On October 5, 2011, Steve Jobs, the visionary co-founder of Apple Inc., which revolutionized the computing, music and mobile communications industries with devices such as the Macintosh, iPod, iPhone and iPad, dies at age 56 of pancreatic complications. Cancer.
Born February 24, 1955 in San Francisco, Calif. To single graduate students Joanne Schieble and Abdulfattah Jandali, a Syrian immigrant, Jobs was adopted as a baby by Paul Jobs, a Silicon Valley machinist, and his wife Clara. After graduating from high school in Cupertino, Calif., In 1972, Jobs attended Reed College, a liberal arts school in Portland, Oregon, for a semester before dropping out. He then worked briefly for pioneer video game maker Atari in California, traveled to India, and studied Zen Buddhism.
In 1976, Jobs and his computer engineer friend Stephen Wozniak founded Apple Computer in Jobs ‘parents’ garage in Los Altos, California. As Bloomberg News later noted of Jobs: “He had no formal technical training and no actual business experience. What he had instead was an appreciation for the elegance of technology and an idea that computers could be more than a hobbyist’s toy or a corporate workaholic. These machines could be indispensable tools. In 1977 Jobs and Wozniak released the Apple II, which became the first popular personal computer. In 1980, Apple went public and Jobs, then in his mid-twenties, became a multimillionaire. Four years later, Apple released the Macintosh, one of the first personal computers to feature a graphical user interface, which allowed people to navigate by pointing and clicking a mouse rather than typing commands.
In 1985, Jobs left the company following a power struggle with Apple’s board of directors. The same year, he created NeXT, a company that develops high performance computers. The machines turned out to be too expensive to gain a large consumer audience; however, British computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee developed the World Wide Web using a NeXT workstation. In 1986, Jobs acquired a small computer graphics studio founded by filmmaker George Lucas and renamed it Pixar Animation Studios. In 1995 Pixar released its first film, “Toy Story”, the first computer animated feature film. It became a huge box office hit and was followed by award-winning hits such as “Finding Nemo” (2003) and “The Incredibles” (2004). In 2006, The Walt Disney Company bought Pixar for over $ 7 billion, making Jobs Disney’s largest shareholder.
In late 1996, Apple, which had failed without Jobs, announced it would buy NeXT and hire Jobs as an advisor. The following year he became the interim CEO of Apple (“the interim” was dropped in 2000), and under his leadership, a near-bankrupt Apple was transformed into one of the most valuable companies. of the planet. A charismatic and demanding perfectionist, Jobs was said to possess the ability to understand what clients wanted before knowing it themselves. In his signature jeans and black turtleneck, the tech titan turned product launches into highly anticipated events, and Apple showcased a slew of innovative digital devices, including the iPod portable music player in 2001, the ‘iPhone in 2007 and the iPad tablet in 2010, which has become a part of modern everyday life. (In early 2007, Jobs announced that Cupertino-based Apple was removing “Computer” from its official nickname to reflect the fact that the company’s focus had shifted from computers only to mobile electronics).
Despite a series of medical issues, including surgery in 2004 to remove a pancreatic tumor and a liver transplant in 2009, Jobs continued to lead Apple until August 24, 2011, when he resigned his position as general manager of the company. Six weeks later, he died at his home in Palo Alto, California. At the time of his death, Jobs, a father of four, had an estimated net worth of over $ 7 billion. According to biographer Walter Isaacson, Jobs “was the greatest business executive of our time, the one who will be remembered most in a century. History will place him in the pantheon right next to Thomas Edison and Henry Ford.
