Steve Jobs
From IT Jalakam - Unofficial IT syllabus for grade 10 students
Steven Paul Jobs (born February 24, 1955) is an American businessman and co-founder, and CEO of Apple Inc. Jobs is the former CEO of Pixar Animation Studios.
In the late 1970s, Jobs, with Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, created one of the first commercially successful personal computers. In the early 1980s, Jobs was among the first to see the commercial potential of the mouse-driven graphical user interface.After losing a power struggle with the board of directors in 1985, Jobs resigned from Apple and founded NeXT, a computer platform development company specializing in the higher education and business markets. NeXT's subsequent 1997 buyout by Apple Computer Inc. brought Jobs back to the company he co-founded, and he has served as its CEO since then. Steve Jobs was listed as Fortune Magazine's Most Powerful Businessman of 2007.
In 1986, he acquired the computer graphics division of Lucasfilm Ltd which was spun off as Pixar Animation Studios. He remained CEO and majority shareholder until its acquisition by the Walt Disney Company in 2006. Jobs is currently a member of Walt Disney Company's Board of Directors.
Biography
Jobs was born in San Francisco and was adopted by Paul and Clara (née Hagopian) Jobs of Mountain View, Santa Clara County, California who named him Steven Paul. Paul and Clara also had a daughter, Patty. His biological parents, Joanne Carole Schieble and Abdulfattah Jandali[7] — a graduate student from Syria who became a political science professor[7] — later married and gave birth to Jobs' sister, the novelist Mona Simpson.
Jobs attended Cupertino Junior High School and Homestead High School in Cupertino, California, and frequented after-school lectures at the Hewlett-Packard Company in Palo Alto, California. He was soon hired there and worked with Steve Wozniak as a summer employee. In 1972, Jobs graduated from high school and enrolled in Reed College in Portland, Oregon. Although he dropped out after only one semester, he continued auditing classes at Reed, such as one in calligraphy. "If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts", he said.
In the autumn of 1974, Jobs returned to California and began attending meetings of the Homebrew Computer Club with Steve Wozniak. He took a job as a technician at Atari, a manufacturer of popular video games, with the primary intent of saving money for a spiritual retreat to India.
Jobs then traveled to India with a Reed College friend (and, later, the first Apple employee),[citation needed] Daniel Kottke, in search of spiritual enlightenment. He came back a Buddhist with his head shaved and wearing traditional Indian clothing.[citation needed] During this time, Jobs experimented with psychedelics, calling his LSD experiences "one of the two or three most important things [he had] done in [his] life." He has stated that people around him who did not share his countercultural roots could not fully relate to his thinking.
He returned to his previous job at Atari and was given the task of creating a circuit board for the game Breakout. According to Atari founder Nolan Bushnell, Atari had offered US$100 for each chip that was reduced in the machine. Jobs had little interest or knowledge in circuit board design and made a deal with Wozniak to split the bonus evenly between them if Wozniak could minimize the number of chips. Much to the amazement of Atari, Wozniak reduced the number of chips by 50, a design so tight that it was impossible to reproduce on an assembly line. At the time, Jobs told Wozniak that Atari had only given them $600 (instead of the actual $5000) and that Wozniak's share was thus $300
Referance(s) - www.wikipedia.com
