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Steve Jobs Biography

Steve Jobs was born in San Francisco, 1955, to two university students Joanne Schieble and Syrian-born John Jandali. They were both unmarried at the time, and Steven was given up for adoption.

Steven was adopted by Paul and Clara Jobs, whom he always considered to be his real parents. Steven’s father, Paul, encouraged him to experiment with electronics in their garage. This led to a lifelong interest in electronics and design.

Jobs attended a local school in California and later enrolled at Reed College, Portland, Oregon. His education was characterised by excellent test results and potential. But, he struggled with formal education and his teachers reported he was a handful to teach.

At Reed College, he attended a calligraphy course which fascinated him. He later said this course was instrumental in Apple’s multiple typefaces and proportionally spaced fonts.

Steve Jobs in India

In 1974, Jobs travelled with Daniel Kottke to India in search of spiritual enlightenment. They travelled to the Ashram of Neem Karoli Baba in Kainchi. During his several months in India, he became aware of Buddhist and Eastern spiritual philosophy. At this time, he also experimented with psychedelic drugs; he later commented that these counter-culture experiences were instrumental in giving him a wider perspective on life and business.

“Bill Gates‘d be a broader guy if he had dropped acid once or gone off to an ashram when he was younger.” – Steve Jobs, The New York Times, Creating Jobs, 1997

Job’s first real computer job came working for Atari computers. During his time at Atari, Jobs came to know Steve Wozniak well. Jobs greatly admired this computer technician, whom he had first met in 1971.

Steve Jobs and Apple

In 1976, Wozniak invented the first Apple I computer. Jobs, Wozniak and Ronald Wayne then set up Apple computers. In the very beginning, Apple computers were sold from Jobs parents’ garage.

Over the next few years, Apple computers expanded rapidly as the market for home computers began to become increasingly significant.

In 1984, Jobs designed the first Macintosh. It was the first commercially successful home computer to use a graphical user interface (based on Xerox Parc’s mouse driver interface.) This was an important milestone in home computing and the principle has become key in later home computers.

Despite the many innovative successes of Jobs at Apple, there was increased friction between Jobs and other workers at Apple. In 1985, removed from his managerial duties, Jobs resigned and left Apple. He later looked back on this incident and said that getting fired from Apple was one of the best things that happened to him – it helped him regain a sense of innovation and freedom, he couldn’t find work in a large company.

Life After Apple

Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. Photo Joi Ito

On leaving Apple, Jobs founded NeXT computers. This was never particularly successful, failing to gain mass sales. However, in the 1990s, NeXT software was used as a framework in WebObjects used in Apple Store and iTunes store. In 1996, Apple bought NeXT for $429 million.

Much more successful was Job’s foray into Pixar – a computer graphic film production company. Disney contracted Pixar to create films such as Toy Story, A Bug’s Life and Finding Nemo. These animation movies were highly successful and profitable – giving Jobs respect and success.

In 1996, the purchase of NeXT brought Jobs back to Apple. He was given the post of chief executive. At the time, Apple had fallen way behind rivals such as Microsoft, and Apple was struggling to even make a profit.

Return to Apple

Photo: Matt Buchanan

Jobs launched Apple in a new direction. With a certain degree of ruthlessness, some projects were summarily ended. Instead, Jobs promoted the development of a new wave of products which focused on accessibility, appealing design and innovate features.

The iPod was a revolutionary product in that it built on existing portable music devices and set the standard for portable digital music. In 2008, iTunes became the second biggest music retailer in the US, with over six billion song downloads and over 200 million iPods sold.

In 2007, Apple successfully entered the mobile phone market, with the iPhone. This used features of the iPod to offer a multi-functional and touchscreen device to become one of the best-selling electronic products. In 2010, he introduced the iPad – a revolutionary new style of tablet computers.

The design philosophy of Steve Jobs was to start with a fresh slate and imagine a new product that people would want to use. This contrasted with the alternative approach of trying to adapt current models to consumer feedback and focus groups. Job’s explains his philosophy of innovative design.

“But in the end, for something this complicated, it’s really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.”

– Steve Jobs, BusinessWeek (25 May 1998)

Apple has been rated No.1 in America’s most admired companies. Jobs management has been described as inspirational, although c-workers also state, Jobs could be a hard taskmaster and was temperamental. NeXT Cofounder Dan’l Lewin was quoted in Fortune as saying of that period, “The highs were unbelievable … But the lows were unimaginable.”

“My job is not to be easy on people. My jobs is to take these great people we have and to push them and make them even better.” – All About Steve Jobs [link]

Under Jobs, Apple managed to overtake Microsoft regarding share capitalization. Apple also gained a pre-eminent reputation for the development and introduction of groundbreaking technology. Interview in 2007, Jobs said:

“There’s an old Wayne Gretzky quote that I love. ‘I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.’ And we’ve always tried to do that at Apple. Since the very very beginning. And we always will.”

Despite, growing ill-health, Jobs continued working at Apple until August 2011, when he resigned.

“I was worth over $1,000,000 when I was 23, and over $10,000,000 when I was 24, and over $100,000,000 when I was 25, and it wasn’t that important because I never did it for the money.”

– Steve Jobs

Jobs earned only $1million as CEO of Apple. But, share options from Apple and Disney gave him an estimated fortune of $8.3billion.

Personal life

In 1991, he married Laurene Powell, together they had three children and lived in Palo Alto, California.

In 2003, he was diagnosed with Pancreatic Cancer. Over the next few years, Jobs struggled with health issues and was often forced to delegate the running of Apple to Tim Cook. In 2009, he underwent a liver transplant, but two years later serious health problems returned. He worked intermittently at Apple until August 2011, where he finally retired to concentrate on his deteriorating health. He died as a result of complications from his pancreatic cancer, suffering cardiac arrest on 5 October 2011 in Palo Alto, California.

In addition to his earlier interest in Eastern religions, Jobs expressed sentiments of agnosticism.

“ Sometimes I believe in God, sometimes I don’t. I think it’s 50-50 maybe. But ever since I’ve had cancer, I’ve been thinking about it more. And I find myself believing a bit more. I kind of – maybe it’s ’cause I want to believe in an afterlife. That when you die, it doesn’t just all disappear.”

Quote in Biography by Walter Isaacson.

Steve Jobs is buried in an unmarked grave at Alta Mesa Memorial Park, a nonsectarian cemetery in Palo Alto.

Citation: Pettinger, Tejvan . “Biography of Steve Jobs”, Oxford, UK. www.biographyonline.net. Published 25th Feb. 2012. Last updated 11th March 2019.

Steve Jobs: The Exclusive Biography

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This is beautiful. He’s one of my role models. RIP Jobs

• January 20, 2019 7:27 AM

This is very inspirational to all of us in the world today. He made the impossible the possible, he will always be remembered for his great work done. Congrats Steve you are an inspiration!

• January 16, 2019 5:29 PM

He made life easier for us all, nothing would be the way it is today without him.

• December 19, 2018 2:19 PM

Steve job amazing man

• October 27, 2018 7:01 AM
• By Rambharat

I agree 100%.

• December 05, 2018 9:13 PM
• By Roman Lopez

Very nice biography

• September 04, 2018 12:47 PM

Steve jobs! His lesson reminds alot,but Steve went to school ,through colleges he attained ajob that has resulted him into many champions in business and other s.now how can someone has no such gualification also leave such great impact.

• December 05, 2017 1:35 AM
• By Natanyakhu moses

Biography of Steve Jobs, Co-Founder of Apple Computers

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Disney pixar, expanding apple.

Steve Jobs (February 24, 1955–October 5, 2011) is best remembered as the co-founder of Apple Computers . He teamed up with inventor  Steve Wozniak to create one of the first ready-made PCs. Besides his legacy with Apple, Jobs was also a smart businessman who became a multimillionaire before the age of 30. In 1984, he founded NeXT computers. In 1986, he bought the computer graphics division of Lucasfilm Ltd. and started Pixar Animation Studios.

Fast Facts: Steve Jobs

• Known For : Co-founding Apple Computer Company and playing a pioneering role in the development of personal computing
• Also Known As : Steven Paul Jobs
• Born : February 24, 1955 in San Francisco, California
• Parents : Abdulfattah Jandali and Joanne Schieble (biological parents); Paul Jobs and Clara Hagopian (adoptive parents)
• Died : October 5, 2011 in Palo Alto, California
• Education : Reed College
• Awards and Honors : National Medal of Technology (with Steve Wozniak), Jefferson Award for Public Service, named the most powerful person in business by Fortune  magazine, Inducted into the California Hall of Fame, inducted as a Disney Legend
• Spouse : Laurene Powell
• Children : Lisa (by Chrisann Brennan), Reed, Erin, Eve
• Notable Quote : "Of all the inventions of humans, the computer is going to rank near or at the top as history unfolds and we look back. It is the most awesome tool that we have ever invented. I feel incredibly lucky to be at exactly the right place in Silicon Valley, at exactly the right time, historically, where this invention has taken form."

Jobs was born on February 24, 1955, in San Francisco, California. The biological child of Abdulfattah Jandali and Joanne Schieble, he was later adopted by Paul Jobs and Clara Hagopian. During his high school years, Jobs worked summers at Hewlett-Packard. It was there that he first met and became partners with Steve Wozniak.

As an undergraduate, he studied physics, literature, and poetry at Reed College in Portland, Oregon. Formally, he only attended one semester there. However, he remained at Reed and crashed on friends' sofas and audited courses that included a calligraphy class, which he attributes as being the reason Apple computers had such elegant typefaces.

After leaving Oregon in 1974 to return to California, Jobs started working for Atari , an early pioneer in the manufacturing of personal computers. Jobs' close friend Wozniak was also working for Atari. The future founders of Apple teamed up to design games for Atari computers.

Jobs and Wozniak proved their skills as hackers by designing a telephone blue box. A blue box was an electronic device that simulated a telephone operator's dialing console and provided the user with free phone calls. Jobs spent plenty of time at Wozniak's Homebrew Computer Club, a haven for computer geeks and a source of invaluable information about the field of personal computers.

Out of Mom and Pop's Garage

By the late 1970s, Jobs and Wozniak had learned enough to try their hand at building personal computers. Using Jobs' family garage as a base of operation, the team produced 50 fully assembled computers that were sold to a local Mountain View electronics store called the Byte Shop. The sale encouraged the pair to start Apple Computer, Inc. on April 1, 1979.

The Apple Corporation was named after Jobs' favorite fruit. The Apple logo was a representation of the fruit with a bite taken out of it. The bite represented a play on words: bite and byte.

Jobs co-invented the  Apple I  and Apple II computers together with Wozniak, who was the main designer, and others. The Apple II is considered to be one of the first commercially successful lines of personal computers. In 1984, Wozniak, Jobs, and others co-invented the  Apple Macintosh  computer, the first successful home computer with a mouse-driven graphical user interface. It was, however, based on (or, according to some sources, stolen from) the Xerox Alto, a concept machine built at the Xerox PARC research facility. According to the Computer History Museum, the Alto included:

A mouse. Removable data storage. Networking. A visual user interface. Easy-to-use graphics software. “What You See Is What You Get” (WYSIWYG) printing, with printed documents matching what users saw on screen. E-mail. Alto for the first time combined these and other now-familiar elements in one small computer.

During the early 1980s, Jobs controlled the business side of the Apple Corporation. Steve Wozniak was in charge of the design side. However, a power struggle with the board of directors led to Jobs leaving Apple in 1985.

After leaving Apple, Jobs founded NeXT, a high-end computer company. Ironically, Apple bought NeXT in 1996 and Jobs returned to his old company to serve once more as its CEO from 1997 until his retirement in 2011.

The NeXT was an impressive workstation computer that sold poorly. The world's first web browser was created on a NeXT, and the technology in NeXT software was transferred to the Macintosh and the iPhone .

In 1986, Jobs bought "The Graphics Group" from Lucasfilm's computer graphics division for $10 million. The company was later renamed Pixar. At first, Jobs intended for Pixar to become a high-end graphics hardware developer, but that goal was never met. Pixar moved on to do what it now does best, which is make animated films. Jobs negotiated a deal to allow Pixar and Disney to collaborate on a number of animated projects that included the film "Toy Story." In 2006, Disney bought Pixar from Jobs.

After Jobs returned to Apple as its CEO in 1997, Apple Computers had a renaissance in product development with the iMac, iPod , iPhone, iPad, and more.

Before his death, Jobs was listed as the inventor and/or co-inventor on 342 United States patents, with technologies ranging from computer and portable devices to user interfaces, speakers, keyboards, power adapters, staircases, clasps, sleeves, lanyards, and packages. His last patent was issued for the Mac OS X Dock user interface and was granted the day before his death.

Steve Jobs died at his home in Palo Alto, California, on October 5, 2011. He had been ill for a long time with pancreatic cancer, which he had treated using alternative techniques. His family reported that his final words were, "Oh wow. Oh wow. Oh wow."

Steve Jobs was a true computer pioneer and entrepreneur whose impact is felt in almost every aspect of contemporary business, communication, and design. Jobs was absolutely dedicated to every detail of his products—according to some sources, he was obsessive—but the outcome can be seen in the sleek, user-friendly, future-facing designs of Apple products from the very start. It was Apple that placed the PC on every desk, provided digital tools for design and creativity, and pushed forward the ubiquitous smartphone which has, arguably, changed the ways in which humans think, create, and interact.

• Computer History Museum. " What Was The First PC? "
• Gladwell, Malcolm, and Malcolm Gladwell. “ The Real Genius of Steve Jobs .”  The New Yorker , 19 June 2017.
• Levy, Steven. “ Steve Jobs .”  Encyclopædia Britannica , 20 Feb. 2019.
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• Born February 24 , 1955 · San Francisco, California, USA
• Died October 5 , 2011 · Palo Alto, California, USA (pancreatic cancer)
• Birth name Steven Paul Jobs
• Height 6′ 2″ (1.88 m)
• Steven Paul Jobs was born on 24 February 1955 in San Francisco, California, to students Abdul Fattah Jandali and Joanne Carole Schieble who were unmarried at the time and gave him up for adoption. He was taken in by a working class couple, Paul and Clara Jobs, and grew up with them in Mountain View, California. He attended Homestead High School in Cupertino California and went to Reed College in Portland Oregon in 1972 but dropped out after only one semester, staying on to "drop in" on courses that interested him. He took a job with video game manufacturer Atari to raise enough money for a trip to India and returned from there a Buddhist. Back in Cupertino he returned to Atari where his old friend Steve Wozniak was still working. Wozniak was building his own computer and in 1976 Jobs pre-sold 50 of the as-yet unmade computers to a local store and managed to buy the components on credit solely on the strength of the order, enabling them to build the Apple I without any funding at all. The Apple II followed in 1977 and the company Apple Computer was formed shortly afterwards. The Apple II was credited with starting the personal computer boom, its popularity prompting IBM to hurriedly develop their own PC. By the time production of the Apple II ended in 1993 it had sold over 6 million units. Inspired by a trip to Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), engineers from Apple began working on a commercial application for the graphical interface ideas they had seen there. The resulting machine, Lisa, was expensive and never achieved any level of commercial success, but in 1984 another Apple computer, using the same WIMP (Windows, Icons, Menus, Pointer) interface concept, was launched. An advert during the 1984 Super Bowl, directed by Ridley Scott introduced the Macintosh computer to the world (in fact, the advert had been shown on a local TV channel in Idaho on 31 December 1983 and in movie theaters during January 1984 before its famous "premiere" on 22 January during the Super Bowl). In 1985 Jobs was fired from Apple and immediately founded another computer company, NeXT. Its machines were not a commercial success but some of the technology was later used by Apple when Jobs eventually returned there. In the meantime, in 1986, Jobs bought The Computer Graphics Group from Lucasfilm. The group was responsible for making high-end computer graphics hardware but under its new name, Pixar, it began to produce innovative computer animations. Their first title under the Pixar name, Luxo Jr. (1986) won critical and popular acclaim and in 1991 Pixar signed an agreement with Disney, with whom it already had a relationship, to produce a series of feature films, beginning with Toy Story (1995) . In 1996 Apple bought NeXT and Jobs returned to Apple, becoming its CEO. With the help of British-born industrial designer Jonathan Ive , Jobs brought his own aesthetic philosophy back to the ailing company and began to turn its fortunes around with the release of the iMac in 1998. The company's MP3 player, the iPod, followed in 2001, with the iPhone launching in 2007 and the iPad in 2010. The company's software music player, iTunes, evolved into an online music (and eventually also movie and software application) store, helping to popularize the idea of "legally" downloading entertainment content. In 2003, Jobs was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and underwent surgery in 2004. Despite the success of this operation he became increasingly ill and received a liver transplant in 2009. He returned to work after a six month break but eventually resigned his position in August 2011 after another period of medical leave which began in January 2011. He died on 5 October 2011. - IMDb Mini Biography By: IMDb Editors
• Spouse Laurene Powell-Jobs (March 18, 1991 - October 5, 2011) (his death, 3 children)
• Children Lisa Brennan-Jobs Eve Jobs
• Relatives Mona Simpson (Sibling)
• Black turtleneck sweatshirt and blue jeans - he owned over a hundred
• CEO of Pixar Animation Studios
• Has a daughter, Lisa, from a previous relationship. She is the namesake of Apple's computer, the Lisa.
• When Apple Computer appointed its first Board of Directors, they insisted that all employees wear name badges with a number indicating the order in which they were hired. They assigned Steve Wozniak , who did all the engineering of the highly successful Apple II computer, the title Employee No. 1. Steve Jobs was officially Employee No. 2. He protested, but the board refused to change the badge assignments. Jobs offered a compromise: He would be Employee No. 0, since 0 comes before 1 on the mathematical model known as a number line.
• In Forbes Magazine's listing of the 400 Richest Americans in 2005, Steve Jobs came in at number 67 with a total worth of $3.3 Billion.
• CEO of Pixar Animation Studios - the creators of Toy Story (1995) , A Bug's Life (1998) , Toy Story 2 (1999) , Monsters, Inc. (2001) , and Finding Nemo (2003) - as well as various shorts, including Oscar-winning Tin Toy (1988) , Geri's Game (1997) , and For the Birds (2000) .
• [February 1985, interview in "Playboy" magazine] I don't think I've ever worked so hard on something, but working on Macintosh was the neatest experience of my life. Almost everyone who worked on it will say that. None of us wanted to release it at the end. It was as though we knew that once it was out of our hands, it wouldn't be ours anymore. When we finally presented it at the shareholders' meeting, everyone in the auditorium gave it a five-minute ovation. What was incredible to me was that I could see the Mac team in the first few rows. It was as though none of us could believe we'd actually finished it. Everyone started crying.
• [1985] I'll always stay connected with Apple. I hope that throughout my life I'll sort of have the thread of my life and then the thread of Apple weave in and out, like a tapestry. There may be a few years when I'm not there, but I'll always come back.
• [2003] There are downsides to everything; there are unintended consequences to everything. The most corrosive piece of technology that I've ever seen is called television--but then, again, television, at its best, is magnificent.
• [1998] A lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them.
• Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn't really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while.

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Jobs' Biography: Thoughts On Life, Death And Apple

Walter Isaacson's biography of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs was published Monday, less than three weeks after Job's death on Oct. 5.

When Steve Jobs was 6 years old, his young next door neighbor found out he was adopted. "That means your parents abandoned you and didn't want you," she told him.

Jobs ran into his home, where his adoptive parents reassured him that he was theirs and that they wanted him.

"[They said] 'You were special, we chose you out, you were chosen," says biographer Walter Isaacson. "And that helped give [Jobs] a sense of being special. ... For Steve Jobs, he felt throughout his life that he was on a journey — and he often said, 'The journey was the reward.' But that journey involved resolving conflicts about ... his role in this world: why he was here and what it was all about."

When Jobs died on Oct. 5 from complications of pancreatic cancer, many people felt a sense of personal loss for the Apple co-founder and former CEO. Jobs played a key role in the creation of the Macintosh, the iPod, iTunes, the iPhone, the iPad — innovative devices and technologies that people have integrated into their daily lives.

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Jobs detailed how he created those products — and how he rose through the world of Silicon Valley, competed with Google and Microsoft, and helped transform popular culture — in a series of extended interviews with Isaacson, the president of The Aspen Institute and the author of biographies of Albert Einstein and Benjamin Franklin. The two men met more than 40 times throughout 2009 and 2010, often in Jobs' living room. Isaacson also conducted more than 100 interviews with Jobs' colleagues, relatives, friends and adversaries.

His biography tells the story of how Jobs revolutionized the personal computer. It also tells Jobs' personal story — from his childhood growing up in Mountain View, Calif., to his lifelong interest in Zen Buddhism to his relationship with family and friends.

In his last meetings with Isaacson, Jobs shifted the conversation to his thoughts regarding religion and death.

"I remember sitting in the back garden on a sunny day [on a day when] he was feeling bad, and he talked about whether or not he believed in an afterlife," Isaacson tells Fresh Air 's Terry Gross. "He said, 'Sometimes I'm 50-50 on whether there's a God. It's the great mystery we never quite know. But I like to believe there's an afterlife. I like to believe the accumulated wisdom doesn't just disappear when you die, but somehow it endures."

Jobs paused for a second, remembers Isaacson.

"And then he says, 'But maybe it's just like an on/off switch and click — and you're gone.' And then he paused for another second and he smiled and said, 'Maybe that's why I didn't like putting on/off switches on Apple devices.' "

'The Depth Of The Simplicity'

Jobs' attention to detail on his creations was unrivaled, says Isaacson. Though he was a technologist and a businessman, he was also an artist and designer.

"[He] connected art with technology," explains Isaacson. "[In his products,] he obsessed over the color of the screws, over the finish of the screws — even the screws you couldn't see." Even with the original Macintosh, he made sure that the circuit board's chips were lined up properly and looked good. He made them go back and redo the circuit board. He made them find the right color, find the right curves on the screw. Even the curves on the machine — he wanted it to feel friendly.

That obsessiveness occasionally drove his Apple co-workers crazy — but it also made them fiercely loyal, says Isaacson.

