Background info Steve Paul Jobs was born on February 24, 1955 to biological parents Joanne Carole Schieble and Abdulfattah Jandali. He was put up for adoption for unknown reasons, and was adopted by Justin and Clara Jobs of Mountain View, California. Jobs initially became interested in electronics around the age of 11 with a neighbor/friend Bill Fernandez. In 1972, Jobs graduated from Homestead High School. Bill introduced Jobs to Steve Wozniak. Jobs and Wozniak sold blue boxes and small devices that would allow the calling of international numbers for free. He enrolled in Reed College. Eventually, Jobs realized that higher education would not give him what he expected in life; after six months he dropped out. In 1974, he returned to the United States, and began to attend meetings of the Homebrew Computer Club with Wozniak. When he was 19, he got a job at Atari, with the primary goal of saving up for a spiritual trip to India. He traveled throughout India for a month, with his best friend Dan Kottke, looking for enlightenment. Instead of enlightenment, he experienced disappointment. When Jobs returned, he learned that Wozniak had created a design for a personal computer (which he called Apple I). This marked the beginning of Apple Computer Inc, on April 1st, 1976. The first sale of the Apple I happened at a local computer store, The Byte Shop. They bought fifty Apple computers at $500 each. In April 1977 at the West Coast Computer Faire, the Apple II was introduced. Wozniak’s new design, with its compactness, performance, and disk drives became an instant success. After introducing the Apple II, Jobs started on the next great project, Lisa. The main feature of Lisa was its Graphical User Interface (GUI). Also, this machine came with the first affordable mouse. Because of his managerial style, and the tension with Apple’s president Mike Scott, this lead to Jobs' exclusion from the Lisa project. Instead, Steve Jobs was named Chairman of the Board. Later, Jobs moved on to taking over a small R&D group working on a computer called the Macintosh (Mac). Both the Lisa and the Apple III, were attempts to respond to the release of the IBM PC. The Lisa, which was released on January 19, 1983, was a failure because of its high price. On January 24, 1984, the Macintosh was released to great fanfare. Unfortunately, it did not sell well. It did have some successes on US college campuses. This lead to increased tensions between Jobs and the new CEO John Sculley, which resulted in Jobs being removed from the Mac and Lisa divisions. Steve Jobs, hired five people away from Apple, and created a new company NeXT Computer, Inc. Jobs initially aimed to make the perfect company, with first-class offices on the Stanford University campus, and a $100,000 logo created by the renowned Yale professor Paul Rand. On October 12th 1988, NeXT Computer released the NeXT Cube. It was an elegant machine with new technologies including an magneto-optical drive, Digital Signa.

1. Background info
Steve Paul Jobs was born on February 24, 1955 to biological
parents Joanne Carole Schieble and Abdulfattah Jandali. He was
put up for adoption for unknown reasons, and was adopted by
Justin and Clara Jobs of Mountain View, California. Jobs
initially became interested in electronics around the age of 11
with a neighbor/friend Bill Fernandez. In 1972, Jobs graduated
from Homestead High School. Bill introduced Jobs to Steve
Wozniak. Jobs and Wozniak sold blue boxes and small devices
that would allow the calling of international numbers for free.
He enrolled in Reed College. Eventually, Jobs realized that
higher education would not give him what he expected in life;
after six months he dropped out. In 1974, he returned to the
United States, and began to attend meetings of the Homebrew
Computer Club with Wozniak. When he was 19, he got a job at
Atari, with the primary goal of saving up for a spiritual trip to
India. He traveled throughout India for a month, with his best
friend Dan Kottke, looking for enlightenment. Instead of
enlightenment, he experienced disappointment. When Jobs
returned, he learned that Wozniak had created a design for a
personal computer (which he called Apple I). This marked the
beginning of Apple Computer Inc, on April 1st, 1976.
The first sale of the Apple I happened at a local computer store,
The Byte Shop. They bought fifty Apple computers at $500
each. In April 1977 at the West Coast Computer Faire, the
Apple II was introduced. Wozniak’s new design, with its
compactness, performance, and disk drives became an instant
success. After introducing the Apple II, Jobs started on the next
great project, Lisa. The main feature of Lisa was its Graphical
User Interface (GUI). Also, this machine came with the first
affordable mouse. Because of his managerial style, and the
tension with Apple’s president Mike Scott, this lead to Jobs'

