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Steve Jobs

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

friend Steve Wozniak to help him build a personal computer.

The beginning of Apple:

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

re-create an atmosphere in which the computer industry's highly individualistic, talented,

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

appointed CEO of the company he created and started off with.

Steve Jobs: Controversy

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

criticized as America's roughest, toughest, most intimidating bosses (Angelelli, 1994).

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

him" (Angelelli, 1994).

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

in a row, I know I need to change something” (Jobs, 2005).

(This is a quote from the Commencement address by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer

and of Pixar Animation Studios, delivered on June 12, 2005.)

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

grown to the new Ipod touch.

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

Macs in 2007 ( Chaffin, 2008).


Below is just the current value of the Apple Inc. stock. As you can see they are doing

well and there stock it currently trading at 135.58 per share.

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 Jobs owns the graphics company Pixar


- Steve Jobs is also is the largest single shareholder in the Disney Company he

owns 7% of the stock

- Steve Job’s annual salary for Apple is $1 but he owns 10 million in restricted

shares of Apple Inc. stock

Works Cited or Consulted

Angelelli, Lee. "STEVE JOBS." CS Dept. NSF-Supported Education Infrastructure

Project / ei.cs.vt.edu. 18 June 2009 <http://ei.cs.vt.edu/~history/Jobs.html>.

"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

Mac Observer. 18 June 2009

<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

featuring the MacMove.com site archives! 18 June 2009

<http://www.systemshootouts.org/?q=node/209>.

"A Short History of NeXT." Main Page - SimsonWiki. 18 June 2009

<http://simson.net/ref/NeXT/aboutnext.htm>.
"Steve Jobs - Departure from Apple, Creation of NeXT." Spiritus-Temporis.com -

Historical Events, Latest News, News Archives. 18 June 2009

<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>.

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