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"It's one of the dichotomies about Jobs: He could be demanding and tough and irate. On the other hand, he got all A-players and they became fanatically loyal to him," says Isaacson. "Why? They realized they were producing, with other A-players, truly great products for an artist who was a perfectionist — and wasn't always the kindest person when they failed — but he was rallying them to do great stuff."

He relays one story about Jobs that shows, he says, how much he was able to connect great ideas and innovations together. In the early 1980s, Jobs visited Xerox PARC, a research company in Palo Alto that had invented the laser printer, object-oriented programming and the Ethernet. Jobs noticed that the computers running at PARC all featured graphics on their desktops that allowed users to click icons and folders. This was new at the time: Most computers used text prompts and a text interface.

"Steve Jobs made an arrangement with Xerox and he took that concept [of the graphical user interface] and he improved it a hundred-fold," says Isaacson. "He made it so you could drag and drop some of the folders; he invented the pull-down menus. ... So what he was able to do was to take a conception and turn it into a reality."

That's where Jobs' genius was, Isaacson says. Jobs insisted that the software and hardware on Apple products needed to be fully integrated for the best user experience. It was not a great business model at first.

"Microsoft, which licensed itself promiscuously to all sorts of manufacturers, ends up with 90 to 95 percent all the operating system market by the beginning of 2000," says Isaacson. "But in the long run, the end-to-end integration system works very well for Apple and for Steve Jobs. Because it allows him to create devices [like the iPod and iPad] that just work beautifully with the machines."

Isaacson says working with Jobs gave him an additional insight into the design of Jobs' products.

"I see the depth of the simplicity," he says. "[I appreciate] the intuitive nature of the design, and how he would repeatedly sit there with his design engineers and his user-interface software people, and say, 'No, no no, I want to make it simpler.' I also appreciate the beauty of the parts unseen. His father taught him that the back of a fence or the back of a chest of drawers should be as beautiful as the front because [he] would know the craftsmanship that went into it. So somehow, it comes through — the depth of the beauty of the design."

Jobs was a perfectionist with a famously mercurial temperament. He was an artist and a visionary who "could be demanding and tough and irate," says Isaacson.

Interview Highlights

On what Jobs thought of the Microsoft operating system

Isaacson: "When it first came out — I can't use the words on the air — but [Jobs thought it was] clunky and not beautiful and not aesthetic. But as always is the case with Microsoft, it improves. And eventually Microsoft made a graphical operating system — Windows — and each new version got better until it was a dominating operating system."

On the rivalry between Jobs and Bill Gates

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Isaacson: "There are all sorts of lawsuits where Apple is trying to sue Microsoft for Windows, for trying to steal the look and feel. Apple loses most of the suits but they drag on and there's even a government investigation. By the time Steve Jobs comes back to Apple in 1997, the relationship is horrible. And when we say that Jobs and Gates had a rivalry, we also have to realize they had a collaboration and a partnership. It was typical of the digital age — both rivalry and partnership."

On the relationship between Jobs and Google

Isaacson: "I think there was an unnerving historic resonance for what had happened a couple of decades earlier [with Microsoft]. Suddenly you have Google taking the operating system of the iPhone and mobile devices and all of the touch-screen technologies and building upon it, and making it an open technology that various device makers could use. ... Steve Jobs felt very possessive about all of the look, the feel, the swipes, the multitouch gestures that you use — and was driven to absolute distraction when Android's operating system, developed by Google and used by hardware manufacturers, started doing the exact same thing. ... He was furious but that probably understates his feeling. He was really furious and he let Eric Schmidt, who was then the CEO of Google, know it."

Walter Isaacson is president and CEO of The Aspen Institute. His other books include Einstein: His Life and Universe; Benjamin Franklin : An American Life , and Kissinger: A Biography .

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On Jobs' adoptive parents

Isaacson: "When Steve got placed with [parents who were not college graduates], his biological mother initially balked at first but ... the Jobs family made a pledge that they would start a college fund and make sure that Steve went to college."

On approaching Isaacson to write his biography

Isaacson: "It was 2004 and he had broached the subject of doing a biography of him and I thought, 'Well, this guy's in the midst of an up-and-down career and he has maybe 20 years to go, so I said to him, 'I'd love to do a biography of you but let's wait 20 or so years until you retire.' Then off and on after 2004, we would be in touch. ...

"I finally talked to his wife, who was very good at understanding his legacy, and she said, 'If you're going to do a book on Steve, you can't just keep saying, 'I'll do it in 20 years or so.' You really ought to do it now.' This was 2009. Steve Jobs, that year, had had a liver transplant and I realized how sick he was. ... And so, that was when I realized that this was a very fascinating tale and this guy may or may not make it. I thought he was going to live much longer. But at the very least, he was facing the prospect of his mortality so it was time for him to be reflective and do a book."

On his final meeting with Jobs

Isaacson: "He was pretty sick. He was confined to the house. And he said to me, at the end of our long conversation, 'There will be things in this book I don't like, right?' And I said, 'Yes.' Partly because you can interview people right after a meeting they've had with Steve Jobs [and] you interview five people and get five different stories about what happened. ... People have different perceptions of who he is. ...

"He said, 'I'll make you this promise. I'm not going to read the book until next year, until after it comes out.' And it made me feel a grand emotion, of 'Oh! That's great. Steve is going to be alive for another year.' Because when you're around him, the power of his thinking really grabs you. I remember leaving his house and thinking, 'Oh, I'm so relieved. He'll be alive in a year. He just told me so.' Logically, I should have said, 'He doesn't know what ups and downs he's going to have with his health.' But I think that he always felt some miracle would come along because all of his life, miracles had come along."

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Steve Jobs summary

Steve Jobs , (born Feb. 24, 1955, San Francisco, Calif., U.S.—died Oct. 5, 2011, Palo Alto, Calif.), U.S. businessman. Adopted in infancy, he grew up in Cupertino, Calif. He dropped out of Reed College and went to work for Atari Corp. designing video games. In 1976 he cofounded (with Stephen Wozniak ) Apple Computer (incorporated in 1977; now Apple Inc. ). The first Apple computer, created when Jobs was only 21, changed the public’s idea of a computer from a huge machine for scientific use to a home appliance that could be used by anyone. Apple’s Macintosh computer, which appeared in 1984, introduced a graphical user interface and mouse technology that became the standard for all applications interfaces. In 1980 Apple became a public corporation, and Jobs became the company’s chairman. Management conflicts led him to leave Apple in 1985 to form NeXT Computer Inc., but he returned to Apple in 1996 and became CEO in 1997. The striking new iMac computer (1998) revived the company’s flagging fortunes. Under Jobs’s guidance, Apple became an industry leader and one of the most valuable companies in the world. Its other notable products include iTunes (2001), the iPod (2001), the iPhone (2007), and the iPad (2010). In 2003 Jobs was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, and he subsequently took several medical leaves of absence. In 2011 he resigned as CEO of Apple but became chairman.

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Apple's Steve Jobs: An Extraordinary Career Ever wondered how Steve Jobs was so successful? Discover the answers in this comprehensive overview of his life, career and death.

By Entrepreneur Staff

Few entrepreneurs have been as impactful as Steve Jobs : the father of Apple computers and one of the most influential business people ever, not only in America but worldwide.

Throughout his career, Steve Jobs started multiple businesses that pushed forward the computer revolution and reshaped how society interfaces with technology.

But how did he attain his titanic success, and what led to his eventual downfall and re-ascension to Apple leadership? These questions have important answers, so keep reading for a closer look at Steve Jobs and his life.

Related: Top 10 Hiring Platforms for Small Business

An overview of Steve Jobs' life

Steven Paul Jobs was an American business owner, entrepreneur, investor and media proprietor. He was best known for co-founding and leading Apple, one of the most successful companies ever. But he also started and ran many successful companies, such as Pixar and NeXT.

Related: Pixar - Articles & Biography | Entrepreneur

Jobs led Apple for many years before he was forced out because of a dispute with the company's Board of Directors. After founding Pixar and NeXT Inc., another computer platform development company, he returned to steer the Apple ship when the company found itself in trying economic times.

Eventually, a pancreatic neuroendocrine tumor led Jobs to reduce his working hours and responsibilities. He died at the age of 56 from respiratory arrest.

Though he died before reaching late age, he left a legacy of entrepreneurial ambition and business savvy that cannot be forgotten.

Related: These 5 Steve Jobs Keynotes Will Inspire You to Better Sell Your Ideas

What is the history of Steve Jobs and Apple ?

The history of Steve Jobs is intricately intertwined with the history of Apple.

It all began in Jobs' youth when he called the co-founder and president of Hewlett-Packard, William Hewlett, for parts for a high school project. Hewlett did more than that.

Related: Hewlett-Packard - Articles & Biography | Entrepreneur

He was so impressed that he offered the young Steve Jobs a summer internship working at Hewlett-Packard.

This turned out to be a destiny-shaping internship, where Jobs met Steve Wozniak: the future primary creator of the Apple Computer. Wozniak was a talented engineer at the time and five years older than Jobs.

Related: Steve Wozniak - Articles & Biography | Entrepreneur

Jobs finished his internship and enrolled in Reed College in Portland, Oregon. However, he decided to drop out after just one semester, eventually working for Atari designing video games to save enough money to take an Eastern spiritual trip.

When did Apple start?

After he returned from his trip, Jobs reconnected with Wozniak and discovered that his friend was trying to build a personal computer. Wozniak saw the entire endeavor as nothing more than a hobby, but Jobs saw the business potential in a personal computer anyone could have in their home.

Jobs convinced Wozniak to go into business with him. At 20 years old, he set up the Apple company in 1975, working primarily out of his parent's garage in San Francisco, California.

The Apple I computer was released shortly after that, while the pair attended meetings of the local Homebrew Computer Club. To make the project work, Steve Jobs sold his Volkswagen microbus to generate nearly $1400 in liquid capital.

The Apple I was a modest success and was primarily sold to other hobbyists like Wozniak. But it made the business duo enough money to expand their venture.

By 1977, they had completed a new product, the Apple II , the first personal computer to include a keyboard and color graphics. Its user-friendliness and innovative features made it an instant market success; in the first year, Apple made $3 million. In another two years, it had made over $200 million.

This was the first timeApple saw significant success. Unfortunately, 1980 saw increased competition caused by companies like IBM, partially due to the lackluster Apple III and LISA follow-up computers. Determined to make his mark on the business world, Jobs helped to create the AppleMacintosh in 1984.

The defining factor? A graphical user interface or GUI which a mouse could control. This revolution changed personal computing for everyone, allowing anyone without programming knowledge to now use a computer.

Why did Steve Jobs have a falling out with Apple ?

While the AppleMacintosh was a major technical success, it was priced too high for the consumer market at about $2,495. Furthermore, it wouldn't work for corporate buyers, as it lacked certain features businesses needed (such as high memory, hard drive and networking capabilities).

Though Jobs had helped to usher in a new industry entirely, his aggressive and sometimes egocentric personality led him to clash with Apple's Board of Directors.

By 1983, he had worn out his welcome. He was removed from the board by then-CEO John Sculley. Ironically, Jobs had picked Sculley personally to lead Apple.

What were Jobs' new endeavors?

Jobs sold his shares of Apple stock and fully resigned in 1985, moving on to build NeXT Computer Co. This new computer company would create another computer to revolutionize higher education.

It was introduced in 1988 , offering innovations like good graphics, a digital signal processor chip and an optical disk drive. However, it was still too expensive to attract big buyers, so Jobs pivoted once again.

This time, he took an interest in PixarAnimation Studios, which he had purchased in 1986 from George Lucas. He cut a deal with the Walt Disney Company to create entirely computer-generated feature films, the first and most popular of which was Toy Story : a 1995 smash hit that broke box office records.

Emboldened by this success, Jobs took the Pixar company public in 1996 and, overnight, was a billionaire thanks to his 80% share of the company. Jobs was finally rich, but this was just the beginning of his rise back to fame and power.

When did Jobs return to Apple ?

Apple Inc. then bought NeXT for approximately $400 million. More importantly, the company reappointed Jobs to the Board of Directors as an advisor to the then chairman and CEO Gilbert F. Amelio.

This was partially out of desperation and nostalgia, as Apple had not developed a popular Macintoshoperating system for the next generation. As a result, Apple's control of the PC market had dropped precipitously, reaching an all-time low of just 5.3%.

Jobs took the reins once again in March 1997, when Apple announced a $708 million quarterly loss. Jobs took over as the interim Apple CEO when Amelio resigned. To ensure the survival of the company he helped to found, Jobs made a deal with Microsoft, getting some investment capital from the competing company in exchange for a nonvoting minority stake.

Jobs' guidance gradually yielded essential benefits for Apple. He led the "Think Different" advertising campaign and the charge to install a new G3 PowerPC microprocessor in Apple computers, making them faster than competing devices.

Then he led the company to develop the iMac as a new, affordable type of home desktop, which finally resulted in the positive reviews he craved. By the end of 1988, Apple had made nearly $6 billion in sales.

However, the innovative iPhone was the most significant victory under Jobs' belt. Once shortly after the iPod portable audio player launched in 2001 alongside iTunes, the iPhone handset came about in 2007, revolutionizing mobile phones and mobile devices.

The iPhone was the first handheld phone to make calls, text and access the Internet from an intuitive and user-friendly touchscreen. These days, all modern mobile phones are based on the original iPhone design.

Related: Why Steve Jobs 's Passion for Calligraphy is an Important Example for You

Who created Apple ?

Apple was created by both Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. Throughout the partnership, Wozniak was the technical and engineering brains of the operation, spearheading many of the hardware and software development needed to launch the original Apple line of computers. J obs handled the business side of things.

Unfortunately, Wozniak and Jobs had many significant disagreements about the design and development of Apple technologies. Things came to a head with the development of the Apple II, and Wozniak ultimately left the company in 1983.

How did Apple get its name?

Supposedly, there's no profound story surrounding Apple and its name — Steve Jobs just liked apples . A potentially apocryphal story says that Steve Jobs suggested the Apple name to Steve Wozniak after the former visited an apple orchard when they were beginning their business.

Ultimately, the name's origin doesn't matter; it's iconic and unique enough compared to other computer firms that it has cemented itself in business history.

What did Steve Jobs invent?

Although Steve Jobs is named an author of 346 patents according to the US registry, he didn't technically invent anything. He didn't invent the Apple I, the Macintosh computer, the universal remote, the iPod, the iPad or the iPhone.

While he understood the design principles and engineering knowledge behind many of these inventions, his primary skill was business acumen.

Jobs may not have invented these revolutionary technologies, but he did inspire those with the skills to create them. More importantly, he knew how to market and sell those inventions, especially on stage. The Macbook Air, Mac computers and other Apple products would not have been as successful without him.

Related: How Steve Jobs Saved Apple

What was Steve Jobs ' net worth?

Before his death, Steve Jobs' net worth was approximately $10.2 billion , most of which was tied up in his stock options and similar assets. However, he acquired a very high net worth by age 25, at which point it was $250 million, roughly equivalent to around $745 million in 2021.

What were Steve Jobs ' major investments?

Throughout his career, Steve Jobs merely invested in companies that he owned, such as Apple, Pixar and NeXT. This is why his wealth ballooned so much after major business breakthroughs. Jobs was also known to hold stock and assets in companies like Microsoft and other tech companies.

What was Steve Jobs ' education like?

Like many famous entrepreneurs, Steve Jobs did not have a very comprehensive traditional education. Though he graduated high school and enrolled at Reed College in Oregon, he did not stay there for long.

He dropped out of just one semester without telling his parents. This turned out to be the right choice for his long-term career, as Jobs had the time to focus on Apple and his other endeavors.

Related: Steve Jobs Systematically Cultivated His Creativity. You Can Too

Who is in Steve Jobs ' family?

Steve Jobs was born to Joanne Carole Schieble and Abdulfattah Jandali, German-American and Syrian, respectively.

However, Jobs was adopted by Paul Jobs and Clara Hagopian, who had elected to consider adoption after an ectopic pregnancy in 1955. Jobs reportedly loved his parents and treated them as his "true" family from an early age.

Jobs had one adopted sister, Patricia, who was adopted in 1957. He met his future wife, Laurene Powell, at Stanford Graduate School of Business. They were married in 1991 at Yosemite National Park and had their first child that same year.

Reed, the first child, eventually graduated from Stanford University. The couple's next to children, Erin Siena and Eve, were born in 1995 and 1988, respectively.

However, Jobs had another child, Lisa Brennan-Jobs, in 1978, from an on-again-off-again relationship with Chrisann Brennan. Jobs initially denied responsibility for the child but eventually was required to make child-support payments and provide medical insurance coverage for Lisa after a DNA test that proved his fraternity in 1980.

Related: The Best Advice Steve Jobs Ever Gave

What donations, charity and philanthropic efforts did Steve Jobs pursue?

Unlike many wealthy individuals, Steve Jobs was not well known for his philanthropic or charitable donations. He was a very private individual and was repeatedly criticized during his business career for not donating as much money as fellow billionaires.

That said, while his name may be absent from the Million Dollar List of large global philanthropy, many have speculated that large anonymous donations may have been made by Jobs at one time or another.

Jobs did launch the Stephen P. Jobs Foundation after leaving Apple. The Foundation was originally intended to focus on vegetarianism and nutrition but eventually pivoted to social entrepreneurship.

When Jobs returned to Apple in 1987, he eliminated the company's philanthropic programs to cut costs. It's partially because of this that Apple retains a reputation as being among the least philanthropic companies.

Later in life, Jobs donated $50 million to Stanford Hospital and contributed an undisclosed amount of money to cure AIDS. Overall, Jobs is noteworthy and admirable for his business efforts, not for his charitable donations.

Related: As Steve Jobs Once Said, 'People with Passion Can Change the World'

How and when did Steve Jobs pass away?

Steve Jobs was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2003. Although he put off surgery in favor of alternative medicine solutions , he had to undergo a significant reconstructive surgery called the Whipple operation in 2004. Parts of his gallbladder, pancreas, bile duct and duodenum were removed.

Jobs recovered to lead Apple afterward, but in 2008, he lost significant weight. After a liver transplant in April 2009, Jobs' situation had become direr. August 2011 saw him resign as CEO of Apple, remaining chairman.

Unfortunately, he passed away due to respiratory arrest on October 5, 2011, at his Silicon Valley home. He was a fan of Eastern philosophies such as Buddhism. The Jobs family was with him in Palo Alto when he passed.

What are the best Steve Jobs quotes?

Apple co-founder Steve Jobs was well known for many inspiring quotes .

Here are a few to keep in mind as you pursue your own business ambitions:

• "Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life."
• "Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower."
• "You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future."
• "Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice."
• "Stay hungry. Stay foolish."
• "I'm convinced that about half of what separates the successful entrepreneurs from the non-successful ones is pure perseverance."
• "Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren't used to an environment where excellence is expected."
• "You can't just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them. By the time you get it built, they'll want something new."
• "We're here to put a dent in the universe. Otherwise, while else even be here?"

Related: 6 Reasons Why Steve Jobs Was Truly One of a Kind

What can Steve Jobs ' story teach you?

Steve Jobs had a significant impact on the computer and video industries.

His legacy will never be forgotten, and his business skills and lessons are essential materials for up-and-coming entrepreneurs to learn as they grow their own careers.

Check out Entrepreneur's other articles for more information about business leaders and other financial topics.

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History of Apple: The story of Steve Jobs and the company he founded

In this feature we tell the story of Apple. We start with the early days, the tale of how Apple was founded, moving on through the Apple I, to the Apple II, the launch of the Macintosh and the revolution in the DTP industry… To the tech-industry behemoth that we know and love today.

So sit back as we take a stroll down memory lane. Why not brush up on what really happened before you go and watch the Steve Jobs movie , with its interesting interpretations of several important events in the company’s history?

On 1 April 1976 Apple was founded, making the company 41 years old as of the 1 April 2017 – here’s a historical breakdown of the company.

The history of Apple

Our Apple history feature includes information about The foundation of Apple and the years that followed, we look at How Jobs met Woz and Why Apple was named Apple. The Apple I and The debut of the Apple II. Apple’s visit to Xerox, and the one-button mouse. The story of The Lisa versus the Macintosh. Apple’s ‘1984’ advert, directed by Ridley Scott. The Macintosh and the DTP revolution. Read more: The Mac’s Birthday .

We go on to examine what happened between Jobs and Sculley, leading to Jobs departure from Apple, and what happened during The wilderness years: when Steve Jobs wasn’t at Apple, including Apple’s decline and IBM and Microsoft’s rise and how Apple teamed up with IBM and Motorola and eventually Microsoft. And finally, The return of Jobs to Apple.

The foundation of Apple

The history of everyone’s favourite start-up is a tech fairytale of one garage, three friends and very humble beginnings. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves…

The two Steves –  Jobs and Wozniak  – may have been Apple’s most visible founders, but were it not for their friend Ronald Wayne there might be no iPhone , iPad or iMac today. Jobs convinced him to take 10% of the company stock and act as an arbiter should he and Woz come to blows, but Wayne backed out 12 days later, selling for just $500 a holding that would have been worth $72bn 40 years later.

How Jobs met Woz

Jobs and Woz (that’s Steve Wozniak) were introduced in 1971 by a mutual friend, Bill Fernandez, who went on to become one of Apple’s earliest employees. The two Steves got along thanks to their shared love of technology and pranks.

Jobs and Wozniak joined forces, initially coming up with pranks such as rigging up a painting of a hand showing the middle-finger to be displayed during a graduaction ceremony at Jobs’ school, and a call to the Vatican that nearly got them access to the Pope.

The two friends were also using their technology know-how to build ‘blue boxes’ that made it possible to make long distance phone calls for free.

Jobs and Wozniak worked together on the Atari arcade game Breakout while Jobs was working at Atari and Wozniak was working at HP – Jobs had roped Woz into helping him reduce the number of logic chips required. Jobs managed to get a good bonus for the work on Breakout, of which he gave a small amount to Woz.