2. exclusion from the Lisa project. Instead, Steve Jobs was named
Chairman of the Board. Later, Jobs moved on to taking over a
small R&D group working on a computer called the Macintosh
(Mac). Both the Lisa and the Apple III, were attempts to
respond to the release of the IBM PC. The Lisa, which was
released on January 19, 1983, was a failure because of its high
price. On January 24, 1984, the Macintosh was released to great
fanfare. Unfortunately, it did not sell well. It did have some
successes on US college campuses. This lead to increased
tensions between Jobs and the new CEO John Sculley, which
resulted in Jobs being removed from the Mac and Lisa
divisions.
Steve Jobs, hired five people away from Apple, and created a
new company NeXT Computer, Inc. Jobs initially aimed to
make the perfect company, with first-class offices on the
Stanford University campus, and a $100,000 logo created by the
renowned Yale professor Paul Rand. On October 12th 1988,
NeXT Computer released the NeXT Cube. It was an elegant
machine with new technologies including an magneto-optical
drive, Digital Signal Processor, and a built-in Ethernet port.
This computer, was too expensive for the common education
buyer. The NeXT Cube cost on average $6,000 when
universities were asking for a $3,000 computer. These
computers would sell slowly as a result. NeXT Computer, in
September 1990 released the NeXT Station, which was an
improvement over the Cube. Compared to other machines of the
time, the NeXT Station was more compact and less expensive.
The machine sold with a monochrome display for $5,000.
Overall, these machines did not sell well, even with a new
strategy of selling these machines through boutique dealers and
through Japanese and American markets. This would result in
the moving their focus from hardware to software.
In-between the creation of NeXT Computer, Jobs bought the
computer division of George Lucas’ ILM (Industrial Lights &

3. Magic) in 1986. This would be incorporated as Pixar Animation
Studios. The company eventually had one product: the Pixar
Image Computer. It was a $135,000 graphic workstation that
was designed to run Pixar’s cutting-edge animation software
Renderman. Because of its high price, it did not sell well. What
prevented Jobs from shutting down Pixar was its nomination at
the 1986 Academy Awards for Best Animated Short Film, Luxo
Jr. In 1991, Jobs signed a deal with Disney for Pixar to create a
computer-animated feature film, Toy Story. The overall success
of the movie would result in the continuation of Pixar. At this
time Jobs took Pixar public, which resulted in Pixar being worth
$420 million, with shares being valued at $1.5 billion.
Around 1995, Apple was in its lowest point in history. While it
survived off the revenue from Macintosh sales, it was now faced
with a new competitor, Microsoft. Microsoft transitioned from
selling software for use for other computers (including Apple’s)
to MS-DOS, an IBM-compatible operating system. Eventually
Microsoft would create a GUI-façade to DOS called Windows.
The release of Windows 95, in 1995 became the PC industry’s
only standard. With the release of Windows 95, Apple's market
share dropped to five percent. Apple’s CEO at the time, Gil
Amelio looked for ways to save the company. What resulted
from this was the buying of NeXT Software. Jobs was welcomed
back and was given the position “informal adviser”. Because of
two disastrous fiscal quarters under Amelio, Jobs overthrew him
and became the interim CEO of Apple. He also purged the board
of directors, canceled dozens of R&D products, and cut
spending wherever he could. At Macworld on August 6th 1997,
he announced a partnership with Bill Gates. Gates invested $150
million into Apple, and promised to release all future versions
of Office for the Mac platform. This would result in Apple
achieving profitability in 1998. The iMac was released on May
6th 1998, a colorful all-in-one computer. Overall, the iMac was
a great success, and Apple was again regarded as the industry’s
most innovative company.

4. In 2001, Apple released Mac OS X 10.0, the first version of
Apple’s next generation operating system to replace the aging
OS (Operating System) 9 operating system. This new OS was
built on NeXTSTEP and also had a solid UNIX foundation. On
October 23rd 2001, Apple introduced its first iPod, a digital
music player. In 2002, because of the iPod success, it was made
compatible with Windows PCs (Personal Computer). Apple later
released the iTunes Music Store in April 2003. This was the
first online music store to be supported by all four music labels
(Sony BMG, EMI, Universal and Warner). As a result of this,
the iPod and iTunes became the symbols of the digital music
revolution. The relationship between Disney and Pixar degraded
around 2005. Relations would improve in 2006, as a result of
change of CEO from Michael Eisner to Bob Iger. After
additional negotiations, Disney bought Pixar on January 24th
2006. On January 9th, 2007, Jobs would introduce the iPhone,
the state of the art touch based mobile phone. With the releases
of that and the AppleTV (A TV set top music and video player),
Apple has now expanded further than just computers. On that
same day, Jobs announced the change in name from Apple
Computer to just Apple. Jobs in 2004 had to go through surgery
to remove a very rare form of pancreatic cancer, and it was
successful. In 2008 at Macworld he would introduce the second
generation of the iPhone, which was released on July 11, 2008.
Currently Steve jobs is considered one of the most prominent
figures in technology, as well as the visionary leader of Apple
and a key player in the entertainment company, Disney. He was
named “most influential businessman on earth” by Fortune
Magazines in 2008 for his roles in computer, music, animation,
and phone industries.