sell his shares.
It wasn’t until Steve was 28 when he found out who his biological parents were. He meets his sister Mona Simpson who was also abandoned by his father. In Mona’s eulogy she writes “When I met Steve, he was a guy my age in jeans, Arab- or Jewish-looking and handsomer than Omar Sharif.” They became close as soon as they met each other. The two tracked down his father and traced him to a local restaurant in Sacramento, California. Mona went to meet with him in the restaurant. Steve didn’t want her to tell their father Jandali because he didn’t want to meet him at that point. An interview with Walter Isaacson, author of Steve’s biography stated that during Mary and her father’s conversation Jandali says “I used to run a really great restaurant, you know, near Cupertino. I wish you could have seen me then. Everybody used to come to that restaurant, even Steve Jobs used to come to the restaurant. Mona, of course, looks shocked and doesn’t say well, Steve Jobs is your son. And Jandali looked at her and says oh, yes, Steve Jobs. He was a good tipper.” He never found out it was his son all along.
Apple wasn’t the only major company Steve was involved with. Steve Jobs purchased an animation company in 1986, which was later named Pixar. In a interview with Jobs he notes “Pixar is really going to be the first digital studio in the whole world. It really combines art and technology together. Pixar’s got by far and away the best computer graphics talent in the entire world and it now has the best animation and artistic talent in the whole world to do these kinds of film”. According to the Entrepreneur article “Jobs set out to create the first ever computer-animated feature film. Four years in the making, “Toy Story” was a certified smash hit when it was released in November 1995.”
Jobs also started a company of his own called Next, which was a computer software company. Apple ended up buying Next from Steve in 1996, offering his position back at Apple. Steve returned to Apple as the CEO and revamped the entire company introducing products like the IPod, IPhone, IPad, and the Macbook Air. Steve had a self-imposed salary of $1. Steve was making more money off of his shares at the end of the day. Steve had scammed Apple to get free lunch for a while, during the time he was working for a dollar according to Steve’s friend Scott Forstall, “He and I would go to lunch at the cafeteria at Apple all the time, and he would insist on paying. I was like, you’re paying me enough that I can afford the $8 lunch, but he’d always — if he got his food before, he’d wait at the line for me to get up there, and he’d pay.” Jobs paid for the food everyday with his employee badge which took the money directly from his paycheck, Steve said he didn’t know where the money was going because he only got paid $1.
Steve was diagnosed with Pancreatic cancer in 2003, Which led him to get surgery and remove the tumor nine months later. After the surgery he was fine. Later in 2006, Disney merged with Pixar causing Jobs to be the largest shareholder. In 2009, Steve started losing weight and people were saying its due to disease, causing shareholders to be concerned. Steve announced he was having a hormone imbalance and scouted out Tim Cook to be Apple’s CEO of daily operations.
After the release of Apples IPad in 2010, Steve had gone on a medical leave until August 2011. He resigned from CEO of Apple, and gave it to Tim Cook. He passed on October 6th, 2011. One article reports that “Friends say that he spent recent weeks at home in Palo Alto, California, with his immediate family, who will now oversee the fate of his $6.5 billion fortune.” Steve was a good person overall who spent most of his life designing computers and he is responsible for most of the things we were using today. Even if he didn’t physically invent everything himself. He was the mastermind behind it all. Steve Jobs was and will always be the Seed of Apple.