The first Apple computer

The two Steves attended the Homebrew Computer Club together; a computer hobbyist group that gathered in California’s Menlo Park from 1975. Woz had seen his first MITS Altair there – which today looks like little more than a box of lights and circuit boards – and was inspired by MITS’ build-it-yourself approach (the Altair came as a kit) to make something simpler for the rest of us. This philosophy continues to shine through in Apple’s products today.

So Woz produced the the first computer with a typewriter-like keyboard and the ability to connect to a regular TV as a screen. Later christened the Apple I, it was the archetype of every modern computer, but Wozniak wasn’t trying to change the world with what he’d produced – he just wanted to show off how much he’d managed to do with so few resources.

Speaking to NPR (National Public Radio) in 2006, Woz explained that “When I built this Apple I… the first computer to say a computer should look like a typewriter – it should have a keyboard – and the output device is a TV set, it wasn’t really to show the world [that] here is the direction [it] should go [in]. It was to really show the people around me, to boast, to be clever, to get acknowledgement for having designed a very inexpensive computer.”

Jobs and Woz

It almost didn’t happen, though. The Woz we know now has a larger-than-life personality – he’s funded rock concerts and shimmied on Dancing with the Stars – but, as he told the Sydney Morning Herald, “I was shy and felt that I knew little about the newest developments in computers.” He came close to ducking out altogether, and giving the Club a miss.

Let’s be thankful he didn’t. Jobs saw Woz’s computer, recognised its brilliance, and sold his VW microbus to help fund its production. Wozniak sold his HP calculator (which cost a bit more than calculators do today!), and together they founded Apple Computer Inc on 1 April 1976, alongside Ronald Wayne.

Why Apple was named Apple

The name Apple was to cause Apple problems in later years as it was uncomfortably similar to that of the Beatles’ publisher, Apple Corps, but its genesis was innocent enough.

Speaking to Byte magazine in December 1984 , Woz credited Jobs with the idea. “He was working from time to time in the orchards up in Oregon. I thought that it might be because there were apples in the orchard or maybe just its fructarian nature. Maybe the word just happened to occur to him. In any case, we both tried to come up with better names but neither one of us could think of anything better after Apple was mentioned.”

According to the biography of Steve Jobs, the name was conceived by Jobs after he returned from apple farm. He apparently thought the name sounded “fun, spirited and not intimidating.”

The name also likely benefitted by beginning with an A, which meant it would be nearer the front of any listings.

The Apple Logo

There are other theories about the meaning behind the name Apple. The idea that it was named thus because Newton was inspired when an Apple fell out of a tree hitting him on the head, is backed up by the fact that the original Apple logo was a rather complicated illustration of Newton sitting under a tree.

Later the company settled on the bite out of an Apple design for Apple’s logo – a far simpler logo design. These logos are probably the reason for other theories about the meaning behind the name Apple, with some suggesting that the Apple logo with a chunk taken out of it is a nod at computer scientist and Enigma code-breaker, Alan Turing, who committed suicide by eating a cyanide infused apple.

However, according to Rob Janoff , the designer who created the logo, the Turing connection is simply “ a wonderful urban legend.”

Equally the bite taken out of the Apple could represent the story of Adam and Eve from the Old Testament. The idea being that the Apple represents knowledge.

Selling the Apple I

Woz built each computer by hand, and although he’d wanted to sell them for little more than the cost of their parts – at a price at that would recoup their outlay as long as they shipped 50 units – Jobs had bigger ideas.

Jobs inked a deal with the Byte Shop in Mountain View to supply it with 50 computers at $500 each. This meant that once the store had taken its cut, the Apple I sold for $666.66 – the legend is that Wozniak liked repeating numbers and was unaware of the ‘number of the beast’ conection. 

Byte Shop was going out on a limb: the Apple I didn’t exist in any great numbers, and the nascent Apple Computer Inc didn’t have the resources to fulfil the order. Neither could it get them. Atari, where Jobs worked, wanted cash for any components it sold him, a bank turned him down for a loan, and although he had an offer of $5,000 from a friend’s father, it wasn’t enough.

In the end, it was Byte Shop’s purchase order that sealed the deal. Jobs took it to Cramer Electronics and, as Walter Isaacson explains in Steve Jobs: The Exclusive Biography , he convinced Cramer’s manager to call Paul Terrell, owner of Byte Shop, to verify the order.

“Terrell was at a conference when he heard over a loudspeaker that he had an emergency call (Jobs had been persistent). The Cramer manager told him that two scruffy kids had just walked in waving an order from the Byte Shop. Was it real? Terrell confirmed that it was, and the store agreed to front Jobs the parts on thirty-day credit.”

An original Apple I (in a case)

Jobs was banking on producing enough working computers within that time to settle the bill out of the proceeds from selling completed units to Byte Shop. The risk involved was too great for Ronald Wayne, and it’s ultimately this that saw him duck out.

“Jobs and Woz didn’t have two nickels to rub together,”  Wayne told NextShark in 2013 . “If this thing blew up, how was that… going to be repaid? Did they have the money? No. Was I reachable? Yes.”

Family and friends were roped in to sit at a kitchen table and help solder the parts, and once they’d been tested Jobs drove them over to Byte Shop. When he unpacked them, Terrell, who had ordered finished computers, was surprised by what he found.

As Michael Moritz explains in Return to the Little Kingdom , “Some energetic intervention was required before the boards could be made to do anything. Terrell couldn’t even test the board without buying two transformers… Since the Apple I didn’t have a keyboard or a television, no data could be funnelled in or out of the computer. Once a keyboard had been hooked to the machine it still couldn’t be programmed without somebody laboriously typing in the code for BASIC since Wozniak and Jobs hadn’t provided the language on a cassette tape or in a ROM chip… finally the computer was naked. It had no case.”

An original Apple I board, from the Sydney Powerhouse Museum collection

Raspberry PI and the BBC’s Micro Bit aside, we probably wouldn’t accept such a computer today, and even Terrell was reluctant at first but, as Isaacson explains, “Jobs stared him down, and he agreed to take delivery and pay.” The gamble had paid off, and the Apple I stayed in production from April 1976 until September 1977, with a total run of around 200 units.

Their scarcity has made them collectors’ items, and Bonhams auctioned a working Apple I in October 2014 for an eye-watering $905,000. If your pockets aren’t that deep, Briel Computers’  Replica 1 Plus is a hardware clone of the Apple I, and ships at a far more affordable $199, fully built.

When you consider that only 200 were built, the Apple I was a triumph. It powered its burgeoning parent company to almost unheard-of rates of growth – so much so that the decision to build a successor can’t have caused too many sleepless nights in the Jobs and Wozniak households.

The Apple II

The success of the first Apple computer meant that Apple was able to go on to design its predecessor.

The Apple II debuted at the West Coast Computer Faire of April 1977, going head to head with big-name rivals like the Commodore PET. It was a truly groundbreaking machine, just like the Apple computer before it, with colour graphics and tape-based storage (later upgraded to 5.25in floppies). Memory ran to 64K in the top-end models and the image it sent to the NTSC display stretched to a truly impressive 280 x 192, which was then considered high resolution. Naturally there was a payoff, and pushing it to such limits meant you had to content yourself with just six colours, but dropping to a more reasonable 40 rows by 48 columns would let you enjoy as many as 16 tones at a time.

Yes, the Apple II (or apple ][ as it was styled) was a true innovation, and one that Jobs’ biographer, Walter Isaacson , credits with launching the personal computer industry.

The trouble is, the specs alone weren’t really enough to justify the $1,300 cost of the Apple II. Business users needed a reason to dip into their IT budgets and it wasn’t until some months later that the perfect excuse presented itself: the world’s first ‘killer app’.

The first app on an Apple computer: Visicalc

Dan Bricklin

Dan Bricklin was a student at Harvard Business School when he visualised  “a heads-up display, like in a fighter plane, where I could see the virtual image [of a table of numbers] hanging in the air in front of me. I could just move my mouse/keyboard calculator around on the table, punch in a few numbers, circle them to get a sum, do some calculations…”

Of course, we’d recognise that as a spreadsheet today, but back in the late 1970s, such things existed only on paper. Converting them for digital use would be no small feat, but Bricklin was unperturbed. He borrowed an Apple II from his eventual publisher and set to work, knocking out an alpha edition over the course of a weekend.

Many of the concepts he used are still familiar today – in particular, letters above each column and numbers by the rows to use as references when building formulae. (Wondering how it compares to Numbers today? Here’s our Numbers review .)

The technological limitations inherent in the hardware meant that it didn’t quite work as Bricklin had first imagined. The Apple II didn’t have an incorporated display and although the mouse had been invented it wasn’t bundled with the machine. So, the display became the regular screen, and the mouse was swapped out for the Apple II’s game paddle, which Bricklin described as being “a dial you could turn to move game objects back and forth… you could move the cursor left or right, and then push the ‘fire’ button, and then turning the paddle would move the cursor up and down.”

It was far from perfect and working this way was sluggish, so Bricklin reverted to using the left and right arrow keys, with the space bar in place of the fire button for switching between horizontal and vertical movement.

VisiCalc was unveiled in 1979 and described as “a magic sheet of paper that can perform calculations and recalculations”. We owe it a debt of gratitude for the part it played in driving sales of the Apple II and anchoring Apple within the industry.

Writing in Morgan Stanley’s Electronics Letter , shortly before its launch, analyst Benjamin M Rosen expounded his belief that VisiCalc was “so powerful, convenient, universal, simple to use and reasonably priced that it could well become one of the largest-selling personal computer programs ever… [it] could some day become the software tail that wags (and sells) the personal computer dog.”

How right he was, as Tim Barry revealed in a later InfoWorld piece in which he described an experience that would have been familiar to many:

“When I first used VisiCalc on an Apple II, I wanted to get a version that could take advantage of the larger system capabilities of my CP/M computer. Alas it was not to be… We ended up buying an Apple II just to run VisiCalc (a fairly common reason for many Apple sales, I’m told).”

Apple itself credited the app with being behind a fifth of all series IIs it sold.

Apple II success: colour graphics

So a piece of software worth a little more than $100 was selling a piece of hardware worth ten times as much. That was uncharted territory, but even with the right software the Apple II wouldn’t have been a success if it hadn’t adhered to the company’s already established high standards.

The February 1984 edition of PC Mag , looking back at the Apple II in the context of what it had taught IBM, put some of its success down to the fact that “its packaging did not make it look like a ham radio operator’s hobby. A low heat-generating switching power supply allowed the computer to be placed in a lightweight plastic case. Its sophisticated packaging differentiated it from … computers that had visible boards and wires connecting various components to the motherboard.”

More radically, though, the Apple II  “was the first of its type to provide usable colo[u]r graphics… contained expansion slots for which other hardware manufacturers could design devices that could be installed into the computer to perform functions that Apple has never even considered.”

In short, Apple had designed a computer that embodied what we came to expect of desktop machines through the 1980s, 1990s and the first few years of this century – before Apple turned things on its head again and moved increasingly towards sealed boxes without the option for internal expansion.

Almost six million series IIs were produced over 16 years, giving Apple its second big hit. Really, though, the company was still getting started, and its brightest days were still ahead.

For VisiCalc, the future wasn’t so bright, largely because its developers weren’t quick enough to address the exploding PC market. Rival Lotus stepped in and its 1-2-3 quickly became the business standard. It bought Software Arts, VisiCalc’s developer, in 1985 and remained top dog until Microsoft did to it what Lotus had done to VisiCalc – it usurped it with a rival that established a new digital order.

That rival was Excel which, like VisiCalc, appeared on an Apple machine long before it was ported to the PC.

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Apple, Xerox and the one-button mouse

Apple has never been slow to innovate – except, perhaps, where product names are concerned. We’re approaching the eighties in our trip through the company’s history and we’re at the point where it’s followed up the Apple I and II with the III. Predictable, eh?

The two Steves founded the company with a trend-bucking debut and had the gumption to target the industry’s biggest names with its two follow ups. That must have left industry watchers wondering where it might go next.

The answer, it turned out, was Palo Alto.

Xerox had established a research centre there – Xerox PARC, now simply called ‘parc’ – where it was free to explore new technologies a long way from the corporate base on the opposite side of the country. Its work helped drive forward the tech that we still use every day, such as optical media, Ethernet and laser printers (we aren’t just talking about photocopiers!) Of most interest to Mac users, though, is its revolutionary work on interface design.

The Apple I,  II and III computers were text-based machines, much like the earliest IBM PCs. But Jobs, who was working on the Lisa at the time, wanted something more intuitive. He convinced Xerox to grant three days’ access to PARC for him and a number of Apple employees. In exchange Xerox won the right to buy 100,000 Apple shares at $10 each.

To say this was a bargain would be a massive understatement. Apple has split its stock four times since then – in 1987, 2000, 2005 and 2014. Companies do this when the price of a single share starts to get too high, in an effort to stimulate further trading. So, assuming Xerox held on to those shares, it would have had 200,000 by 1987, 400,000 by 2000 and 800,000 by 2005. The split in 2014 was rated at seven to one, so Xerox’s holding would leap from 800,000 to 5.6m. Selling them at today’s prices would rake in $708m (£450m). Not bad for a three-day tour.

Jobs was bowled over by the Xerox Alto, a machine used widely throughout the park, with a portrait display and graphical interface, which was way ahead of its time. It had been knocking around for a while by then, but Xerox, which built 2000 units, hadn’t been selling it to the public. It wasn’t small – about the size of an under-counter fridge – but it was still considered a ‘personal’ machine, which was driven home by the user-centric manner in which it was used. It was the first computer to major on mouse use, with a three-button gadget used to point at and click on objects on the screen.

Jobs decreed that every computer Apple produced from that point on should adopt a similar way of working. Speaking to Walter Isaacson some years later, he described the revelation as “like a veil being lifted from my eyes. I could see what the future of computing was destined to be.”

The Lisa and the Macintosh

It kicked off a race inside Apple between the teams developing the Lisa and the Macintosh.

Jeff Raskin

The official line at the time was that Lisa stood for Local Integrated System Architecture, and the fact it was Jobs’ daughter’s name was purely coincidental. It was a high-end business machine slated to sell at close to $10,000. Convert that to today’s money and it would buy you a mid-range family car. The project was managed by John Couch, formerly of IBM.

Jeff Raskin, meanwhile, was heading up development of the Macintosh, which had smaller businesses and home users firmly in its sights, and each team wanted to be the first to ship an Apple computer with a graphical interface.

Whichever team got their first, Apple – as a company – wanted them to do it at a price that wasn’t prohibitively expensive, and that meant finding some cheaper solutions to the ones arrived at by Xerox. The Alto’s mouse, for example, had three buttons and cost $300. Jobs wanted something simpler, and capped the price at $15. The result was a one-button mouse (which maybe hasn’t stood the test of time as well as Jobs might have expected, with most of us regularly requiring that ctrl-click or right-click).

Jobs was so excited by the potential of the mouse and graphical interface that he got himself more and more involved in the Lisa’s development, to the extent that he started to bypass the management structure already in place. The caused upsets, and in 1982 matters came to a head.

The Apple Lisa had an advanced gui

Michael Scott was Apple’s president and CEO at the time, having been brought to the post by Mark Markkula (Apple employee number three, and investor to the tune of $250,000). The two men worked out a new corporate structure, which sidelined Jobs with immediate effect, and handed control of the Lisa project back to John Couch. Jobs, also stripped of responsibility for research and development within the company, was little more than a figurehead. That left him on the lookout for a new project.

Perhaps inevitably, he turned to the Macintosh.

Named in honour of Raskin’s favourite edible apple (the McIntosh ), the Macintosh had been in the works since 1979, so when Jobs joined the team it was already well advanced. That didn’t stop him making extensive changes though, including the commission of a new external design and integration the graphical operating system. Raskin left the Macintosh team when he and Jobs fell out, and Jobs assumed control for the remainder of its development.

However, this enforced switching of sides meant that Jobs – technically – ended up on the losing team. The Lisa launched in 1983, with its graphical user interface in place; the Macintosh debuted the following year. The race had been won by the Lisa.

It was a pyrrhic victory, though. The Macintosh, which we’ll be covering in more detail below, was a success, and Apple’s current computer line-up – iOS devices aside – descends directly from that first consumer machine.

You can’t say the same of the Lisa. It cost four times the price of the Macintosh, and although it had a higher resolution display and could address more memory, it wasn’t nearly as successful. Apple released seven applications for it, covering all of the usual business bases, but third party support was poor.

Nonetheless, Apple didn’t give up. The original Lisa was followed by the Lisa 2, which cost around half the price of its predecessor and used the same 3.5in disks as the Macintosh. Then, in 1985, it rebranded the hard drive-equipped Lisa 2 as the Macintosh XL and stimulated sales with a price cut.

At this point, though, the numbers didn’t add up, and the Lisa had to go. The Macintosh went on to define the company.

By 1984, Apple had proved twice over that it was a force to be reckoned with. It had taken on IBM, the biggest name in business computing, and acquitted itself admirably. The Apple I and II were resounding successes, but while the Apple III and Lisa had been remarkable machines, they hadn’t captured the public imagination to the same degree as their predecessors. Apple needed another hit, both to guarantee its future and to target the lower end of the market, which to date it had largely ignored.

That hit, we all now know, was the Macintosh: the machine that largely guaranteed the company’s future.

If you’d like a visual guide to Apple history take a look at our Apple timeline in pictures and video

All change: Jef Raskin versus Steve Jobs

The Macintosh

We’ll always remember Steve Jobs as the man who launched the Macintosh, but he only arrived on the project in 1981 – two years after Jef Raskin had started work on the low-cost computer for home and business use. Jobs quickly stamped his mark on it, and Raskin left in 1982 – before the product shipped. We must give Raskin credit for original idea and its name (his favourite kind of apple was the McIntosh, but this was tweaked to avoid infringing copyright), but otherwise the machine that eventually launched was a fair way away from the one he’d originally envisaged.

Raskin’s early prototypes had text-based displays and used function keys in place of the mouse for executing common tasks. Raskin later endorsed the mouse, but with more than the single button that shipped with the Macintosh. It was Jobs and Bud Tribble, the latter of whom is still at Apple (he is Vice President of Software Technology), that really pushed the team to implement the graphical user interface (GUI) for which it became famous.

They saw the potential of the GUI’s desktop metaphor after seeing one in use at Xerox PARC, and they’d already laid much of the groundwork for Apple’s own take on the system as part of the Lisa project. Tribble tasked the Macintosh team with doing the same for their own machine which, in hindsight, may have been the most important directive ever issued by anyone inside Apple.

If the Macintosh team had continued down the text-and-keyboard path, it’s unlikely their product would have sold as well as it did – and Apple, as we know it, might not exist today at all.

The Macintosh project: Simpler and smarter

Through several iterations, the prototype Macintosh became both more able and less complex to build. It had fewer chips, and the Apple engineers were able to push them further and faster. By the time it was ready to launch, the Macintosh incorporated the kind of graphics hardware that would have cost tens of thousands of pounds to buy in any rival machine, yet Apple was aiming to sell it at a price that would put it in reach of the better-heeled home user.

The final spec was radical for its day, with a 6MHz Motorola 68000 processor ramped up to 7.8MHz, 128KB of Ram, and a 9in black and white screen with a fixed 512 x 342 pixels. To put that into perspective, it’s not even enough to display an app icon from a retina-class iOS device at its native resolution, but it could still accommodate System Software 1.0 – Apple’s fully graphical operating system.

The Macintosh project: good looks

But it wasn’t just what went on inside the box that made it such an attractive device. The Macintosh looked just good on the outside. Sure, it was shrouded in beige plastic – but the all in one body incorporated the floppy drive and a handy carrying handle, so you could easily take it with you, wherever you needed to work. It looked friendly, too, and that made it more approachable.

There were still some limitations, though. The original Macintosh didn’t have a hard drive, so you had to boot from a floppy and could only temporarily eject the system disk when you needed to access applications and data. Apple partially fixed this shortcoming by offering an external add-on drive, which allowed users to keep the System disk in situ and delegate responsibility for apps and data to a second disk. It was an expensive add-on, though, and the external Hard Disk 20, which cost $1495 and gave just 20MB of storage, was still a year away from going on sale.

Despite it limitations, though, many of the features established on that first Macintosh are still in use today. We’ve dropped the ‘System’ monicker in favour of ‘OS’ (which stands for Operating System), but we still use the Finder name, which debuted there, and both Command and Option appeared as modifier buttons on its keyboard (the latter has since been usurped by alt, at least in the UK, but the name lives on for many users).

(You’d be surprised by how many people are confused by the fact that Apple still referrs to the Option key on the Mac keyboard even though on UK keyboards that key is known as Alt, find out more here : What is Option on a Mac?)

The Macintosh project: pixels

The hardware was only half of the story. Coder Bill Atkinson had implemented a radical system by which the Macintosh System software allowed for overlapping windows in a more efficient manner than the computers at PARC had done, and Susan Kare spent months developing a visual language in the form of on-screen icons that have since become classics.

Susan Kare and the Command logo she designed

It’s Kare that we have to thank for the on-screen wrist watch (to indicate a background process hogging resources) and the smiling Mac – among others – as well as the seemingly illogical square and circles combination she chose for the command key. (This is a common symbol in Sweden, where it’s used to denote a National Heritage site – not a campsite as has been reported.) Her paint bucket and lasso graphics are used widely in other applications, and the fonts she designed for use on the original Macintosh, which included Chiacgo, Geneva and Monaco, are still in use today – albeit in finer forms.

The Macintosh went on sale in January 1984, priced at $2,495. It wasn’t cheap, but it was good value for what you got, and that was reflected in its sales. By the beginning of May that same year, Apple had hit the landmark figure of 70,000 shipped units, which was likely helped in no small part by a remarkable piece of advertising directed by Ridley Scott.

Apple’s ‘1984’ advert

Nobody would ever deny that the original Macintosh was a work of genius. It was small, relatively inexpensive (for its day) and friendly. It brought the GUI – graphical user interface – to a mass audience and gave us all the tools we could ever need for producing graphics-rich work that would have costs many times as much on any other platform.

