Steven Paul Jobs (February 24, 1955 – October 5, 2011) was
an American entrepreneur, businessman, inventor, and industrial
designer. Jobs was the chairman, and the chief executive officer (CEO),
and a co-founder of Apple Inc.; CEO and majority shareholder of Pixar;[2] a
member of The Walt Disney Company's board of directors following its
acquisition of Pixar; and founder, chairman, and CEO of NeXT. Jobs and
Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak are widely recognized as pioneers of
the microcomputer revolution of the 1970s and 1980s.
He was born in San Francisco to
parents who had to put him up for adoption at birth; he was raised in the San
Francisco Bay Area during the 1960s. [3] Jobs then attended Reed College in
1972 before dropping out [4],
and decided to travel through India in 1974 seeking enlightenment
and studying Zen Buddhism.[5] Jobs's declassified FBI report stated that an
acquaintance knew that Jobs had used marijuana (the formerly
illegalized drug in California), and LSD while he was in college.[6] Jobs once told a reporter that taking LSD was
"one of the two or three most important things" he did in his life.[7]
Jobs and Wozniak co-founded Apple in
1976 to sell Wozniak's Apple I personal computer. The visionaries
gained fame and wealth a year later for the Apple II, one of the first
highly successful mass-produced personal computers. In 1979, after a tour
of PARC, Jobs saw the commercial potential of the Xerox Alto, which
was mouse-driven and had a graphical user interface (GUI). This
led to development of the unsuccessful Apple Lisa in 1983, followed
by the breakthrough Macintosh in 1984. In addition to being the first
mass-produced computer with a GUI, the Macintosh introduced the sudden
rise of the desktop publishing industry in 1985 with the addition of
the Apple LaserWriter, the first laser printer to feature vector
graphics. Following a long power struggle, Jobs was forced out of Apple in 1985.
After leaving Apple, Jobs took a few of
its members with him to found NeXT, a computer platform development
company that specialized in state-of-the-art computers for higher-education and
business markets. In addition, Jobs helped to initiate the development of
the visual effects industry when he funded the spinout of the
computer graphics division of George Lucas's Lucasfilm in
1986.[9] The new company, Pixar, would eventually produce
the first fully computer-animatedfilm, Toy Story—an event made
possible in part because of Jobs's financial support.
In 1997, Apple merged with NeXT. Within
a few months of the merger, Jobs became CEO of his former company; he revived
Apple at the verge of bankruptcy. Beginning in 1997 with the "Think
different" advertising campaign, Jobs worked closely with designer Jonathan
Ive to develop a line of products that would have larger cultural
ramifications: the iMac, iTunes and iTunes Store, Apple
Store, iPod, iPhone, App Store, and the iPad. In 2001, the
original Mac OS was replaced with a completely new Mac OS X,
based on NeXT's NeXTSTEP platform, giving the OS a modern Unix-based
foundation for the first time.
Jobs was diagnosed with a pancreatic
neuroendocrine tumor in 2003 and died on October 5, 2011, of respiratory
arrestrelated to the pancreatic tumor.
