Steve Jobs Biography, Origin, Schooling, Turning Point, Success & More

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Mac O’Clock
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6 min readJun 19, 2020
Steve Jobs Biography, Origin, Schooling, Turning Point, Success & More

Not a Single Book, Nor a whole movie is sufficient to narrate the historic tale of the Great Legend Steve Jobs. His legendary life would require a whole television series that too with several seasons to give justice to various facets of his remarkable journey. His story is lots more than just a biography.

Every aspect of his life and his decisions were so complicated driving people to think out of the box.

This article is just an attempt to understand this Techno famed icon once again.

Steven Paul Jobs was an American entrepreneur, well know as a co-founder and CEO of Apple Computers. This motivational speaker was an inspiration to the techno world and other world leaders. He was the CEO of Pixar and even founder, chairman, and CEO of NeXT. Jobs was beyond every individual’s imagination.

Origin

Born on 24 February 1955 in San Francisco, California, the USA to Joanne Simpson and Abdulfattah “John” Jandali (biological parents) Steve struggled for his identity and was later adopted and raised by Paul and Clara Jobs in 1957 and the family moved to mountain View, California in 1961.

Both Paul and Clara loved Steve and really worked hard to pay his school fees. Paul was Mr. Fixit of his family. He would fix everything in house from fencing to building a cabinet and even fixed cars. And Steve liked to hang out with his dad being his helping hand. By the time he was 10, Jobs has deeply involved in electronics and would hang out with engineers in their neighborhood.

Schooling

But Contrary to this, Jobs was pretty bored in school. Later in 1967 Jobs family moved to Los Altos, California. Where he was introduced to 18yrs old electronics wiz Steve Wozniak (co-founder of Apple).

After high school Jobs enrolled at Reeds college in Portland, Oregon. But this was not working for Jobs, Lacking directions finally he left Reeds after six months. Jobs said in an interview that he didn’t want to waste his parent’s money who were struggling hard to pay his fees. And spend his 18 months dropping in creativity classes and calligraphy lectures. Job stated during this period he slept on the floor in friends dorm rooms returning coke bottles for money and got weekly free meals at local Hare Krishna temple. He also said, “If I had never dropped in on that single Calligraphy course in college then Mac would never have had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts.”

Apple Computers

In 1976, Jobs and Wozniak, who was trying to build small computers back then formed their own company and they called it Apple Computers. This was in the Jobs own family garage. Jobs had sold his Volkswagen bus and Wozniak sold his beloved scientific calculator to turn their dream into reality. At first, they just sold circuit boards while working on their computer prototype.

Their main aim was to develop a technology which is smaller yet smarter, cheaper yet more accessible to the everyday consumer. Jobs idea was to develop a personal computer which every individual can use daily. Their first personal computer, The Apple 1 was sold for $ 666.66. Job and Wozniak had begun an entirely new era of personal computers in the American market. Apple 2 went to market in 1977 and it made a history in US Market. The company’s sales grew to $ 200 million within 3 years. Apple computers had become the largest private manufacturers of personal computers and the second largest manufacturers of home computers in the US.

By 1980 more computers entered the market. Apple introduced it’s Apple 3, but the new model suffered technical and marketing problems which were later reworked and reintroduced.

Turning Point

In 1984, Apple introduced a revolutionary new model, the Macintosh. It was the apple’s first personal computer to feature a mouse and a graphical user interface rather than a command-line interface. Macintosh was costly and sales disappointed, Macintosh was still unable to compete with IBM. IBM or International Business Machines was apples biggest competitors at that time and apple had lost half of its market shares to IBM. Microsoft quickly began to develop its own Mouse driven user interface. Shortly after its release in 1985, Bill gates threatened to stop developing Mac application unless it was granted a license for the Mac Operating System Software because Bill Gates Microsoft was developing its graphical user interface for DOS which it was calling ‘Windows’ and didn’t want Apple to sue over similarities between the Windows GUI and Mac Interface.

Jobs was 30 back then, widely successful, fabulously wealthy and a global celebrity. And then it all came crashing down. After several months of being the sideline. It was 11 Sept 1985, Steve Jobs had resigned from Apple but the exact details of Jobs departure still remains a matter of dispute.

Jobs claim that Apple CEO John Scully fired him over a disagreement regarding how to save the company during a period of decline sales for the Apple Computers. “What can I say? I hired the wrong guy. He destroyed everything I spent 10 years working on.”

Whereas Scully says, “Steve was asked to step down from the Macintosh division, he was never fired.”

But this did not let Jobs down. Jobs soon hired some of his former employees to begin a new computer company called “NeXT”. In 1986, Jobs even purchase a small company called Pixar. Pixar specialized in computer animations. Nine years later Pixar released Toy story Movie which was a huge box office hit.

In December 1996, Apple purchased NeXT software for over $ 400 million and jobs returned to apple once again. Jobs send innings at Apple was most successful from Ipad to iMac. Steve and apple were marching ahead of his previous mild stones.

Success

Jobs was a million dollar when he was 23 in 1978, 10 million when he was 24 and over 100 million when he was 25. He was also one of the youngest people ever to make the Fobes list of the USA ‘s richest people. At the time of his death in 2011, Steve’s net worth was estimated to be $ 10.2 billion. His estate was estimated to be worth $ 19 billion in 2015.

Death

In October 2003 Steve was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, by early 2009 Jobs was experiencing a severe weight loss and finally took his last breathe on 5 October 2011 around 3 pm at Palo Alto, California home due to complications in his previous treatment. Steve’s last words looking at his wife, sister and children were, “ Oh wow. Oh wow. Oh wow.” And he passed away leaving Apple as one of the largest, most profitable and most influential tech company on the planet.

“Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to loose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.” — Steve Jobs.

Learnings

Steve Jobs was considered to be one of the great motivational peoples on the planet. Just hearing what he says teaches a lot.

“I was lucky, I found what I love to do early in life when I was twenty. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being the beginner again, less sure about everything. I am convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You got to find what you love and that it is as true for work as it is for your lover. Your work is going to fill the large part of your life and the only way is to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work and the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking and don’t settle.” — Steve Jobs.

So this was about Steve Jobs hope you might this Informative, thank you! for visiting, also check out other biographies as well: GoBiography.

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