Yet, right from the start, it was in danger of disappointing us.

You see, Apple had built it up to be something quite astounding. It was going to change the computing world, we were told, and as launch day approached, the hype continued to grow. It was a gamble – a big one – that any other company would likely have shied away from.

But then no other company employed Steve Jobs.

Jobs understood what made the Macintosh special, and he knew that, aside from the keynote address at which he would reveal it, the diminutive machine needed a far from diminutive bit of publicity.

He put in a call to ChiatDay, Apple’s retained ad agency, and tasked them with filling sixty seconds during the third quarter break of Super Bowl XVIII.

Super Bowl ads are always special, but this was in a league of its own. Directed by Blade Runner’s Ridley Scott and filmed in Shepperton Studios in the UK, its production budget stood somewhere between $350,000 and $900,000, depending on who is telling the story.

The premise was simple enough, but the message was a gamble, pitting Apple directly against its biggest competitor, IBM.

International Business Machines dominated the workplace of the early 1980s, and the saying that ‘nobody ever got fired for buying IBM’ was a powerful monicker working in its favour. People trusted the brand, staking their careers on the simple choice of IBM or one of the others. As a result, the others often missed out, and if Apple wasn’t going to languish among them, it had to change that perception.

So the ad portrayed Apple as humanity’s only hope for the future. It dressed Anya Major, an athlete who later appeared in Elton John’s Nikita video, in a white singlet and red shorts, with a picture of the Mac on her vest. She was bright, fresh and youthful, and a stark contrast to the cold, blue, shaven-headed drones all about her. They plodded while she ran. They were brainwashed by Big Brother, who lectured them through an enormous screen, but she hurled a hammer through the screen to free them from their penury.

Even without the tagline, the inference would have been clear, but Jobs, Apple CEO John Sculley and ChiatDay turned the knife the with the memorable slogan, ‘On January 24th, Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh. And you’ll see why 1984 won’t be like Nineteen Eighty-Four.’

It was a gutsy move, never explicitly naming IBM, and never showing the product it was promoting, but today it’s considered a masterpiece, and has topped Advertising Age ‘s list of the 50 greatest commercials ever made.

Jobs and Sculley loved it, but when Jobs played it to the board, it got a frosty reception. The board disliked it and Sculley changed his mind, suggesting that they find another agency, but not before asking ChiatDay to sell off the two ad slots they’d already booked it into.

One of these was a minor booking, slated to run on just ten local stations in Idaho, purely so the ad would qualify for the 1983 advertising awards. ChiatDay offloaded this as instructed, but hung on to the Super Bowl break and claimed that it was unsellable.

As Jobs’ biographer, Walter Isaacson, explains, “Sculley, perhaps to avoid a showdown with either the board or Jobs, decided to let Bill Campbell, the head of marketing, figure out what to do. Campbell, a former football coach, decided to throw the long bomb. ‘I think we ought to go for it,’ he told his team.”

Thank goodness they did.

There are two ways to judge an ad. One is how well it markets your brand, and the other is how much money is makes you. The 1984 promotion was a success on both fronts. Ninety-six million people watched its debut during the Super Bowl, and countless others caught a replay as television stations right across the country re-ran it later that evening, and over the following days.

Fifty local stations included a story on it in their new bulletins, which massively diluted the $800,000 cost of the original slot. Apple couldn’t have booked itself a cheaper ad break if it had tried.

The revenue speaks for itself. The ad, combined with Jobs’ now legendary keynote, secured the company’s future, and kicked off a line of computers that’s still with us today – albeit in a very different configuration.

It’s perhaps no surprise that following the success of the 1984 advert, Apple booked another Super Bowl slot the following year for a strikingly similar production, this time filmed by Ridley Scott’s brother, Tony.

‘Lemmings’ once again depicted a stream of drones plodding across the screen. The colours were muted, the soundtrack was downbeat, and the drones were blindfolded, so it was only by keeping a hand on the drone ahead of them that they could tell where they were headed. Only when the penultimate drone dropped off the cliff over which they were marching did the last in line realise that a change of course was called for – and a switch to Macintosh Office.

It wasn’t a great success. As sterndesign’s Apple Matters explains, the advert “left viewers with the feeling that they were inferior for not using the Mac. Turns out that insulting the very people you are trying to sell merchandise to is not the best idea.”

Wired put it succinctly: “Apple fell flat on its face… People found it offensive, and when it was shown on the big screen at Stanford Stadium during the Super Bowl, there was dead silence – something very different from the cheers that greeted ‘1984’ a year earlier.”

The Macintosh and the DTP revolution

The Macintosh got off to a good start, thanks to Jobs’ spectacular unveiling, its innovative design, and the iconic ‘1984’ advert, but it still needed a killer application, like VisiCalc had been on the Apple ][, if it was really going to thrive. It found it in the shape of PageMaker, backed up by the revolutionary Apple LaserWriter printer.

The $6,995 LaserWriter, introduced in March 1985 – just over a year after the Macintosh – was the first mass-market laser printer. It had a fixed 1.5MB internal memory for spooling pages and a Motorola 68000 processor under the hood – the same as the brain of both the Lisa and the Macintosh – running at 12MHz to put out eight 300dpi pages a minute.

It wasn’t the first laser printer – just as the Macintosh wasn’t the first desktop machine and the iPod wasn’t the first digital music player – but, in true Apple style, it was different , and that’s what mattered. Functionally, it was very similar to the first HP Laserjet, which used the same Canon CX engine as the LaserWriter and had shipped a year earlier at half the price. However, while HP had chosen to use its own in-house control language, Apple opted for Adobe’s PostScript, which remains a cornerstone of desktop publishing to this day.

It was a neat fit for Adobe, which had been founded by John Warnock when he left Xerox with the intention of building a laser printer driven by the PostScript language. Jobs convinced him to work with Apple on building the LaserWriter, and sealed the deal shortly before the Macintosh launched.

As a key part of the Apple Office concept, introduced through 1985’s less popular Lemmings Super Bowl ad, the LaserWriter was network-ready out of the box, courtesy of AppleTalk, so system admins could string together a whole series of Macs in a chain and share the printer between them, thus reducing the average per-seat cost of the device. This made it immediately more competitive when stood beside its rivals and, as InfoWorld reported in its issue of February 11, 1985, “Apple claims a maximum of 31 users [can be attached] to each LaserWriter but its own departments at its Cupertino, California headquarters hook up 40 users per printer.”

So, everything was in place on the hardware side. What was missing – so far – was the software.

Paul Brainerd, who is credited with inventing the term ‘Desktop Publishing’, heard of Apple’s intention to build a laser printer and realised that the Mac’s graphical interface and the printer’s high quality output were missing the one crucial part that would help both of them fly: the intermediary application. Thus, he founded Aldus and began work on PageMaker.

The process took 16 months to complete, and when it shipped in July 1985, for $495, PageMaker proved to be the piece that completed the DTP jigsaw. The publishing industry was about to undergo a revolution, the like of which it wouldn’t see again until we all started reading online.

Although it was later available on Windows and VAX terminals, PageMaker started out on the Mac, and firmly established the platform as the first choice for digital creative work – which is perhaps why it’s favoured by so many designers today. It’s hard to believe, in an age where we’re used to 27in or larger displays, that the Macintosh’s 9in screen, with a resolution smaller than the pixel count of an iOS app icon, was ever considered a viable environment for laying out graphically-rich documents, but it was.

By March 1987, less than two years from launch, PageMaker’s annual sales had reached $18.4m – an increase of 100% over the previous year, according to Funding Universe .

PageMaker versus QuarkXPress

But good things don’t last forever, and eventually PageMaker lost a lot of its sales to QuarkXPress, which launched in 1987, undercut its high-end rivals and by the late 1990s had captured the professional market. In 1999 Forbes reported that at one point 87% of the 18,000 magazines published in the US were being laid out using XPress (including Forbes itself).

Adobe and Aldus merged in 1994, retained the Adobe brand and transitioned products away from the Aldus moniker. It was a very logical pairing when you consider that PageMaker was conceived to take advantage of the graphics capabilities of an Apple laser printer, which in turn were served up by an Adobe-coded control language.

Quark was going from strength to strength at the time of the merger, and four years later – in summer 1998 – Quark Chief Executive Fred Ebrahimi, in Forbes’ words, ‘announced his intention to buy Adobe Systems of San Jose… a public company with three times Quark’s revenues’.

Quark versus InDesign

Of course, the acquisition didn’t go ahead, and what followed is now a familiar story to anyone in publishing. Adobe was already working on InDesign under the codename K2, using code that had come across with the Aldus merger. InDesign shipped in 1999 and after a few years of InDesign and PageMaker running side by side, the latter was retired.

PageMaker’s last major release was version 7, which shipped in 2001 and ran on both Windows and OS 9 or OS X, although only in Classic mode on the latter. It’s no doubt still in use on some computers and lives on in the shape of the archived pages on Adobe’s site here .

InDesign was out in the wild by then and Adobe was keen to push users down a more professional path. We think that’s a shame as there’s still space in the market for a tool like PageMaker to act as an entry ramp to InDesign further down the line.

Business users may now turn to Pages, with its accomplished layout tools and help from dynamic guides, but a fully-fledged consumer and small business-friendly tool like PageMaker would still find a home in many an open-plan workspace.

Jobs vs Sculley

It’s all been good news so far in our story of Apple’s founding and early development. We’re still in the mid-eighties. The company is still young, but going from strength to strength, and it’s offering up some serious competition for its larger, longer-established rivals. Few would have guessed that trouble was just around the corner.

To explain what happened next, we need to step back a few months and look at the company structure.

Steve Jobs may have been Apple’s most public face, and the co-founder of the company, but he wasn’t its CEO in the mid-1980s. He hadn’t yet turned 30, and many on the board considered him too inexperienced for the role, so they first hired Michael Scott, and later Mark Markkula, who had retired at 32 on the back of stock options he’d acquired at Fairchild Semiconductor and Intel. Markkula was one of Apple’s initial investors, but he didn’t want to run the company long term.

When he announced his desire to head back to retirement, the company set out to find a replacement. It settled on John Sculley, whom Jobs famously lured to Apple from Pepsi by asking ‘Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life? Or do you want to come with me and change the world?’

Walter Isaacson, in his biography of Steve Jobs, quotes one of Sculley’s reminiscences: ‘I was taken by this young, impetuous genius and thought it would be fun to get to know him a little better.’

That’s exactly what he did, and during the honeymoon period everything seemed to be going swimmingly. As Michael Moritz writes in Return to the Little Kingdom, ‘At Apple, Sculley was greeted like an archangel and, for a time, could do no wrong. He and Jobs were quoted as saying that they could finish each others’ sentences.’

Their management styles were wildly different, though, and it’s perhaps inevitable that this led to some conflicts between the two men. Sculley didn’t like the way that Jobs treated other staff members, and the two came to blows over more practical matters, including the pricing of the Macintosh.

From the moment of its inception, the Macintosh was always supposed to be a computer for the rest of us, keenly priced so that it would sell in large numbers. The aim was to put out a $1000 machine, but over the years of gestation – as the project became more ambitious – this almost doubled.

Shortly before its launch it was slated to go on sale at $1,995, but Sculley could see that even this wasn’t enough and he decreed that it would have to be hiked by another $500. Jobs disagreed, but Sculley prevailed and the Macintosh 128K hit the shelves at $2,495.

That was just the start of the friction between the two men, which wasn’t helped by a downturn in the company’s fortunes. Sales of the Macintosh started to tail off, the Lisa was discontinued and Jobs didn’t hide the fact that his initial respect for Sculley had cooled. The board urged Sculley to reign him in.

That’s exactly what he did, but not until March 1985 – just shy of two years after arriving at the company. Sculley visited Jobs in his office and told him that he was taking away his responsibility for running the Macintosh team.

Talking to the BBC in 2012 , Sculley explained what went on inside the company at the time: “When the Macintosh Office [Apple’s office-wide computing environment including networked Macintosh computers, file server, and a laser printer] was introduced in 1985 and failed Steve went into a very deep funk. He was depressed, and he and I had a major disagreement where he wanted to cut the price of the Macintosh and I wanted to focus on the Apple II because we were a public company. We had to have the profits of the Apple II and we couldn’t afford to cut the price of the Macintosh because we needed the profits from the Apple II to show our earnings – not just to cover the Mac’s problems. That’s what led to the disagreement and the showdown between me and Steve and eventually the board investigated it and agreed that my position was the one they wanted to support.”

But Jobs wasn’t ready to go without a fight.

Sculley had to leave the country on business that May, and Jobs saw this as the perfect opportunity to wrest back control of the company. He confided in the senior members of his own team, which at the time included Jean-Louis Gassée, who was being lined up to take over from Jobs on the Macintosh team. Gassée told Sculley what was happening, and Sculley cancelled his trip.

The following morning, Sculley confronted Jobs in front of the whole board, asking if the rumours were true. Jobs said they were, and Sculley once again asked the board to choose between the two of them – him or Jobs. Again, they sided with Sculley, and Jobs’ fate was sealed.

Jobs leaves Apple

Scully reorganised the company, installed Gassée at the head of the computer division and made Jobs Apple’s chairman. That might sound like a plum job – indeed, a promotion – but in reality it was a largely ceremonial role that took the co-founder away from the day-to-day running of the company.

This wasn’t Jobs’ style. He felt the need to move on and do something else and, a few months later, that’s what he did. He resigned from Apple and founded NeXT, a company that would design and build high end workstations for use in academia, taking several key Apple staff with him.

If this had happened in the 2000s, when Apple was riding high on the back of the iPod and iPhone and was prepping the world for the launch of the iPad, it could have had catastrophic consequences. In the 1980s, though, the outcome was somewhat different.

DeWitt Robbeloth, editor of II Computing magazine, wrote in the October 1985 issue , “Most industry savants agree the move was good for Apple, or even crucial. Why? There were serious differences between the two about what Apple products should be like, how they should be marketed, and how the company should be run.”

So, Sculley was in control and could run Apple as he saw fit. Now we’ll see exactly where that takes the company over the following months. Read next: 12 Apple execs you need to know

Jean-Louis Gassée takes over from Steve Jobs

The most recent stop of our tour through the history of Apple saw Jobs leave the company after falling out with the board. It wasn’t entirely unexpected – and the news wasn’t greeted with the same kind of dread as the announcement of his cancer many years later. Indeed, Wall Street responded positively to Jobs’ departure, and the price of Apple stock went up.

Jean-Louis Gassée, who had been Apple’s Director of European Operations since 1981, was appointed by CEO John Sculley to take over from Jobs and head up Macintosh development. Fewer positions could have been more prestigious in a company that owed its very existence to that single iconic product line – particularly at a time when the company’s focus and ethos was about to undergo a significant change.

Apple post-Jobs (the first time)

In the months leading up to his departure, Jobs had been focused on consumer-friendly price points, initially wanting to sell the Macintosh for $1,000 or less into as many homes and businesses as possible. In the event, that never came to fruition, as the final spec simply couldn’t be built, marketed and shipped at that price while still turning a profit.

However, with Jobs now busy elsewhere, the board was free to re-think what Apple was about and the kind of machines it would produce. It was already appealing to creative business users thanks to the prevalence of Macs in design and layout offices so, logically enough, it made the decision to target the high-end market with more powerful, and thus more expensive Macs. Although the company would sell fewer units, each one should – in theory – deliver similar or higher profits.

The policy had its own nickname, ’55 or die’, which was a nod to Gassée’s dictat that the Macintosh II should deliver at least 55% profit per machine, perhaps explains why it was so expensive. A basic system with a 20MB hard drive (insufficient to hold an average Photoshop file today) started at $5500, but bumping up the spec, with a colour display, more memory and larger hard drive, could easily see the price double.

When stood against their PC counterparts, then, Apple’s new computers looked pretty expensive, but they had several benefits that kept their users loyal – in particular, the user interface. It’s important to remember that although Windows may be ubiquitous today, that wasn’t always the case.

When the Macintosh II first appeared in 1987, Windows was less than two years old, still at version 1.04, and still an add-on to DOS rather than a full-blown, stand-alone operating system.

Once the designers of the mid-1980s had got used to working visually, they didn’t want to go back to using a text-based computer, so until Windows hit the big time, which happened with Windows 3 at the end of the 1980s, Apple had the graphical market pretty much to itself.

Apple gets colourful: the Machintosh II ships with a colour display

This would be enough to encourage complacency in some companies, but not Apple, which continued to innovate in a way that would at least partially justify the high prices. The Machintosh II, for instance, wasn’t simply a spec-boost of the original Macintosh. It looked completely different, being housed in a horizontal case that the end user (or an engineer) could open themselves to upgrade the memory, drives and so on. This was a major break from Apple’s established way of doing things, where all previous computers, with the exception of the build-it-yourself Apple I, had been shipped in closed boxes, largely because Jobs saw this as a way of making them more friendly and less threatening.

It was also the first Macintosh to ship with a colour display, and although it’s difficult to imagine what a difference that would make today, we only need to think back to early, mono iPods and compare them to the iPod touch to understand the impact it must have had.

Aside from heading up the development of conventional computers, Gassée also oversaw a lot of Apple’s behind-the-scenes development, where designers were dreaming up new products that would one day drive the company to new heights. Two of the fruits of those labours, the Newton MessagePad and the eMate, were particularly prescient, as they pointed towards Apple’s later dominance of lightweight computing through the iPad and iPhone, but they didn’t see the light of day before Gassée’s own departure from Apple.

His tenure ran from 1981 until the end of the decade, which was the point the focus on highly-priced premium products started to falter. IBM clones were getting cheaper, and with the uptake of Windows and inexpensive desktop publishing applications, even some of Apple’s most loyal customers were tempted to jump ship.

What Gassée did after Apple

The fourth quarter of 1989 marked the first time Apple had seen a drop in sales. The stock market got edgy, Apple’s shares lost a fifth of its value, and despite having once been tipped to one day head up the company, Gassée left the following year. Like Jobs, he went on to found another radical computer company – in this case, Be Incorporated, which developed the BeOS operating system.

As we’ll see in a later episode, his work with BeOS would come close to bringing Gassée back to the company. For now, though, Apple was focused on trying to win back some of the less wealthy customers by introducing a range of lower-priced computers, including the Macintosh Classic (8MHz processor, integrated mono display, $999), Macintosh LC (16MHz processor, pizza box case, colour capable; the initials stood for LC, but it cost $999 without a display), and Macintosh IIsi (20MHz processor, large desktop case, $2999 without a display).

Today, amongst other things, Gassée writes a blog, here . 

Unsurprisingly, after so many years of waiting, Apple customers lapped up these new, affordable machines, and the company enjoyed a revival. Indeed, by returning to basics, almost literally, Apple was back on the up, and about to wow the world with two of its most radical products ever, as we’ll discover below.

Apple’s decline and IBM and Microsoft’s rise

So Steve Jobs has gone, and so has Jean-Louis Gassée, his successor as head of product development. All in all, the future isn’t looking so bright for Apple at this point in its story. Despite initially being quite successful in chasing high profits with wide margins, its market is starting to shrink and, with it, so did its retained income. For the first time in the company’s history, its year-end results showed its cash balances to be rising more slowly than they had the year before.

That wasn’t its only problem, though. IBM had been out-earning Apple since the mid-1980s, when it established itself as the dominant force in office computing. There was little indicating that this would change any time soon and, to make matters worse, Apple’s key differentiator was about to be dealt a close-to-lethal blow: Microsoft was gearing up for Windows 3 – a direct competitor to the all-graphical OS, System.

Windows had been a slow burner until this point. Versions 1 and 2 came and went without bothering Apple to much, but Windows 3 was a different story entirely. The interface was more accomplished, which for the first time supported 256 colours, and it was more stable thanks to a new protected mode. The graphical design language had been implemented from end to end, with icons in place of program names in Windows Explorer, its equivalent of the Mac’s Finder.

It could also run MS DOS applications in a Windows window, so it felt more like the unified graphical OS experience we know today – and which was already a hallmark of Apple’s GUI underpinnings. In short, more people than ever before could happily spend their whole day in a Windows environment, which would have left them asking why they would buy a Mac when there were so many PCs to choose from.

Apple’s Quadra and Performa

Apple needed to up its game, which it did by developing a whole new line of computers that we now might think of as classics of their time: chiefly the Quadra and Performa, but also the less well-known Centris (which, as its name suggested, sat at the ‘centre’ of the line-up).

The Performa line was, in effect, a case of Apple rebranding its existing stock, but bundling them with consumer-friendly software like ClarisWorks and Grolier Encyclopedia so they would appeal to the home user. The idea was to make them a viable stock item for department stores and other lifestyle outlets, as to date Apple’s computers had only been available through authorised dealers and mail order (there was no such thing as the Apple Store back then).

It was a sound theory, and one that would have exposed the Apple brand to a whole new audience, but it didn’t quite work as might have been expected. In part that was because the enormous range of slightly different models was confusing – so confusing that Apple went to the expense of producing a 30-minute infomercial showing a regular family choosing and buying a Performa. You can still find it online, in six linked parts .

It’s unlike the kind of short and snappy advertising we’re used to these days, devoid of catchphrases, and it spends a lot of time explaining not only why a Performa is the right choice, but also why Windows is difficult to use. It’s hypnotic – and it’s hard to argue with its message, too, if you can devote enough time to it.

Macintosh Performa 6300

You can see a full list of the various Performa machines, and the original Macintosh models from which each one was derived on Wikipedia , and its clear from the minor differentiations between them that some of the simplicity on which Apple was founded – and to which it has since returned – had by now been lost.

Having so many computers to market and ship also meant the company had to try and predict which machines would sell best and build enough of each one to satisfy demand. That didn’t always happen, and with Windows-based computers approaching ubiquity, Apple realised it was going to have to team up with one of its long time rivals, IBM, if it was going to take a lead.

