Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Early Life:
Steve Jobs was born on February 24th 1955 Green Bay Wisconsin. His biological parents
are Joanne Carole Schieble and Abdulfattah Jandali. Before he was born Steve’s mother
decided that she was going to give him up for adoption due to the fact that she was an
unwed college graduate student and at that time and unwed couple having a child was
looked down on. Unfortunately the couple that was supposed to adopt him right at birth
decided at the last minute that they wanted a female child. He was eventually adopted by
his current parents Paul and Clara Jobs who resided in Mountain View, Santa Clara
County, California. Steve Jobs was described by his high school computer teacher Hohn
McCollum as somewhat of a loner and always had a different way of looking at things
(Angelelli, 1994). After graduating from high school in 1972 he attended Reed College in
Portland, Oregon which he dropped out of after only one semester. In 1974 Steve Jobs
got a job at Atari as a video game designer where he worked for several months and
obtained enough money to take a spiritual trip to India. After returning from in India in
the fall of 1974 Jobs began to attend meeting’s with the "Homebrew Computer Club"
started by one of his friends Stephen Wozniak. During this time Steve Jobs convinced his
This computer they built was called the Apple I and it had pretty good success. They sold
25 copies of the Apple I machine to a local electronics equipment retailer. Then Jobs and
Wozniak came up with the idea to start a computer company that would manufacture and
then sell computers. But in order to do this they both had to sell their most prized
possessions. Jobs sold his Volkswagen micro-bus and Wozniak sold his Hewlett-Packard
scientific calculator which raised $1,300 to start their new company (Angelelli, 1994).
This lead to the formation of the company called Apple. Jobs and Wozniak earned
$774,000 from sales of the Apple I computer. After the success of the Apple I computer
they created the Apple II computer. The Apple II had built-in circuitry allowing it to
interface directly to a color video monitor (Angelelli, 1994). In the first three years of
production the Apple II made $139,000,000. In 1981 the Apple III was introduced but
this computer had very little success. Apple had to recall the first 14,000 units due to do
design flaws. When the problem was finally fixed they had a lot of trouble selling the re
engineered product. Steve Jobs then created the Macintosh in an effort to compete with
PC’s and to increase the profit margin of Apple. In developing the Macintosh, he tried to
and often eccentric software and hardware designers could flourish. The Macintosh had
128K of memory, twice that of the PC, and the memory could be expandable up to192K.
The Mac's 32-bit microprocessor did more things and out performed the PC's 16-bit
microprocessor (Scott, 1991). The success of the Macintosh led Apple to abandon the
Apple II in favor of the Mac product line, which continues to this day (Spiritus-
Temporis.com ©2005).
NeXT Computers:
Due to conflicts between the board of directors and Steve Jobs. In 1985 he was stripped
of his duties and later resigned from Apple. Jobs introduced the first NeXT computer in
1988. The NeXT computer was created in order to rival the best computers made by
Macintosh and PC. This computer included a high-resolution display, built-in Ethernet,
CD-quality sound, and multimedia e-mail, the NeXT Computer was packaged in a one-
foot by one-foot black magnesium cube (NeXT Computer Historical Site, 2009). In 1990
NeXT introduced a newer version of the cube which was faster and offered a 32 bit color
display. NeXT was bought out by Apple in 1996 for 402 million USD. He was then
Even though Steve Jobs has been called one of the most successful men in America there
is a lot of controversy surrounding him and how he treats his employees. Jobs has been
Jobs wanted perfection so much that he has been known to verbally attack employees and
terminate their employment. Steve Jobs is also known to show disregard for other peoples
ideas. A NextStep employee describes his attitude: "You've been on it a week, and you're
supposed to be brilliant. So what have you done? That's why so many people are afraid of
Philosophy
If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right. It made
an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror
every morning and asked myself: If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do
what I am about to do today? And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days
(This is a quote from the Commencement address by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer
Apple Today
One of Apples most successful products is the Ipod which is an Mp3 player. Apple has
come out with many versions of the Ipod. It started of the just the Ipod classic and now
This is a chart outlining Apples sales of their product Ipod from 2001 to 2008. As you
can see by looking at this graph Apple became very successful with sales of the Ipod in
April 2004. Sales started going up drastically till 2008 and they continue today. Another
popular item sold by Apple is their Mac computers. In 2008 earned a 38% growth in
computer sales. Apple sold 9.715 million Macs throughout 2008, up from 7.051 million
Education
Steve Jobs attended Cupertino Junior High School and Homestead High School in. He
was soon hired there and worked with Steve Wozniak as a summer employee. In 1972, he
graduated from high school and enrolled in Reed College in Portland, Oregon. He
dropped out of Reed College after only one semester but remained at the college taking
courses in calligraphy.
Family Life
Steve Jobs married his wife Laurene Powell on March 18, 1991. He has four children
three of them with his wife and another child with a woman he did not marry.
Interesting Facts
- Steve Job’s annual salary for Apple is $1 but he owns 10 million in restricted
"Apple Increases Mac Sales by 38% in 2008, iPod & iPhone Also Up | Apple Stock
Watch | The Mac Observer." Mac and Apple News, Tips, Help and Reviews | The
<http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/Apple_Increases_Mac_Sales_by_38_i
n_2008_iPod_iPhone_Also_Up/>.
"IPod Sales - Total (2001-2008) | Mac/PC System Shootouts." Mac/PC System Shootouts
| Head to head, detailed comparisons of the latest from Apple, Dell and more; now
<http://www.systemshootouts.org/?q=node/209>.
<http://simson.net/ref/NeXT/aboutnext.htm>.
"Steve Jobs - Departure from Apple, Creation of NeXT." Spiritus-Temporis.com -
<http://www.spiritus-temporis.com/steve-jobs/departure-from-apple,-creation-of-
next.html>.
"Text of Steve Jobs' Commencement address (2005)." Stanford News. 18 June 2009
<http://news.stanford.edu/news/2005/june15/jobs-061505.html>.