The AIM Alliance: Apple teams up with IBM and Motorola

Together, Apple, IBM and Motorola founded the AIM Alliance in October 1991 (the name is their initials), to build a brand new hardware and software combo called PReP – the PowerPC Reference Platform. This ambitious project would go head to head against the existing Windows / Intel hegemony by running a next-generation operating system (from Apple) on top of brand new RISC-based processors (from IBM and Motorola).

Apple’s nascent operating system was codenamed Pink, and not without good reason. Much of the code was rolled into Copland, the aborted OS that we’ve encountered once before in our tour of the archives, and it came about following an extraordinary meeting in which all of the company’s future projects were written down on blue and pink card. Those that made it onto blue paper were comparatively easy and could be implemented in the short term.

Those written on pink would require more effort, and a longer timeframe. The next generation OS, was naturally noted on one of the latter.

AIM Alliance’s plans never came to fruition on the software side, and there were problems on the hardware front, too. When you bring together three notable players like Apple, IBM and Motorola, it’s to be expected that they’d each have their own ideas about the best way to do things so, perhaps it was inevitable that their differing views on the reference platform’s make-up didn’t always align.

If it had worked out, PReP might indeed have changed the face of computing. It didn’t, of course, but it did result in a change of direction for Apple. PReP’s legacy was the PowerPC processor, which went on to form the bedrock of its computer line-up for years to come.

The PowerPC years

If you bought a new Apple computer any time between 1994 and 2006, you’ll have taken home a PowerPC-based device, the genesis of which we explored above. The fruit of a productive collaboration between Apple, IBM (yes IBM) and Motorola – the AIM Alliance – it was, for a while, one of the most advanced platforms on the planet. Indeed, it proved versatile enough to sit at the heart of everything from the lowly iBook, right up to the mightiest enterprise-focused Xserve.

PowerPC 601 Processor Prototype

The name is an acronym for Performance Optimization With Enhanced RISC-Performance Computing, and its core technology was based on IBM’s POWER instruction set, so even though it was an innovation of the early-1990s it wasn’t an entirely alien platform for developers coding for the Mac.

This helped make PowerPC a viable alternative to the x86-based processors being shipped by Intel and AMD, which were then dominating the computing market. Even Microsoft shipped a version of Windows NT for PowerPC before scaling back to focus solely on x86 and, later, Freescale.

The first PowerPC-based Macintosh (pre-Mac) was 1994’s Power Macintosh 6100 which, as its name suggests, was based on the 601 processor, running at 60MHz and developed using code that was already familiar to engineers from both Motorola and Apple. As the Quadra’s successor, it was the first machine able to run Mac OS 9, which would likely have been a big enough sales point on its own.

However, perhaps hedging its bets (platform transitions are nerve-wracking projects, after all) it also released a DOS-compatible version, which instead used an Intel 486 processor and allowed Windows and Mac OS to be run simultaneously, effectively doing what VMware Fusion and Parallels Desktop do today, and VirtualPC did in the PowerPC line’s latter years.

Power Macintosh 6100

The 6100 was released in concert with the beefier Power Macintosh 7100, which had been developed under the internal codename ‘Carl Sagan’. It was a convoluted choice, based on the belief that the computer was so brilliant it would make the company ‘Billions and Billions’, which just happened to be the name of a book written by astronomer Carl Sagan, who used to stress the letter ‘B’ when saying the word ‘billions’ so people wouldn’t confuse it with millions.

Although it was never used to market the 7100, Sagan claimed that customers might have considered the codename, which was revealed in a magazine, to imply that he endorsed the product. He wrote to the magazine, asking them to make it clear that he did not, at which point Apple’s development team re-named the computer BHA, for Butt-Head Astronomer. Sagan sued for libel and lost, with the court ruling that “one does not seriously attack the expertise of a scientist using the undefined phrase ‘butt-head'” .

Eventually the two parties settled out of court, at which point the 7100 was again renamed, this time to LAW, or Lawyers Are Wimps.

The PowerPC line enjoyed a good innings, but by the middle of this century’s first decade (we’re jumping ahead a bit here to tie-up the PowerPC story), fractures were starting to appear in the alliance and the platform wasn’t evolving quickly enough to keep consumers happy. Apple’s high-end notebook, the PowerBook, was starting to look a little underpowered, and in an effort to push the processor in the Power Mac G5 beyond its native rating, it produced three special editions that employed a sophisticated water cooling system that allowed it to overclock the processor without it overheating.

PowerPC 970FX processor, as used in one of the last Power Mac G5s

Those in the know began talking about parallel teams working inside Apple HQ on a version of OS X that would run on Intel processors. The gossip was never confirmed, but the fact it had even been mooted meant Jobs’ 2005 announcement that the company would shift its entire line-up to Intel hardware was less of a shock than it might have been.

Jumping ship just four years after the introduction of OS X would have been too big a move for many CEOs, who might have been afraid that they’d frighten away their customers. As Macworld wrote, ‘It was a big gamble for a company that had relied on PowerPC processors since 1994, but Jobs argued that it was a move Apple had to make to keep its computers ahead of the competition. “As we look ahead… we may have great products right now, and we’ve got some great PowerPC product[s] still yet to come,” Jobs told the audience at the 2005 Worldwide Developers Conference. “[But] we can envision some amazing products we want to build for you and we don’t know how to build them with the future PowerPC road map.”‘

You might have expected developers to be up in arms: after decades of honing their code to run smoothly on PowerPC architecture, they’d have to throw it away and start from scratch, but Apple gave them a crutch, at least in the interim. Rather than cut off support for legacy code from day one, it built a runtime layer into OS X Tiger (10.4), called Rosetta, a name inspired by the Rosetta Stone, the multi-lingual engravings on which were the key to understanding hieroglyphics.

This interim layer intercepted Power G3, G4 and AltiVec instructions and converted them, on the fly, to Intel-compatible code. There would have been a slight performance hit, naturally, but it was an impressive stopgap, and one that Apple maintained until it shipped Lion. (Although Snow Leopard , the last iteration to support it and the first for which there was no PowerPC release, didn’t install it by default – you had to add it manually.)

PowerPC lives on, not only in the countless legacy Macs that are still putting in good service, but in consumer devices like the Wii U, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, as well as in faceless computing applications where it’s a popular choice for embedded processing.

Of course, during the 12 years of PowerPC’s dominance, many other things were going on behind the scenes. Apple was working on the Newton MessagePad, chipping away at a revolutionary operating system that never shipped and, as a result, bought Steve Jobs’ company NeXT and, with it, Jobs himself, ensuring Apple’s survival.

Apple and Microsoft

If IT was a soap opera, Apple and Microsoft’s on-off relationship would put EastEnders to shame. Today, you’d never guess there had ever been anything wrong, and that’s probably down to the fact that their relationship has never been more symbiotic.

IDC figures released in summer 2015 showed Mac sales to have climbed by 16% over the previous quarter. At the same time, though, the overall PC market for machines running Windows had dipped by 11.8%. So, with ever more of Microsoft’s revenue coming from Office 365, it needs to push its subscription-based productivity service onto as many platforms as it can – including Android, iOS and, of course, the Mac.

Apple, on the other hand, needs Office. It has its own productivity apps in the shape of Pages, Numbers and Keynote, but Word, Excel and Powerpoint remain more or less industry standards, so if it’s going to be taken seriously in the business world, Apple needs Microsoft Office onboard.

So, a peace has broken out – and a long-lasting one at that, which despite some sniping from either side, stretches right back to Jobs’ return to Apple after his time at NeXT. We’ll come to that later, but suffice it to say at this point that it shouldn’t really surprise us: the rivalry between the two camps often seems overblown.

Microsoft developed many of the Office apps for the Mac before porting them to the PC and, in the early days at least, Bill Gates had good things to say about the company. “To create a new standard, it takes something that’s not just a little bit different,” he said in 1984, “it takes something that’s really new, and really captures people’s imagination. And the Macintosh – of all the machines I’ve seen – is the only one that meets that standard.”

That’s pretty flattering, but there’s a saying about flattery: imitation is its sincerest form. Apple apparently didn’t see it that way when Microsoft, in Apple’s eyes, went on to imitate its products a little too faithfully.

As we already know, Apple had been inspired by certain elements of an operating system it saw at Xerox PARC when it was developing the Macintosh and Lisa. Xerox’s implementation used the desktop metaphor now familiar to OS X, Windows and many Linux users, and when Microsoft was developing Windows 1.0, Apple licensed some of its fundamentals to the company that Jobs latterly took to calling “our friends up north”.

That was fine when Windows was just starting out, but when version 2 hit the shelves, with significant amendments, Apple was no longer so happy to share and share alike.

Microsoft Windows 1.0

Most significantly, Microsoft had implemented one of the features of which Apple was proudest: the ability to overlap live application windows. This is more complex as it sounds, as it requires some advanced calculations to determine which parts sit beneath others, not to mention how they should behave when repositioned.

However, Apple’s primary argument was that, taken as a whole, the generic look and feel of a graphical operating system – such as its resizable, movable windows, title bars and so on – should be subject to copyright protection, rather than each of the specific parts. Looking back on it now, it’s easy to see that this would be akin to Ford copyrighting the idea of a car, rather than a specific engine implementation or means of heating the windscreen, but back then, the GUI was such an innovation that you can understand why Apple would have wanted to protect it.

The court didn’t buy into the idea of look and feel, and asked Apple to come back with a more specific complaint, highlighting the parts of its own operating system that it believed Microsoft had stolen. So, Apple made a list of 189 points, of which all but 10 were thrown out by the court as having been covered by the licensing agreement drawn up between the two parties with respect to Windows 1.0. That left Apple with just 10 points on which to build its case.

Microsoft Windows 2.0

However, over at PARC, Xerox could see that if Apple won it might be able to claim the rights to those elements itself, even though they’d been dreamed up following on from Jobs et al’s tour of its labs. Xerox had no choice but to mount a claim itself, against Apple, stating that the operating environments on the Macintosh and Lisa infringed its own copyrights.

Ultimately, Xerox’s act of self-defence was unnecessary as the court ruled against Apple, deciding that while their specific implementation was important, the general idea of using office-like elements, such as folders and a desktop, was too generic to protect.

Apple appealed, but to no avail. However, it did at least avoid losing to Xerox, as the Palo Alto company’s claim was thrown out.

Of course, Apple and Microsoft patched things up eventually, and for that we should all be grateful. If they hadn’t, it’s possible there might be no Mac today. Why? Because when he came back to Apple and set about returning it to greatness, Jobs realised that he couldn’t do it alone. He might have a streamlined hardware line-up waiting in the wings, headlined by the groundbreaking iMac, but he knew that without the software to back them up they’d never attain their full potential.

Business users wouldn’t switch to a platform that didn’t support industry standard document formats, like those produced by Word, Excel and PowerPoint, and that remains true today. While home users and small teams will be happy to use Pages, Numbers and Keynote, IT departments – particularly those in mixed-platform offices – often still rely on Microsoft Office formats.

So, Steve Jobs put in a personal call to Bill Gates , who was then Microsoft’s CEO, and convinced him to keep developing Office for Mac for at least the next five years. Gates did just that, and at the same time Microsoft bought $150m worth of non-voting Apple stock, thereby securing its future.

In return, Apple unseated Netscape as the Mac’s default browser and installed Internet Explorer in its place, which was actively developed right up until 2003, when in the face rumours that Apple was working on its own browser in house – Safari – Microsoft scaled back its work on IE for Mac to the point where, today, it no longer runs on OS X.

Apple in the 1990s

Apple was a very different company in the 1990s to the one we know today. It had a lot of products and a lot of stock, but not enough customers. There’s only so long a company can survive like that.

Looking back on it now, you’d be forgiven for thinking it was losing its way. Alongside its computer range, it was producing digital cameras (where it was ahead of most of the big-name players that now dominate photography), video consoles, TV appliances and CD players. It had also invested heavily in the Newton platform to produce the MessagePad and eMate lines.

In many respects, to use a well-worn cliche, it was running before it could walk. Almost all of these products have equivalents in Apple’s current line-up where they form the basis of the iPhone camera, Apple TV, iPad and so on, but in the 1990s there was no way to link them all together. They were, to all intents and purposes, disparate and largely disconnected products; there was no overarching storyline to what Apple was producing the way there is now, where the Mac, Apple Watch, Apple TV and iOS devices can all share data courtesy of iCloud.

To make matters worse, the decision to license a lot of its technologies was only making it harder for Apple to succeed in each marketplace, as it was enabling its rivals to produce cheaper cloned versions of its top-line products. Even the Newton platform wasn’t immune, with Motorola, Siemens and Sharp, among others, using the operating system and hardware spec to build their own products.

Cloning remains a contentious issue in Apple history. Aside from being bad news from Apple’s in-house hardware development, many consumers would say it was actually good for the end user, as it encouraged competition and, as a result, lowered prices. That brought more people to the platform than Apple would have managed to attract on its own, which in turn ensured continued support from application developers, including key names like Adobe and Microsoft, without whom the computer line-up may well have collapsed.

But something had to give – and a decision had to be made, which turned out to be one of the most momentous decisions in the company’s history.

Jobs returns to Apple

Apple was still on the look out for a new operating system, as its in-house efforts weren’t going as well as it had hoped. By 1996 it had shortlisted two possible suppliers: BeOS and NeXTSTEP, each of which had a historical connection to Apple itself.

BeOS was developed by Be Inc, a company founded by former Apple executive, Jean-Louis Gassée. He had been appointed as Apple’s director of European operations in 1981 and, four years later, was responsible for informing Apple’s board of Jobs’ intention to oust CEO John Sculley – the act that led to Jobs’ departure from the company.

NeXTSTEP, on the other hand, came from NeXT – the company that Jobs founded upon leaving Apple. Although NeXT’s hardware didn’t go on to sell in the quantities that Apple was shipping, it was highly thought of and is perhaps best known as the platform on which Tim Berners Lee developed the World Wide Web while working at Cern.

The stakes couldn’t have been higher for either man – or either company – but in the end Apple chose NeXTSTEP.

If it had been a simple licensing deal that wouldn’t have been so remarkable, but in truth it was far more than that. Apple purchased NeXT itself – not just its operating system – for $429m in cash, plus 1.5 million shares of Apple stock, effectively buying back Steve Jobs in the process.

The man who had co-founded the company was returning to it after 12 years away.

Making changes

Buying NeXT wasn’t enough to fix Apple’s ongoing woes on its own. Its share price was declining, and over the next six months it fell still further, to a 12-year low.

Jobs convinced the board of directors that the company’s CEO, Gil Amelio, had to go and, when it agreed, it installed Jobs in his place as interim CEO. At that point, Apple began a remarkable period of restructuring that leads directly to the successful organisation it is today.

Jobs recognised that if Apple was going to survive it needed to concentrate on a narrower selection of products. He slimmed down the range of computers to just four – two for consumers and two for businesses – and closed down a lot of supplementary divisions, including the one working on the Newton.

At the same time, he saw that the licensing deals it had signed weren’t doing it any favours, and he brought them to an end. The immediate effect wasn’t good, as it saw the market share of new computers running Apple’s operating system dropping from 10% to just 3% – but at least 100% of them were being built by Apple itself.

The strategy paid off in the long run, though, and Apple’s computers and operating system are holding their own in a world where rivals are seeing year on year stagnation or – worse – decline.

Not everyone was convinced, though. When asked what he would do to fix the broken Apple Computer Inc, Michael Dell, who founded the Windows-based rival that carries his name, told a Gartner Symposium, ‘What would I do? I’d shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders.’

Dell was riding high at the time, but over the years the two companies’ relative positions have changed, and in 2006 Jobs mocked his rival in an email he sent to Apple staff.

“Team,” the email read. “It turned out that Michael Dell wasn’t perfect at predicting the future. Based on today’s stock market close, Apple is worth more than Dell. Stocks go up and down, and things may be different tomorrow, but I thought it was worth a moment of reflection today.”

And were things “different tomorrow”?

Maybe not tomorrow, but certainly in the long run they were very different indeed. Apple grew to become the most valuable company in the world when measured by market capitalisation, while Dell went back to private ownership, as Michael Dell and Silver Lake Partners bought out the existing shareholders.

Steve Jobs Biography

Birthday: February 24 , 1955 ( Pisces )

Born In: San Francisco, California, United States

Popularly known as the ‘Father of the Digital World’, Steve Jobs an American entrepreneur, investor, co-founder of Apple Inc. Not the one to be satisfied with a single achievement, he moved on to make history in the world of consumer electronics with his foray into the music and cellular industry. The founder of Apple Inc, Pixar Animation Studios and NeXT Inc, Jobs gave information technology its life and blood. A master of innovation, he was known for his perfectionist attitude and futuristic vision. He foresaw trend in the field of information technology and worked hard to embrace the same in his line of products. With about 346 US patents by his side, Steve Jobs created a revolution in his field with his novel ideas and unique concepts. During his years at the Apple, he administered the development of the iMac, iTunes, iPod, iPhone, and iPad. He was the mastermind behind the working of the company's Apple Retail Stores, iTunes Store and the App Store. Interestingly, with so much to fall back upon, it is quite amusing to know that this legendary innovator was not much educated, in fact a college dropout.

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Also Known As: Steven Paul Jobs

Died At Age: 56

Spouse/Ex-: Laurene Powell (m. 1991–2011)

father: Abdulfattah John Jandali

mother: Joanne Carole Schieble

siblings: Mona Simpson , Patricia Ann Jobs

children: Erin Siena Jobs , Eve Jobs , Lisa Brennan-Jobs , Reed Jobs

Born Country: United States

American Men Reed College

Died on: October 5 , 2011

place of death: Palo Alto, California, United States

Ancestry: German American, Swiss American, Syrian American

Cause of Death: Respiratory Arrest

U.S. State: California

Personality: ENTJ

City: San Francisco, California

Founder/Co-Founder: Apple Inc, Pixar Animation Studios, Next Computer, Inc

discoveries/inventions: IPod, IPhone, IPad, Macintosh

education: Reed College

awards: 1985 - National Medal of Technology 1987 - Jefferson Award for Public Service 2012 - Grammy Trustees Award 2002 - PGA Vanguard Award

You wanted to know

What were steve jobs' most significant contributions to the technology industry.

Steve Jobs was instrumental in the development and popularization of the Macintosh computer, iPod, iPhone, and iPad, revolutionizing the way people interact with technology.

How did Steve Jobs impact the way we consume music and other media?

Steve Jobs played a key role in the creation of iTunes, which revolutionized the music industry by allowing users to purchase and download individual songs legally and easily.

What was Steve Jobs' leadership style at Apple?

Steve Jobs was known for his visionary leadership style, emphasizing innovation, attention to detail, and a focus on creating products that were both user-friendly and aesthetically pleasing.

How did Steve Jobs' departure from and return to Apple impact the company?

Steve Jobs' departure from and subsequent return to Apple were significant moments in the company's history, with his return leading to a period of immense growth and innovation, including the development of iconic products like the iPod and iPhone.

What was Steve Jobs' approach to marketing and branding at Apple?

Steve Jobs was known for his keen understanding of marketing and branding, emphasizing simplicity, elegance, and a focus on the customer experience in all Apple products and marketing campaigns.

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How Steve Jobs Changed the Course of Animation

After resigning from Apple Computer Inc. in 1985, Steve Jobs focused on the launch of NeXT Computer and acquired the computer graphics division of George Lucas ' production company for $10 million. Surprisingly, it was the latter that disrupted an industry as Pixar, the animation studio which brought CGI to life, forever changed the moviegoing experience.

Jobs initially had Pixar focus on creating powerful hardware

As is the case now, Pixar in 1986 was staffed by a mix of techies and artists who hoped to create computer-animated films. However, since the technology to do so simply wasn't there yet, Jobs had his group focus on saleable products.

The first was the Pixar Image Computer, which produced stunning high-resolution imagery at an equally stunning price of $135,000. The machine drew some interest from hospitals and intelligence agencies, but only about 100 of them were sold.

Pixar had more success by teaming with Disney to create the computer animation production system (CAPS), which eliminated the need for hand-drawn "cels" and freed up capabilities for advanced effects. By the time The Rescuers Down Under hit theaters in 1990, Disney had made the full-time switch to digital. Another Pixar system, RenderMan, was responsible for the groundbreaking visuals in live-action films like The Abyss (1989) and Terminator 2 (1991).

He eventually sold Pixar's hardware division to concentrate on short films and commercials

Meanwhile, former Disney animator John Lasseter was quietly providing a roadmap for Pixar's future by using in-house technology for innovative content. His two-minute Luxo Jr. (1986), showing two desk lamps playfully interacting with one another, earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Animated Short. Two years later, the five-minute Tin Toy became the first computer-animated film to claim the Oscar in that category.

Jobs subsequently sold Pixar's hardware division and focused on generating income through short films and commercials. Still, while the company was impacting the viewing experience on both the large and small screens, it was only being kept afloat through its founder's personal checks, amounting to some $50 million through 1991.

"I kept putting more money into [Pixar], and the only bright spot was John's short films," Jobs later said. "He'd say, 'Can I have $300,000 to make a short film?' And I'd say, 'Okay, go make it.' That was the only thing that was fun. Everything else was not really working."

The release of 'Toy Story' was Pixar's big break

The company's biggest success came in 1991 when Disney revealed an interest in financing and distributing Pixar's first feature film. Previously more invested in the fortunes of NeXT, Jobs promptly inserted himself into negotiations and helped hammer out a three-movie deal for 12.5 percent of box-office receipts.

As Lasseter and the creative team labored through what became Toy Story , Jobs hired CFO Lawrence Levy to work out the details of restructuring the company for a public offering. Jobs settled on an IPO date for shortly after the Thanksgiving 1995 release of Toy Story , tying the company's fate to the opening weekend box office numbers of its first massive undertaking.

It proved a worthwhile gamble, as the combination of Pixar's technical wizardry, a heartwarming story and a voice cast headlined by Tom Hanks and Tim Allen propelled Toy Story to an impressive $30 million opening weekend (en route to a global haul of $365 million). Days later, Pixar closed at $39 per share after its first day of trading, the once-struggling company now valued at $1.5 billion.

While the success made Jobs a very wealthy man, he realized there was a lot more to be made from the licensing revenue that was fully flowing into Disney's coffers. In 1997, Disney CEO Michael Eisner agreed to a new five-movie deal in which the two sides split all costs and profits, placing Pixar on equal footing with the company that had dominated the animation industry for the past 60 years.

Jobs saw Pixar as a side project

For Jobs, who sold NeXT to Apple and made a triumphant return to his old company in 1997, Pixar remained something of a side project; day-to-day operations were left to Lasseter and CTO Ed Catmull, the boss only showing up about once per week.

When he did appear, employees took note of the kinder, gentler Jobs in their presence. The tempestuous CEO who publicly dressed down underlings was all but nonexistent here, replaced by one willing to listen and address potentially embarrassing situations in private.

Furthermore, Pixar's top-grade creative team grew to value his input. According to Catmull, Jobs had a knack for cutting to the core of a film's problems after an early screening, his insight serving as a "gut punch" that often sparked significant improvements.

He sold Pixar for $7 billion just two decades after Jobs bought to company

Following the smashing success of Monsters, Inc. in 2002, Jobs again sought to negotiate a more favorable deal from Eisner. His attempt at hardball left the two at an impasse, but Jobs eventually found a more receptive audience with the arrival of new Disney CEO Bob Iger in 2005.

When Iger offered to buy Pixar outright, Jobs made sure his top two lieutenants, Lasseter and Catmull, were okay with the transaction, before ensuring they were given full reign to run Disney Animation. He left the company for good with the completion of a $7.4 billion sale in January 2006, going on to cement his legacy in his final years at Apple while his old gang kept the hits coming with movies like Cars (2006), WALL-E (2008), Up (2009) and continuing the Toy Story franchise.

While Jobs didn't design the graphics or create the characters that made Pixar a household name, his stewardship provided the means for an oddball group of creatives to find their footing and become the driving force behind some of the most successful and popular films of the past 20 years.

As Lasseter and Catmull noted in a statement after Jobs died in October 2011: "Steve took a chance on us and believed in our crazy dream of making computer-animated films; the one thing he always said was to simply 'make it great.' He is why Pixar turned out the way we did and his strength, integrity, and love of life has made us all better people. He will forever be a part of Pixar's DNA."

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Steve Jobs: From Garage to World’s Most Valuable Company

By dag spicer | december 02, 2011.

So we’re sitting in the payphone trying to make a blue box call. And the operator comes back on the line. And we’re all scared and we’d try it again. … And she comes back on the line; we’re all scared so we put in money. And then a cop car pulls up. And Steve was shaking, you know, and he got the blue box back into my pocket. I got it– he got it to me because the cop turned to look in the bushes for drugs or something, you know? So I put the box in my pocket. The cop pats me down and says, “What’s this?” I said, “It’s an electronic music synthesizer.” Wasn’t too musical. Second cop says, “What’s the orange button for?” “It’s for calibration,” says Steve.

— steve wozniak, lecture at computer history museum, 2002.

So begins one of the earliest chapters in the life of two remarkable young men whose youth, energy and enthusiasm transformed the world.

The “Blue Box” was a simple electronic gizmo that bypassed telephone company billing computers, allowing anyone to make free telephone calls anywhere in the world. The Blue Box was illegal, but the specifications for hacking into the telephone network were published in a telephone company journal and many youngsters with a flair for electronics built them. The “two Steves” had a great deal of fun building and using them for “ethical hacking,” with Wozniak building the kits and Jobs selling them—a pattern which would emerge again and again in the lives of these two innovators. (Wozniak once telephoned the Vatican, pretended to be Henry Kissinger and asked to speak to the Pope—just to see if he could. When someone answered, Woz got scared and hung up.)

Wozniak and Jobs Blue Box, ca. 1972. The Blue Box allowed electronics hobbyists to make free telephone calls. CHM #X727.86

These early playful roots are what Wozniak remembers most fondly of Jobs. As columnist Mike Cassidy recalled in a San Jose Mercury News interview, what these two friends most remembered was “not bringing computers to the masses … or the many ‘aha’ moments designing computers. Instead, it’s the time the two tried to unfurl a banner depicting a middle finger salute from the roof of Homestead High School…” or their many Blue Box exploits. Walter Isaacson, Jobs’s official biographer, cites Jobs reflecting on the Blue Box:

If it hadn’t been for the Blue Boxes, there would have been no Apple. I’m 100% sure of that. Woz and I learned how to work together, and we gained the confidence that we could solve technical problems and actually put something into production.

— (isaacson, p. 30).

Steve Jobs (circled) at Homestead High School Electronics Club, Cupertino, California ca. 1969

Jobs, like Wozniak before him, attended Homestead High School in Cupertino, California, a solidly middle-class school in the suburbs of Silicon Valley. Homestead was progressive, with an innovative electronics program that shaped Wozniak’s life. Jobs and Wozniak had been friends for some time. They met in 1971 when their mutual friend, Bill Fernandez, introduced then 21-year-old Wozniak to 16-year-old Jobs. After hours, the two Steves would often meet at Hewlett-Packard lectures in Palo Alto, and both were hired by HP for a summer. Jobs graduated high school in 1972 and attended Reed College in Portland, Oregon for a semester, during which he collected Coke bottles for money and ate free meals at the local Hare Krishna temple. After drifting from class to class, Jobs left for India on a spiritual quest with Reed College friend Dan Kottke (who later became Apple employee #12). Jobs returned as a Buddhist and in 1974 began working at the legendary gaming company Atari as a technician.

The Homebrew Computer Club newsletter was a forum for hobbyists to exchange information and ideas.

The next year, Jobs began attending meetings of the Homebrew Computer Club, a group of electronics and computer hobbyists in Silicon Valley who got together to explore the latest in a new technology, the microcomputer.

Wozniak, who had no formal engineering training, designed the Apple-1 computer as a way of “showing off” to the people at the Homebrew Club. Based on an inexpensive 6502 microprocessor, the Apple-1 came as a kit and was aimed squarely at hobbyists who wanted to own their own computer, even if they weren’t quite sure what they could do with it. The Apple-1 was a masterpiece of circuit design and its elegance impressed all who could appreciate its simple but powerful conception. Ever the salesman, Jobs quickly appreciated that there might be a demand for the Apple-1 beyond the geeky members of the Homebrew Club. Jobs showed an Apple-1 to Paul Terrell, owner of the local Byte Shop computer store, who placed an order for 50 of the machines—so long as they came pre-assembled. To obtain funds to purchase parts for the Apple-1, Jobs had obtained 30 days’ credit from suppliers—just long enough to enable Wozniak and Jobs to build the computers (mostly in Jobs’s parents’ garage) and get paid for them. To fund the circuit board layout of the Apple-1, Wozniak sold his beloved HP-65 calculator and Jobs his Volkswagen van. The Byte Shop order brought in $50,000, a “total shock” to Wozniak, who was earning one-tenth of that as an engineer at HP. The sale spurred Jobs into thinking about a new computer that anyone—not just those handy with a soldering iron—could afford and use.

Homebrew Computer Club meeting, 1978 Courtesy of Lee Felsenstein

Steve Jobs and Wozniak using Apple-1 system, ca. 1976 ©Apple, Inc. / Joe Melena

The Apple-1 kit computer introduced in 1976 Photo: ©Mark Richards

Early ad for the Apple-1 computer system, ca. 1976

Funding this vision presented some challenges: the idea of people having their own computers was viewed as absurd at the time. Banks were unwilling to loan the two Steves money. After several unsuccessful visits with venture capitalists, Jobs met Mike Markkula, who, at 32, was already retired from Intel. Markkula was an electrical engineer with solid management skills who would provide “adult supervision” to the young company as well as something else: he personally invested $250,000. The three founded Apple Computer in January, 1977.

Steve and I get a lot of credit, but Mike Markkula was probably more responsible for our early success, and you never hear about him.

— steve wozniak, failure magazine, july 2000.

The original Apple II personal computer, the machine that propelled Apple into a global company (1977) Photo: ©Mark Richards

Jobs and Wozniak immediately moved forward with their new machine, the Apple II. It was a big improvement over the Apple-1. It had an integrated keyboard and case, could plug into a TV set for display, and was ready to run right out of the box. It also had color graphics, which made it unique among similar computers at the time such as the Radio Shack TRS-80 and the Commodore PET. It was a consumer item, not a kit for hobbyists.

If the Apple II featured typically brilliant Wozniak design, the marketing was vintage Jobs. This was Apple’s first mass-produced product, and Jobs sold it as a computer for everyone, from students to business professionals. The Apple II’s success was unprecedented, in part because, under Markkula’s urging, Apple donated or gave huge discounts to schools—ensuring that a new generation of students would learn about computers on an Apple. But the Apple II also enjoyed a business windfall with the arrival of the spreadsheet program VisiCalc in 1979. Powered by demand from both the education and business markets, Apple II sales soared. The Apple II would live on in various models until 1993—an astonishing 16 years. Early chants of “Apple II Forever” among the Apple faithful rang long and clear.

Apple Macintosh, 1984. The Mac revolutionized personal computing by introducing the graphical user interface (GUI), allowing anyone to use a computer CHM# 102633564 Photo: ©Mark Richards

Jobs’s greatest triumph, however, was the 1984 Macintosh, “the computer for the rest of us.” Macintosh offered users an entirely new way of interacting: the graphical user interface (GUI). No longer would people have to learn special commands or have specialized training to use a computer. Now everyone who could point and click a mouse (even children) could run a computer. The Macintosh kicked off a new personal computer revolution, one that stressed intuition and use of a common graphical look and feel over memorization of computer codes.

Apple launched the Macintosh with a revolutionary television commercial produced by science fiction filmmaker Ridley Scott. The commercial aired only once—during the 1984 Super Bowl broadcast. Even with its splashy introduction and its breakthroughs in usability and design, however, the Mac started slowly in the marketplace and sales were modest in the first year. Moreover, Jobs’s intense personality, drive for perfection and difficult management style frequently clashed with others at Apple. In 1985, he suffered the same fortune as many Silicon Valley founders: he was fired by the board of directors. Jobs’s departure marked the end of an era and the beginning of a period of massive hits and equally big misses for him. That period would last for a decade.

Explore further

• Learn more about the Homebrew Computerr Club in a CHM interview with Steve Wozniak
• Look inside the Apple-1 manual
• Learn about Apple’s vision for the Apple-II computer: Apple Computer Inc. Preliminary Confidential Offering Memorandum – 102712693
• Learn about early Macintosh market plans: Preliminary Macintosh Business Plan, CHM# 102712692
• Watch The Macintosh Marketing Story: Fact and Fiction, 20 Years Later, 102703180
• The Changing Face of the Macintosh, Marcin Wichary

Watch vintage Steve Jobs footage on Apple

Two years ago we made a decision. We saw some new technology and we made a decision to risk our company.

— steve jobs’s next presentation, october 12, 1988, san francisco symphony hall.

Pixar Image Computer, 1986. This computer was used for generating images from complex data sets such as CAT scans, oil exploration or scenes from a virtual world. Disney purchased several dozen for use in animation. CHM# 102621974 Photo: ©Mark Richards

Jobs spent the next ten years away from Apple but was by no means taking time off. In 1986, he bought the computer graphics division of Lucasfilm, renaming it Pixar. Pixar had started as a manufacturer of high-performance graphics hardware. Its main product was the Pixar Image Computer, a rendering engine for animation. While the computer was technically sophisticated, its high cost (about $130,000) made it appealing only to well-funded customers such as advanced medical research institutions and government laboratories. There was one exception: Disney. The legendary studio bought several dozen of the systems for use in animation.

Scene from Pixar’s computer-generated feature-length film Toy Story ©Pixar

Disney’s interest in Pixar’s hardware, however, was not enough to save the company from lackluster sales. Pixar finally sold its hardware division in 1990. Jobs shifted Pixar’s focus and concentrated it on producing short film sequences and commercials. The next year, partly due to the success of Pixar’s Oscar-winning “Tin Toy” short film, Pixar and Disney agreed to produce a computer generated film called “A Tin Toy Christmas.” Hollywood had met computing, and together Pixar and Disney would move computer-generated graphics from the niche of special effects to the heart of filmmaking itself.

Pixar brain trust: Ed Catmull, Steve Jobs, John Lasseter ©Pixar

Using groundbreaking computer technology and some of the most skilled animators and storytellers in the world, Pixar produced the blockbuster film Toy Story, released in 1995. Toy Story proved that a feature-length motion picture could be entirely animated by computer and also made wildly entertaining. Pixar exploded as a Hollywood powerhouse, and its partnership with Disney produced some of the biggest box office hits of the decade. Jobs sold Pixar to Disney in 2006, earning more than $7 billion from his initial $10 million investment and becoming Disney’s largest single shareholder.

The NeXT Cube (1990) was a masterpiece of engineering… but was too expensive. NeXT evolved into a software company after the Cube and several other NeXt hardware products failed in the marketplace. NeXT’s greatest innovation was the NeXTSTEP operating environment CHM# 102626734

While Pixar was beginning to work its magic, Jobs was working in parallel on another computer startup. His new company, NeXT, set out to build high-performance UNIX workstations for the educational and scientific market. The machines, introduced in 1990, were prototypically Jobs: elegant, well-engineered and easy to use, but the NeXT “Cube” was too expensive for mass appeal. Although it had high-performance hardware, the NeXT delivered its greatest innovation in the form of its “object-oriented” operating system, NeXTStep. Yet despite its originality and power, the NeXT system struggled to find its place in the market. It did, however, have a significant claim to fame: a British scientist named Tim Berners-Lee would write the program for the World Wide Web on a NeXT. In 1996, Apple bought NeXT, mainly for its software and operating system, and Jobs returned to Apple as a consultant.

Jobs with the original iMac, 1998 ©Apple Inc. / Moshe Brakha

Jobs joined an Apple that was in no better shape than the company from which he had been unceremoniously fired. It was losing money at a catastrophic rate. Its product line was bloated and confusing. Its marketing was ineffective. Its innovations in user interfaces and software had long since been eclipsed by Microsoft’s Windows and applications for the Windows system, which had become the de facto standard for personal computing worldwide. And Apple seemingly had no strategy for capitalizing on the internet, which was exploding as a force in home and business computing.

A year after returning to Apple, Jobs was named interim CEO, replacing Gil Amelio in July 1997. Apple had lost more than $700 million the preceding quarter. It was running out of money and it looked as if it might not survive. Jobs quickly sought new financing, terminated languishing projects, fired hundreds of people and focused the company on just a desktop computer and a laptop for professionals and for consumers. The first desktop computer from the new Jobs era was the iMac (1998). Ultimately available in several colors of the rainbow, the iMac emphasized connection to the Internet and—Jobs’s mantra—simplicity. Out of the box, the iMac could be on the Internet in just two easy steps. “There is no Step 3,” Apple claimed. The iMac and its distinctive design also marked the first tangible collaboration between Jobs and Jonathan Ive, the British-born designer with whom he would form a legendary partnership.

• Learn about the roots of Pixar. Watch the CHM lecture: Pixar: A Human Story of Computer Animation

One More Thing

The return of elvis would not have provoked a bigger sensation, — jim carlton, january 1997, the wall street journal, from “steve jobs,” by walter isaacson.

In 2000, the Apple board removed the term “interim” from Jobs’s CEO title, cementing his permanent return to the company he had co-founded. It must have seemed a glorious triumph for Jobs personally. For the Apple faithful, it represented a glimmer of hope that the resurgent company they loved might have a chance. Perhaps no one within or outside Apple—with the possible exception of Jobs himself—could foresee that the company was embarking on one of the most remarkable decades any company in any industry had ever experienced.

iPod Evaluation and Test Prototype (2001). The original iPod had a miniaturized 5GB hard disk drive and could “store 1,000 songs in your pocket.” CHM# 102633636 Photo: ©Mark Richards

Innovations came in rapid-fire succession. In 2001, Apple introduced OS X, the new operating system for the Mac platform. OS X marked the total redesign of the Mac operating system from the ground up. It was a direct result of Apple’s NeXT acquisition and was based on NeXT’s OPENSTEP environment and the BSD Unix system developed at UC Berkeley.

That same year Apple opened its first retail store, in Tysons Corner, Virginia. It was a daring step at a time when computer companies had long since abandoned their own branded retail outlets in favor of “big box” electronic superstores and internet shopping. Like Apple products themselves, the stores reflected an austere simplicity and were organized not by product category but by how Jobs believed people wanted to use them. Products were stylishly arranged for direct use by customers in a minimalist, almost laboratory-like zone of utilitarian consumerism. As usual, Jobs sweated the details, ensuring the marble floors were the right color and the washroom signs were not too obtrusive. A “Genius Bar” staffed by Apple experts answered customer problems on-site. The stores were hailed as a perfect blend of the products Apple made and the brand itself.

The most momentous event of 2001, however, was the introduction of the iPod digital music player. Although not a new idea, Apple’s take on the device featured an easy-to-use interface and, thanks to new miniaturized hard drive technology, a prodigious amount of music storage. Jobs announced the iPod with the slogan “1,000 songs in your pocket.” Music was sync’d to the iPod through the iTunes software application, another Apple innovation. As of October 2011, more than 300 million iPods had been sold worldwide.

In 2003, Jobs introduced an even more radical innovation: the iTunes store and music management system. The iTunes platform represented the successful integration of retail music, portable player, e-commerce, digital rights management and a simple desktop environment where users could manage their music libraries. Jobs convinced powerful and deeply skeptical music company executives that, together, the iPod and iTunes system represented a legitimate and profitable alternative to music piracy, which was then rampant through bootleg services such as Napster and LimeWire. In exchange, Jobs won a revolutionary concession from the music industry: flat-rate pricing of 99 cents per downloaded song. The iTunes concept revolutionized the retail music industry, and sounded the death knell for brick-and-mortar record stores. As of October 2011, the iTunes music store had sold more than 16 billion songs.

The iPod marked a turning point in Apple’s strategy. Jobs sought to move Apple beyond computers and into Apple-powered consumer devices. It was a very bold gamble, and the success of the iPod and iTunes showed that the strategy could win on two levels: it eroded traditional industry structures, and it catapulted Apple into a widely recognized global consumer brand.

iPhone, 2007 CHM# 102716304 Photo: ©Mark Richards

Steve Jobs unveiling iPhone to the world

At the 2007 Macworld trade show, Jobs announced that Apple would drop the word “Computer” from its name and become simply “Apple Inc.” The move solidified the profound shift in the company’s direction and signaled its seemingly unlimited ambition in the multi-billion dollar market for switched-on consumer products. At the Macworld show, Jobs also saved his customary “one more thing” portion of his presentation for another blockbuster announcement: the iPhone. He described it as nothing less than the re-invention of the telephone: a combination “widescreen iPod with touch controls,” a “revolutionary mobile phone,” and a “breakthrough Internet communicator.”

When the iPhone went on-sale, thousands of people worldwide waited patiently outside Apple stores, sometimes for days, to be first to purchase one. This remarkable show of brand loyalty reflected how deeply Apple products had connected with their users on a personal level. Like the iPod before it, the iPhone sold briskly and transformed another industry (telephones) by making the smartphone an established category of “must-have” device, for everyone from teenagers to business executives. The iPhone was a computer at its core: it ran Apple’s iOS operating system, which was based on Mac OS X, its desktop operating system. To add extra capabilities, the user downloaded ‘apps’ (applications) from the iTunes App Store, launched in July 2008. By October 2011, more than 18 billion apps had been downloaded.

iPad (2010)

Jobs’s last major product launch was the iPad, a tablet computer optimized for media consumption, quick emails, and web browsing. Like the previous iPod and iPhone iOS devices, the iPad pioneered an entirely new set of experiences and possibilities for users. Apple introduced the iPad in 2010, and within a year software developers had introduced more than 100,000 apps for the device, ranging from navigation aids to cameras to wildly popular games and ways both to create and consume every type of media. Yet unlike the iPod and the iPhone, the iPad did not simply improve upon a major segment of consumer electronics: it invented a largely new category. The iPad was another triumph of Apple engineering and marketing, one deeply shaped by Jobs at every step.

Outpouring of remembrances and ‘thanks’ to Steve Jobs, Apple store, Palo Alto, California, Oct 8, 2011 © All rights reserved by troialynn

Certain qualities persisted throughout Jobs’s career, from the Apple-1 to the iPad. One was an unshakable determination to create something of beauty, in the aesthetic and engineering senses of that word. Another was enormously successful risk-taking, from selling his van to finance the Apple-1 to perfecting the music player, telephone and tablet computer. Another was Jobs’s uncanny ability to focus on a larger vision—and, in the case of consumers, to anticipate whole categories of needs that few of his rivals saw. Finally, especially in the iOS devices, Jobs engaged in “ecosystem thinking,” a drive to integrate radical new hardware advances with bold new software and services. iTunes and the App Stores were as critical to the success of iOS devices as the hardware itself, and established Apple not simply as an unparalleled product company but also as a global content distribution company.

Jobs once said his goal in life was “to make a dent in the universe.” Isaacson asserts that Jobs changed seven industries: personal computers, animated movies, music, telephones, tablet computing, digital publishing and retail stores. At the end of this life, Jobs saw Apple surpass Exxon as the most valuable company in the world as measured in market capitalization. Ultimately, Jobs made his dent, and more. A fitting tribute, borrowed from the tomb of English architect Sir Christopher Wren, might be: Si monumentum requires circumspice. “If you seek his monument, look around you.”

Steven Paul Jobs was born February 24, 1955, and died October 5, 2011.

• Steve Jobs original iPod introduction
• Watch the CHM lecture: Steve Jobs: The Authorized Biography. An Evening with Walter Isaacson
• Stanford University Commencement Speech
• Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs, New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011
• Michael Moritz, Return to the Little Kingdom: How Apple and Steve Jobs Changed the World, New York: Overlook Press, 2010
• Smithsonian Oral History
• Charlie Rose

About The Author

Dag Spicer oversees the Museum’s permanent historical collection, the most comprehensive repository of computers, software, media, oral histories, and ephemera relating to computing in the world. He also helps shape the Museum’s exhibitions, marketing, and education programs, responds to research inquiries, and has given hundreds of interviews on computer history and related topics to major print and electronic news outlets such as NPR, the New York Times, The Economist, and CBS News. A native Canadian, Dag most recently attended Stanford University before joining the Museum in 1996.

Join the Discussion

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Steve Jobs Biography

Learn how Apple co-founder Steve Jobs revolutionized the computer industry.

Table of Contents

Steve Jobs was a computer designer, executive and innovator, as well as an all-around role model for many people in their professional and personal lives. As the co-founder of Apple Computers and the former chairman of Pixar Animation Studios, he revolutionized the computer and animation industries, amassing a fortune worth $10.2 billion at the time of his death. Jobs died at age 56 on Oct. 5, 2011, in Palo Alto, California, after battling pancreatic cancer for eight years.

Steve Jobs’ early life

Born in San Francisco, Steve Jobs was adopted by an encouraging and loving family. He developed an interest in computers and engineering at a young age, inspired by his father’s machinist job and love for electronics. 

Growing up south of Palo Alto, Jobs was bright beyond comparison – his teachers wanted him to skip several grades and enter high school early, although his parents declined. When he did go to high school, Jobs met his future business partner, Steve Wozniak, with whom he bonded over a shared love for electronics and computer chips.

The start of Apple

After dropping out of college in his first semester, Jobs explored his spiritual side while traveling in India. It was through this spiritual enlightenment that Jobs’ work ethic and simplistic view toward life were developed. 

“That’s been one of my mantras – focus and simplicity,” he once said. “Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.”

Jobs began to move mountains at age 21 when he and Wozniak started Apple Computers in the Jobs family garage. To fund their venture, Jobs sold his Volkswagen bus and Wozniak sold his scientific calculator. This ended up being a good investment. Prior to Apple’s rise, computers were physically massive, expensive and not accessible by the everyday person. 

With Jobs heading up marketing and Wozniak in charge of technical development, Apple sold consumer-friendly machines that were smaller and cheaper, at only $666.66 each. The Apple II was more successful than the first model, and sales increased by 700 percent. On its first day of being a publicly traded company in 1980, Apple Computers had an estimated market value of $1.2 billion.

Apple resignation and Pixar beginnings

But this success was short-lived, even with the praise for Jobs’ latest design, the Macintosh. IBM was Apple’s stiffest competition, and it began to surpass Apple’s sales. After a falling out with Apple’s CEO, John Sculley, Jobs resigned in 1985 to follow his own interests. He started a new software and hardware company, NeXT Inc., and he invested in a small animation company, Pixar Animation Studios.

Pixar became successful thanks to Jobs’ tenacity and evolving management style. Toy Story , Pixar’s first major success, took four years to make, as the then-unknown animation company struggled. Jobs pushed its progress along by encouraging and prodding his team in critical and often abrasive ways. While some found his management style caustic, he also earned loyalty from many team members. 

“You need a lot more than vision – you need a stubbornness, tenacity, belief and patience to stay the course,” Edwin Catmull, the co-founder of Pixar, told the New York Times. “In Steve’s case, he pushes right to the edge, to try to make the next big step forward.”

Return to Apple

While Pixar succeeded, NeXT, trying to sell its own operating system to American consumers, floundered. Apple bought the company in 1997, and Jobs returned to Apple as CEO. Working for an annual salary of $1 a year (in addition to the millions of Apple shares he owned), Jobs revitalized Apple. Under his leadership, the company developed numerous innovative products – namely, the iPod, the iPhone, the iPad and iTunes. 

Apple revolutionized mobile communications, music and even how numerous industries, including retail and healthcare, carried out their everyday business operations. He showed a unique intuition when developing these products. When asked what consumer and market research went into the iPad, Jobs reportedly replied, “None. It’s not the consumers’ job to know what they want,” according to his obituary in The New York Times.

Jobs used his personal experiences, such as growing up in the San Francisco area in the ’60s and his world travel, to shape the way he designed the products that made Apple synonymous with success. He criticized the sheltered lives that characterized many in the computer industry. 

“[They] haven’t had very diverse experiences,” he told Wired . “So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.”

Death and legacy

In 2004, Apple announced Jobs had a rare but curable form of pancreatic cancer. This brush with death helped Jobs focus his energy on developing the Apple products that rose to such popularity in the 2000s.

“Almost everything – all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important,” he said in his 2005 commencement address at Stanford .

Though he was ill, it was during this time that Apple launched some of its biggest (and most successful) creations. Under Jobs, iTunes became the second-biggest music retailer in America, the MacBook Air revolutionized laptop computing, and the iPod and iPhone broke sales records. These innovations changed the way users consumed content and communicated with one another.

Jobs once said, “I want to put a ding in the universe.” After starting the personal computer revolution, launching the smartphone craze, changing the age of computer animation, and making technology popular and accessible, he made more than a ding.

Steve Jobs’ innovative leadership style

Jobs emphasized the importance of teamwork to his employees. Though he made the final decision on product designs, he knew the right people are a company’s greatest asset. “That’s how I see business,” he said in a 2003 60 Minutes interview , “… great things in business are never done by one person. They’re done by a team of people.” [Read our tips on improving the hiring process .]

At the same time, Jobs knew he had to be the best leader possible to his teams. According to Jobs’ work mantra and ethic, innovation is what distinguishes a leader from a follower. Thanks to Jobs’ expectation of high quality, almost every product he turned out was a huge success among consumers and businesses.

Steve Jobs’ impact

Steve Jobs is still recognized today for making positive impacts in a number of areas.

Helping the environment

Jobs’ innovation led to the creation of products that save trees and help the environment. In situations where someone would typically use paper, such as in a presentation or a script reading, technology on devices like the iPad replaced it. The iPhone and iPad – groundbreaking products that ushered in a new generation of smart mobile technologies – ensure “paperless” is more and more the status quo. [Learn how to create a paperless office for your business.]

Revolutionizing technology

While the iPhone wasn’t the first smartphone, it catapulted the mobile revolution forward and gave more freedom to individuals in their professional and personal lives. With an iPhone, professionals could answer calls, respond to emails, join webinars and more from their cellular device – in addition to having immediate access to music, movies and messages that fulfill their personal likes, needs and passions. [These are the tech trends we’re seeing in 2024.]

Creating a faster world

Today’s world is more instantaneous than ever before, thanks to advancements by Jobs. His innovations ensure productivity thrives, like being able to make an appointment or reservation from your mobile phone and use your iPad as a point of sale (POS) system . With Jobs’ technology, businesses and customers have much smoother and quicker interactions. [Don’t miss our picks for the best POS systems .]

What businesses can learn from Steve Jobs

There are many lessons any entrepreneur can take away from Steve Jobs’ journey from humble beginnings to the big time. Here are a few takeaways we found in his story:

Stay in the present moment

Planning is important, but you can get lost in forecasts of the future. Steve Jobs preached focus and simplicity following his spiritual journey, and that involves staying in the present moment. When you can focus on the task at hand and put your all into it, the outcomes will likely be better. That doesn’t mean you should eschew planning and forecasting, because anticipating the future is important for business leaders. But if you find yourself ruminating or worrying about what might come down the line, you’re not focusing on what’s right in front of you in the here and now. 

Find resources wherever you can

Jobs and Wozniak sold what few assets they had to invest in Apple during its earliest days. This might have seemed like a big gamble at the time, but the duo believed in what they were building, and the sale of these assets provided the means to create it. Rather than jumping at the chance to sell equity or taking out an expensive loan, ask yourself if you have any resources you can draw from first. Bootstrapping your business may leave you with more control over your company and less debt to pay back later. 

Have a grander vision

Steve Jobs wanted to build a successful company, but he also had a bigger mission. Focusing on helping the environment and achieving a sort of personal fulfillment and spiritual environment drove him – it wasn’t all about business and profitability. While pursuing success in business is an important motivation, it’s these grander visions that sustain you on days where things get most difficult. Find a broader purpose and build it into the ethos of your business in order to stay motivated and keep driving yourself – and your business – forward. 

Steve Jobs quotes

Jobs’ approach to innovation and business offers entrepreneurs industry-agnostic inspiration more than a decade after his death. Many of his quotes remain inspiring today:

• “Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn’t matter to me. … Going to bed at night saying we’ve done something wonderful – that’s what matters to me.”
• “Sometimes when you innovate, you make mistakes. It is best to admit them quickly, and get on with improving your other innovations.”
• “Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition.”
• “Technology is nothing. What’s important is that you have a faith in people, that they’re basically good and smart, and if you give them tools, they’ll do wonderful things with them.”
• “I’m convinced that about half of what separates successful entrepreneurs from the nonsuccessful ones is pure perseverance.”
• “Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.”
• “I’m as proud of many of the things we haven’t done as the things we have done. Innovation is saying no to a thousand things.”
• “Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren’t used to an environment where excellence is expected.”

Learning from a legendary leader

Although entrepreneurs tend to be independent and intrinsically motivated people, there’s plenty that can be learned by turning to the business leaders that came before them. Steve Jobs remains an icon for growing Apple into an international success. As such, he’s an important figure for any entrepreneur looking to launch and grow a small business, possibly into the next big brand to rocket onto the scene.

Tejas Vemparala contributed to this article.

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Why It Matters Who Steve Jobs Really Was

I n 2011 Walter Isaacson published a biography of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs. Isaacson’s biography was fully authorized by its subject: Jobs handpicked Isaacson, who had written biographies of Benjamin Franklin and Albert Einstein. Entitled simply Steve Jobs , the book was well-reviewed and sold some 3 million copies.

But now its account is being challenged by another book, this one called Becoming Steve Jobs , by Brent Schlender , a veteran technology journalist who was friendly with Jobs, and Rick Tetzeli , executive editor at Fast Company . Some of Jobs’ former colleagues and friends have taken sides, speaking out against the old book and praising the new one. Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO and Jobs’s successor, has said that Isaacson’s book depicts Jobs as “a greedy, selfish egomaniac.” Jony Ive, Apple’s design chief, has weighed in against it , and Eddy Cue, Apple’s vice president of software and Internet services, tweeted about the new book : “Well done and first to get it right.”

But who did get it right? And why do people care so much anyway?

(This article comes with a bouquet of disclosures, starting with the fact that Isaacson is a current contributor and former editor of TIME magazine and as such my former boss. I’m quoted in his biography—I interviewed Jobs half a dozen times in the mid-2000s, though he and I weren’t friendly. Schlender spent more than 20 years writing for Fortune , which is owned by TIME’s parent company, Time Inc., and Tetzeli was an editor both at Fortune and at Entertainment Weekly , also a Time Inc. magazine.)

Schlender and Tetzeli have given their book the subtitle “The Evolution of a Reckless Upstart into a Visionary Leader,” and its emphasis is on the transformation that Jobs underwent between 1985, when he was ousted from Apple, and 1997, when he returned to it. “The most basic question about Steve’s career is this,” they write. “How could the man who had been such an inconsistent, inconsiderate, rash, and wrongheaded businessman … become the venerated CEO who revived Apple and created a whole new set of culture-defining products?” It’s an excellent question.

11 Amazing Features of the Apple Watch

Becoming Steve Jobs is, like most books about Jobs, tough on his early years. He could be a callous person (he initially denied being the father of his first child) and a terrible manager (the original Macintosh, while magnificent in its conception, was only barely viable as a product). On this score Schlender and Tetzeli are clear and even-handed. It’s easy to forget that Jobs originally wanted Pixar, the animation firm he took over from George Lucas in 1986, to focus on selling its graphics technology rather than making movies, and if the geniuses there hadn’t been more independent he might have run it into the ground.

Schlender and Tetzeli argue that it was this middle period that made Jobs. The failure of his first post-Apple company, NeXT, chastened him; his work with Pixar’s Ed Catmull and John Lasseter taught him patience and management skills; and his marriage to Laurene Powell Jobs deepened him emotionally. In those wilderness years he learned discipline and (some) humility and how to iterate and improve a project gradually. Thus reforged, he returned to Apple and led it back from near bankruptcy to become the most valuable company in the world.

Schlender and Tetzeli strenuously insist that they’re upending the “common myths” about Jobs. But they’re not specific about who exactly believes these myths, and in fact it’s a bit of a straw man: there’s not much in Becoming Steve Jobs that Isaacson or anybody else would disagree with . What’s missing is more problematic: as it goes on, Becoming Steve Jobs gradually abandons its critical distance and becomes a paean to the greatness of Jobs and Apple. Jobs was “someone who preferred creating machines that delighted real people,” and his reborn Apple was “a company that could once again make insanely great computing machines for you and me.” It reprints the famous “ Think Different ” spiel in full. It compares Jobs’ career arc, without irony, to that of Buzz Lightyear in Toy Story . It unspools sentences like: “Steve [we’re on a first-name basis with him] also understood that the personal satisfaction of accomplishing something insanely great was the best motivation of all for a group as talented as his.”

Read More: Apple’s Watch Will Make People and Computers More Intimate

It’s easy to see why Apple executives have endorsed Becoming Steve Jobs , but it has imperfections that would have irked Jobs himself. The writing is slack—it’s larded with clichés (“he wanted to play their game, but by his own rules”) and marred by small infelicities (it confuses jibe and gibe, twice). It lacks detail: for example, it covers Jobs’ courtship of and marriage to Laurene in two dry pages (“Their relationship burned intensely from the beginning, as you might expect from the pairing of two such strong-willed individuals”). By contrast, a Fortune interview Schlender did with Jobs and Bill Gates in 1991 gets 13 pages. Whatever its faults, Isaacson’s book at least dug up the telling details: in his account of the marriage we learn that Jobs was still agonizing over an ex-girlfriend; that he had a hilariously abortive bachelor party; that he threw out the calligrapher who was hired to do the wedding invitations (“I can’t look at her stuff. It’s shit”); and that the vegan wedding cake was borderline inedible.

Jobs was famously unintrospective, but Schlender and Tetzeli seem almost as incurious about his inner life as he supposedly was. Jobs’ birth parents were 23 when they conceived him, then they gave him up for adoption; when he was 23 Jobs abandoned his own first child. It takes a determinedly uninterested biographer not to connect those dots, or at least explain why they shouldn’t be connected. We hear a lot about what Jobs did, and some about how he did it, but very little about why.

Jobs was a man of towering contradictions: he identified deeply with the counterculture but spent his life in corporate boardrooms amassing billions; he made beautiful products that ostensibly enabled individual creativity but in their architecture expressed a deep-seated need for central control. Maybe making educated guesses about a major figure’s private life is unseemly, or quixotic, but that’s the game a biographer is in. Ultimately there’s no point in comparing Steve Jobs and Becoming Steve Jobs , because the latter book isn’t really a biography at all, much less a definitive one.

A more interesting question might be, why has the story of Steve Jobs become so important to us? And why is it such contested territory? He’s also the subject of a scathing new documentary by Alex Gibney and an upcoming biopic written by Aaron Sorkin. Was Jobs, to use Schlender and Tetzeli’s terminology, an asshole, or a genius, or some mysterious fusion of the two? It’s as if Jobs’ life has become a kind of totem, a symbolic story through which we’re trying to understand and work through our own ambivalence about the technology he and his colleagues made, which has so thoroughly invaded and transformed our lives in the past 20 years, for good and/or ill. Apple’s products are so glossy and beautiful and impenetrable that it’s difficult to do anything but admire them. But about Jobs, at least, we can think ­different.

Read next: Becoming Steve Jobs Shares Jobs’ Human Side

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Short Biography of Steve Jobs

The story of Steve Jobs from cradle to grave - and beyond.

Steven Paul Jobs was born on February 24, 1955 in San Francisco, California. His unwed biological parents, Joanne Schieble and Abdulfattah Jandali, put him up for adoption. Steve was adopted by Paul and Clara Jobs, a lower-middle-class couple, who moved to the suburban city of Mountain View a couple of years later.

The Santa Clara county, south of the Bay Area, became known as Silicon Valley in the early 1950s after the sprouting of myriads of semi-conductor companies in the area. As a result, young Steve Jobs grew up in a neighborhood filled with engineers working on electronics and other gizmos in their garages on weekends. This shaped his interest in the field as he grew up. At age 13, he met one the most important persons in his life: 18-year-old Stephen Wozniak, an electronics whiz-kid —and an incorrigible prankster, much like Steve himself.

Five years later, when Steve Jobs reached college age, he told his parents he wanted to enroll in Reed College — an expensive liberal arts college up in Oregon. Even though the tuition fees were astronomical for the poor couple, they had promised their son's biological parents he would get a college education, so they relented. Steve spent only one semester at Reed, then dropped out, as he was more interested in eastern philosophy, fruitarian diets, and LSD than in the classes he took. He moved to a hippie commune in Oregon where his main activity was cultivating apples.

A few months later, Steve returned to California to look for a job. He was hired at the young video game maker Atari, and used his wages to make a trip to India with one of his college friends, Dan Kottke, in order to 'seek enlightenment'. He came back a little disillusioned and started to take more interest in his friend Woz's new activities.

Apple's origins

Woz, whose interest in electronics had grown stronger, was regularly attending meetings of a group of early computer hobbyists called the Homebrew Computer Club. They were the real pioneers of personal computing, a collection of radio jammers, computer professionals and enlightened amateurs who gathered to show off their latest prowess in building their own personal computer or writing software. The club started to gain popularity after the Altair 8800 personal computer kit came out in 1975.

The knowledge that Woz gathered at the Homebrew meetings, as well as his exceptional talent, allowed him to build his own computer board — simply because he wanted a personal computer for himself. Steve Jobs took interest, and he quickly understood that his friend's brilliant invention could be sold to software hobbyists, who wanted to write software without the hassle of assembling a computer kit. Jobs convinced Wozniak to start a company for that purpose: Apple Computer was born on April 1, 1976.

The following months were spent assembling boards of Apple I computers in the Jobses' garage, and selling them to independent computer dealers in the area. However, Wozniak had started work on a much better computer, the Apple II — an expandable and more powerful system that even supported color graphics. Jobs and Wozniak knew deep down it could be hugely successful, and therefore Jobs started to seek venture capital. He eventually convinced former Intel executive turned business angel Mike Markkula to invest in Apple to the tune of $250,000 (roughly equivalent to $1 million in today's dollars) in January 1977. Markkula was a big believer in the personal computing revolution, and he said to the young founders that, thanks to the Apple II, their company would join the Fortune 500 in less than two years.

Apple II Forever

Although Markkula was a bit too optimistic (it actually took 7 years for Apple to make it), he was right that the company would become an overnight success. Because of its beautiful package, ease of use, and nifty features, the Apple II crushed most of its competition, and its sales made the Apple founders millionaires. The biggest surge in sales came after the introduction of VisiCalc, the first commercially successful spreadsheet program: hundreds of thousands of Americans, whether they be accountants, small business owners, or just obsessed with money, bought Apple IIs to make calculations at home.

In the wake of Apple's success, its leadership decided it was time to go public. The IPO took place in December 1980, only four years after the company was founded. Steve Jobs's net worth increased to over $200 million, at age 25.

Apple's success attracted the attention of the computer giant IBM, which until then was still only selling mainframe computers to large companies. A crash project was started and in August 1981, the IBM PC entered the personal computer market. It was the biggest threat yet to Apple, whose reputation was being put into question after the flop of the Apple III in 1980. Most hopes rested on a business computer project, called the Lisa.

Lisa & Xerox PARC

Steve Jobs was a big believer in the Lisa computer initially. It was he who came up with the name. Indeed, in 1978, his ex-girlfriend from high school Chrisann Brennan gave birth to a little girl, who she named Lisa. Steve denied paternity, although it was obvious to everyone who knew him that he was the father, given the on-and-off relationship he still had with Chrisann at the time. Jobs refused to give any money to Chrisann, despite the millions he had accumulated at Apple. While in denial, he came up with the name "LISA" for the new computer Apple was building...

The following year, a tour of the computer research lab Xerox PARC made a huge impression on him. The scientists who worked there had invented a number of breakthrough technologies that would mark the industry for the coming decades, including the graphical user interface (GUI) and the mouse, Ethernet, laser printing and object oriented programming. Jobs became obsessed with the GUI which was a lot easier to use than the command-line interfaces of the day. Instead of learning a computer language, you only had to point at pictures to use it. He insisted the Lisa should have a GUI and a mouse, too.

However, because of his hot temper and his relative inexperience in management, Steve Jobs grew at odds with the Lisa leadership team and was thrown out of the project. He felt absolutely crushed by this decision. As a revenge, he took over a small project called Macintosh, a personal computer that was supposed to be a cheap appliance, 'as easy to use as a toaster' . In 1981, Steve Jobs became head of the Macintosh project, and decided to make it a smaller and cheaper version of the Lisa, complete with a GUI of folders, icons and drop-down menus —and, of course, a mouse.

The three years it took to develop Macintosh were some of the most productive and intense in Steve Jobs' career. He formed a small group of dedicated, young, brilliant engineers who stood fully behind his vision of a 'computer for the rest of us'. They saw themselves as 'pirates' against the rest of Apple, which they dubbed 'the Navy'. The team antagonized both the Apple II group and the Lisa group, as they dismissed them as representing the past, while they were the future. Yet in 1983, after it became clear the Lisa was turning into another major flop for Apple, all of the company's hopes started to rest on the Macintosh. Steve was supported in his mission by John Sculley, Apple's new CEO whom he hired in 1983 to help him run the company and groom him into a future chief executive.

Leaving Apple

On January 24 1984, after Apple had run a very memorable TV commercial for the Super Bowl ( 1984 ), Steve Jobs introduced Macintosh at the company's annual shareholders meeting . The product was launched in great fanfare and for the first few months, it was quite successful.

However, by early 1985, as the whole PC industry fell into a slump, sales of the Mac started to plummet. Yes, Steve Jobs refused to acknowledge it and continued to behave as if he had saved Apple. This created a lot of tension within the company, especially between Steve and CEO John Sculley. While they used to be very close, they'd now stopped talking to one another.

In May 1985, Steve Jobs started trying to convince some directors and top executives at Apple that Sculley should go. Instead, many of them talked to Sculley, who took the matter to the board of directors. The board sided with Sculley and a few days later, announced a reorganization of the company where Steve Jobs had no operational duties whatsoever —he was only to remain chairman of the board.

Steve was aghast: Apple was his life, and he was effectively kicked out of it. After four months spent traveling and trying out new ideas, he came back in September with a plan: he would start a new computer company aimed at higher education, with a small group of other ex-Apple employees. When Apple learned of the plan, they declared they would sue him as he was taking valuable information about the company to compete with it. As a result, Steve Jobs resigned from Apple and sold all but one of his Apple shares in disgust. He went ahead with his plan anyway, and incorporated NeXT. Apple dropped its lawsuit a few months later.

The NeXT years

Steve aimed at the highest possible standards for his new NeXT machine: he wanted the best hardware, built in the world's most automated factory, and running the most advanced software possible. He decided that the computer's operating system, NeXTSTEP, would be based on UNIX, the most robust system in the world , used by the military and universities —but that it would also be as easy to use as a Macintosh, with its own GUI. NeXTSTEP would allow for object-oriented programming, another breakthrough from Xerox PARC, that made writing software much faster and more reliable. These ambitious plans put off the release date of the computer — called the NeXT Cube — to October 1988.

When it came out, the NeXT Cube was indeed a great machine. But it didn't sell — it was late, and way too overpriced: universities has asked for a $3,000 PC, and NeXT had built a $10,000 workstation. After two years of very low sales, the company launched the cheaper NeXTstation, and expanded its target to businesses, in addition to higher education. It didn't work: the number of NeXT computers sold each month remained in the hundreds. The company was bleeding money and all its co-founders left one after the other, as well as its most prominent investor, Texan billionaire Ross Perot. By 1993, NeXT had to give up its entire hardware business to become a niche software company. Steve Jobs had failed, and he was devastated. He started focusing less on work, and more on his wife Laurene (who he married in 1991) and his newborn son, Reed.

To understand how Steve Jobs got out of his nadir, let's go back eight years earlier, in late 1985. At the time, George Lucas, who was in the middle of an expensive divorce, was selling the computer graphics division of his Lucasfilm empire. Steve Jobs had millions in the bank, after having sold all his Apple stock, and was interested. In early 1986, he bought the small group of computer scientists, and incorporated a new company: Pixar. The founders of Pixar, Ed Catmull and Alvy Ray Smith, had gotten together in the late 1970s with a common vision of making films using computer animation only. But they also knew no computer was powerful enough at the time, and they would have to hold out for a couple decades before their dream could materialize.

For the first five years of Pixar's life, Steve Jobs set a goal for the company to sell high-end computer graphics workstations for institutions, such as hospitals or even the army. The animations group led by John Lasseter was very small at the time, and only survived because it provided good publicity for the power of the Pixar 3D rendering software, RenderMan. Steve Jobs understood this when the studio won an Academy Award for its short movie Tin Toy in 1989. However, just like NeXT's, sales of Pixar hardware were microscopic, and the company went software-only in 1990.

Pixar then became a software company whose primary product was RenderMan. Its animation business was kept alive because it was the only one that brought some cash in, by producing various TV commercials in 3D for brands. However, a decisive contract changed everything: in 1991, Disney signed a contract with Pixar to make a full-feature computer-animated movie. The script had to be fully approved by both parties, and the very hands-on head of Disney animation Jeffrey Katzenberg halted the production several times out of creative disagreements with John Lasseter and his team. But in 1995, the movie was finally starting to take form, and Steve Jobs became increasingly enthused by it.

Although he had used his personal money to fund Pixar for nine years, Jobs had never been implicated that much in the company, which was always more of a 'hobby' to him compared to NeXT. But by 1995, NeXT had more or less tanked, whereas Pixar was obviously going to benefit widely from the Disney marketing machine and make a hit with its movie, Toy Story . Steve understood this new momentum full well: he planned to take Pixar public the week following the release of the movie, in November 1995. He was right, and Toy Story 's box-office success was only surpassed by the Pixar stock's success on Wall Street. Steve Jobs, who owned 80% of the company, saw his net worth rise to over $1.5 billion —five times the money he had ever made at Apple in the 1980s!

Back to Apple

Business wasn't all sunshine and roses at Apple. In the decade following Steve's departure, the computer maker had milked all the cash it could from the Macintosh and its successors, surfing on the wave of the desktop publishing revolution that the Mac and the laser printer had made possible. But in 1995, after Microsoft had released Windows 95, which was a pale but working copy of the Mac OS GUI, sales of Macintosh computers started plummeting.

A new CEO, Gil Amelio, arrived in early 1996 to save the company. He cut costs, got rid of a third of the workforce, and decided that instead of writing a new, modern operating system from scratch to compete with Window, it was better for Apple to acquire one. Eventually, Amelio chose to buy NeXTSTEP, NeXT's operating system — and agreed to buy the company for $400 million (roughly equivalent to $670 million today). The deal was made in December 1996: Steve Jobs was back at the company he had founded.

The Amelio-Jobs cooperation didn't last long, though: Apple lost $700 million in the first quarter of 1997, and the board decided to get rid of its CEO. Jobs effectively organized a board coup with the complicity of his billionaire friend Larry Ellison, and after a tenure that lasted exactly 500 days, Amelio was gone. In August 1997, Jobs took the stage at Macworld Boston to explain his plan for Apple: he had gotten rid of the old board of directors, and made a deal with Microsoft to settle patent disputes and invest $150 million in the struggling Silicon Valley icon. One month later, on September 16, 1997, Jobs accepted to become Apple's interim CEO.

For the loser now will be later to win

The few months after Steve Jobs came back at Apple were among the hardest-working in his life. He later told his biographer Walter Isaacson that he was so exhausted, he couldn't speak when he came home at night (remember he was also running a thriving Pixar simultaneously). He reviewed every team at Apple and asked them to justify why they were important to the future of the company. If they couldn't, their product would get canceled, and there was a high probability they'd have to leave, too. Jobs also brought with him his executive team from NeXT, and installed them in key positions.

Critics started to believe in Steve Jobs's ability to run Apple when he unveiled his first great product, the iMac. Introduced in May 1998 , it was Apple's first truly innovative product since the original Macintosh of 1984. Its translucent design blew away the whole PC industry, which had failed to produce anything but black or beige boxes for over a decade. Moreover, it was a hot seller, and put the company's finances back in the black. The iconic iMac also played a key role in bringing back tons of developers to the Mac platform. Design innovations continued throughout 1998 and 1999 with the colored iMacs and the iBook, Apple's consumer notebook. After three years in charge, Steve Jobs had brought Apple back to its status of cool tech icon.

At Macworld in January 2000 , Steve Jobs made two significant announcements: first, he demoed Aqua, the graphics-intensive user interface that Apple would use in its next-generation operating system derived from NeXTSTEP, Mac OS X. Second, he announced he had accepted the Apple board's offer, and became the company's CEO, dropping the 'interim' from his title. It was quite controversial, as he remained CEO of Pixar, another public company. Mac OS X had not shipped yet, though —it would take another year to do so.

The simple fact that such a massive OS transition took place was a technical feat in itself. The Mac OS X team worked very hard and released six major versions of the system at a roughly yearly cadence between 2001 and 2007 —each time delivering more stability, speed, and new user features. Although Steve Jobs buried Mac OS 9 on stage in 2002 , most observers acknowledge that the transition from Classic Mac OS to OS X was really complete in 2005, with the release of Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger. The continuous improvement of Mac OS X and its powerful core technologies and developer tools proved key in the success of the Digital Hub strategy, which Steve Jobs unveiled in January 2001.

The Digital Hub

Once Apple had been come back from its near-death experience in the late 1990s, Steve Jobs started focusing on ways to make the company's shrinking market share (around 5%) grow. He decided to leverage Apple's unique strength of making both hardware & software to do this: not only would Macs be very powerful and attractive machines, but they would also run differentiated software that no Windows PCs could. His first move was to bet on what he called 'desktop video', the ability to shoot and edit personal movies on your Mac. He was convinced that desktop video would become as big a deal as desktop publishing had been in the 1980s. As a first step, in 1999, he introduced the iMac DV (which stood for Digital Video) and a new digital movie editing software, iMovie .

The iMac DV was a hit, but desktop video failed to catch on as well as Jobs had hoped. After much introspection, in 2000, the Apple executive team came up with a new paradigm for the Mac that would set the company's destinies for the coming decade. They took the idea of desktop video and decided to expand it to other consumer digital devices, which were rapidly becoming mainstream at the time. Apple would write software for the Mac to edit and store all the new digital content that consumers created —and these apps would be so powerful, delightful and easy to use, that they would entice PC users to switch to the Mac. The Digital Hub strategy was born. Steve Jobs explained it to the Apple community at Macworld in January 2001 , the same day he unveiled the second and third of the iApps: iDVD —to let you burn your own DVDs— and iTunes, a digital jukebox software. Other iApps would follow: iPhoto in 2002, GarageBand in 2004, and iWeb in 2006.

2001: An Apple Odyssey

In many ways, the juggernaut that Apple became was shaped by very smart decisions that Jobs and his executive team took in the crucial period of 2000-2001. We've already covered Mac OS X and the Digital Hub strategy, both unveiled in January 2001.

A third key decision was taken in 2000 and unveiled in mid-2001: that of creating a fully-owned retail channel, the famous Apple retail stores. Although it is easy to call this strategy smart in retrospect, it was far from obvious back in May 2001, when the first two retail stores were inaugurated. That same year, PC maker Gateway was shutting down its own retail stores one after the other, and the analysts consensus was that niche player Apple would burn precious money in this economic downturn on a foolish and dated idea. On the other hand, Steve Jobs explained that only in an environment fully controlled by Apple, with Apple-trained staff and only Apple-compatible products, could the superiority of Apple products be fully appreciated by consumers.

Finally, it was in 2000 that Jobs started realizing his mistake of betting only on digital movies, and reoriented the company's efforts to another media: music. Digital music file-sharing service Napster was at the peak of its popularity, and young people were not spending their time shooting movies, but rather downloading and listening to MP3 music files. iTunes was born out of that realization. Still, there was a problem: although there were great digital camcorders to run in conjunction with iMovie —and awesome digital cameras too for iPhoto— digital music players mostly sucked. Not to mention, they were ugly.

That's why, in March 2001, Steve Jobs started a crash development program to build an Apple-branded MP3 player and ship it before that year's holiday season: the iPod was born. On October 23, 2001, he introduced this cute white digital device to a small group of journalists on Apple's campus. The tagline was 'A thousand songs in your pocket' ( the ad is a classic ), and there was great emphasis on its symbiosis with the iTunes app. But no one in the room, Jobs included, had any clue how important it would turn out to be.

iPod nation

iPod was a commercial success from the day it debuted, even though it was released as Mac-only, since its goal was to prop up sales of the Mac. It came at a time when a lot of people needed a good MP3 player to take their (mostly stolen) MP3s with them, and despite its rather high price tag, a lot of PC users ended up buying it too, hacking it so they could use it on their machines. This had Steve Jobs and his team think a great deal: should they keep making a Mac-only iPod, or should they open it to Windows, too? Although Jobs was initially staunchly opposed to the latter idea, he eventually relented, and the first Windows iPods were introduced in July 2002 at Macworld New York .

However, it was soon becoming clear that iPod benefited from music piracy, and that its sales could go even higher if there was a legal way to download music. Steve Jobs didn't wait for the music industry to reinvent itself. He went to all record labels to negotiate landmark deals that would lead to the introduction of the iTunes Music Store in April 2003. Ironically, one of the arguments he used was that the risk to music labels was quite low, because of the Mac's small market share (iTunes was still Mac-only). The first compelling legal alternative to illegal music file-sharing, the iTunes Store was an instant success, selling one million songs in its first week. It not only helped the sales of iPods, but it eventually reshaped the whole music industry. It was introduced to Windows as well six months later , in October 2003.

Despite this great success, Apple didn't rest on its laurels. In January 2004, Jobs introduced the iPod mini , a more compact version of iPod that sold at $249, only $50 less than the full featured iPod. It was really the combination of the iPod mini and the Windows compatibility that propelled the iPod to its status of cultural icon. The phrase 'Walkman of the digital age' became commonplace to describe it, and in July 2004, Steven Levy of Newsweek wrote an emblematic cover story entitled 'iPod nation' . The iPod adventure was far from over, since Apple introduced the $99 iPod shuffle and the 'impossibly small' iPod nano in 2005, and the iPod video in 2006. By that time, 'iPod' had become synonymous with 'portable music player', and the iTunes Store had sold over one billion songs.

Although the iPod changed the music industry and the way everybody listened to music, the most important change it carried was probably that of Apple. The wild success of iPod proved to all the company's employees, starting with Jobs himself, that they were right to strive for perfection and ease of use —unlike the Mac, which still didn't grow beyond its 5% market share, iPod garnered Microsoft-like numbers of 80% of the MP3 player market. It was iPod that revealed the future of Apple, not only as a PC manufacturer, but as a consumer electronics powerhouse. It was also iPod that broadened the company's expertise in the supply chain, manufacturing, and distribution of a mainstream digital device in gigantic proportions. Finally, it was iPod which, through the crowds it attracted to the company's retail stores, finally helped the Mac business of Apple, whose growth rate started outpacing that of consumer Windows PCs from 2005.

When Pixar met Disney

iPod also played an indirect role in shaping the future of Steve's 'other' company, Pixar. After having released hit after hit ( A Bug's Life (1998), Toy Story 2 (1999), Monsters Inc. (2001) and Finding Nemo (2003)), the animation studio had decided to let go of its distribution deal with Disney, mainly because of increasing tensions between Steve Jobs and Disney CEO Michael Eisner. Steve Jobs openly said he would not make another deal with the Magic Kingdom until Eisner was out. Turns out his opinion was shared by many an executive at Disney — including Walt's own nephew, Roy Disney, who started a public campaign to oust the company's CEO in late 2003. This led to the nomination of Bob Iger as new CEO in September 2005.

Rumor has it that one of the first phone calls Iger made after he became CEO was to Pixar CEO Steve Jobs. He was willing to show his good will in ending the Pixar-Disney dispute. Steve Jobs took the opportunity to pitch him his new Apple plan. He was going to introduce an iPod with video capabilities soon, and he wanted a movie store to go along with it. Iger accepted, and both men appeared on stage in October 2005 to announce that Disney would be selling TV shows on the iTunes Store. The audience of journalists was pleasantly surprised to see the CEO of Disney appear so friendly with Steve Jobs, and suspected there would soon be news on the Pixar side.

Indeed, just a couple months later, on January 24, 2006, Disney announced its friendly acquisition of Pixar, at $7.4 billion (mostly in stock). Jobs became a Disney board member and its largest individual shareholder, owning 7% of the company's stock —ironically, this is by far what contributed to most of his wealth, not his Apple stock. Pixar executives Ed Catmull and John Lasseter were also both given leadership roles in the new combined animation studio. In many ways, it was as if Pixar had taken over Disney animation —a reverse acquisition reminiscent of NeXT taking over Apple after the 1996 merger.

Meanwhile, Apple was seeing unprecedented success in all its businesses, not only iPod and iTunes. The retail stores were hugely popular, and a milestone was reached when Steve Jobs inaugurated the impressive 5th Avenue store in Manhattan, a glass cube facing Central Park. As for the Mac, it was gaining momentum on the market, benefiting from both the aura of the iPod, and the switch to Intel processors.

Indeed, at WWDC in June 2005, , Jobs made a surprise announcement that after over a decade on the PowerPC microprocessor architecture, Apple would start using more power-efficient Intel chips in its Macs. In the late 1990s, Apple had run several ads to make fun of Intel's Pentium processors. As a matter of fact, the expression 'Wintel machines' (Windows + Intel) was often used to describe PCs. That move to Intel was thus pretty bold, but in the long run turned out to be another wise decision. Not only did it make Macs more competitive and efficient, paving the way for the super slim (and super successful) MacBook Air notebooks —it also opened up a whole new set of customers to Apple, as Intel Macs could run both Mac OS X and Windows. The Mac became the platform of choice for an ever larger number of software developers. Less than a year after the announcement, all new Macs were running Intel. The transition was a complete success.

iPod made Steve Jobs realize that Apple could become the greatest consumer electronics company on the planet. Around 2003, he started a secret project to develop a computer tablet. But in 2004-2005, he realized that the technology that had been developed for this tablet —including a revolutionary touch-screen technology— could also be used in a mobile phone, which was even more appealing. After two more years of development, iPhone was introduced at Macworld on January 9, 2007 . This keynote is often considered the pinnacle of Steve Jobs' career.

iPhone was not only a breakthrough digital convergence device ("an iPod, a phone, and an Internet communicator" all in one), it was also a force of disruption for the traditional phone business. Just like for the iTunes Store, Steve Jobs had negotiated a landmark deal with wireless carrier AT&T before he introduced iPhone —without ever showing them a prototype! In exchange for exclusivity, the carrier would pay Apple a share of all their iPhone subscription revenues. And of course, AT&T could not put any software on the iPhone, and no logo either. This was an inversion of the traditional master-slave relationship that carriers entertained with phone manufacturers (OEMs). In the long run, it really turned the phone industry upside down.

Unlike iPod, all of Apple understood that iPhone, if successful, could become a world-changing device and redefine their company. Thus, at the end of the iPhone introduction, Steve Jobs also announced that the company's name would change from Apple Computer Inc. to Apple Inc. Macs still mattered, but they now accounted for a minority of Apple's revenues, and this trend was not about to be reversed. They was a highly symbolic moment in the company's history.

The original iPhone was quite successful: despite its $399 price tag, Apple sold 6 million of them during its lifetime. But sales really started to skyrocket in 2008, after Apple introduced the cheaper iPhone 3G (at a subsidized $199 price) and the App Store. Just like the Windows-compatible iPod, Steve Jobs was originally opposed to letting third-party software on the iPhone. But the demand was so high that he eventually relented, and introduced the iPhone SDK and the App Store in March 2008.

It is impossible to overestimate the impact of the iPhone's App Store, which ushered in a new era in mobile software. Thousands of developers started writing apps for the iPhone platform, which became a competitive advantage for Apple. Apple proudly showed off this rich choice of software in its TV ad campaign 'There's an app for that' , which ran for over two years.

Health concerns

Unfortunately, while he had never been so successful professionally, Steve Jobs had to start fighting cancer with renewed intensity.

In late 2003, he had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer of a rare kind, that could potentially be cured by surgery. However, against everyone's advice, he refused to have the surgery for nine long months. Instead, true to the ideals of his youth, he tried alternative diets and treatments, including acupuncture and seeing a psychic. Only in July 2004 did he agree to have the surgery. He looked healthy for the next five years, and spoke publicly of being 'cured' of cancer at his famous Stanford commencement speech in 2005 .

Yet at the WWDC keynote in June 2008 , few observers failed to notice how thin he appeared on stage, and concerns about his health started popping up again. They became increasingly frequent until December 2008, when Apple made a shocking announcement that Jobs would not be the keynote speaker at Macworld 2009, and that he was taking a medical leave of absence for six months. Although he (and Apple) publicly denied it, the truth was that his cancer had come back. He was actually weeks away from death when he received a liver transplant, in April 2009. He came back to Apple in late summer 2009, healthier though still very frail in appearance. He was eager to bring the finishing touches to a new project very dear to his heart.

Ushering in the Post-PC era

The iPhone had spun off the idea for a tablet device back in 2005, and it was time to restart that project, which of course became the iPad. Although some speculated it would run Mac OS X, it was decided that iPad would in fact run the same operating system as iPhone, now called iOS. It would therefore benefit from the rich variety of apps already present in the iPhone App Store.

Although iPad was welcomed by mixed reviews when it was introduced in January 2010 (some dubbed it a "larger iPod touch"), it was always clear to Steve Jobs that it was 'the biggest thing [he'd] ever done' —the ultimate post-PC device, an eventual replacement of PCs for the average user. He laid out his vision clearly at the D8 conference in June 2010, where he compared PCs to trucks and iPads to cars. This perspective on iPad was reiterated in a series of TV commercials where the narrator, the 'Apple voice', explained how revolutionary iPad was, and how the revolution had 'only just begun'.

Unfortunately, Steve Jobs' health, which had seemed to recover throughout 2010, started declining again. In January 2011, he announced he was taking a new medical leave of absence, this time without saying when it would end. Everybody started talking about his upcoming departure. However, he deemed iPad and iOS so important that he still made two major public presentations at Apple events. The first one was the introduction of iPad 2 in March 2011, and the second one was WWDC , in June 2011, where he introduced iCloud.

In many ways, the iCloud announcement was of similar importance as the Digital Hub Strategy introduction ten years before. It was not only a product, but a master plan to get consumers to adopt iOS devices and lock them into the Apple ecosystem. The 2011 iCloud, which allowed users to sync email, documents, and media across their Macs and iDevices, was only the first step in that direction. It was crucial to Steve Jobs, who clearly considered iOS to be the most important of Apple's businesses, and the key to its future success.

Building his legacy

The resurgence of Steve's cancer was a painful reminder that it was time to 'put his affairs in order' before his passing —and he did.

First, he made sure that Apple was ready to operate without him. In late 2008, he hired the dean of the Yale School of Management to create 'Apple University', a sort of internal business track to groom future Apple executives by exposing them to the Apple ways, through case studies of the history of the company. He also consolidated his executive team and agreed with the board that his natural successor would be his second in command, COO Tim Cook. Finally, at his last public appearance in June 2011, he unveiled his plans for the future Apple campus in Cupertino (now Apple Park ), a huge spaceship-sized building in the shape of a circle. All of this was in place when he eventually resigned as Apple CEO on August 24, 2011.

Jobs also prepared his personal legacy. In 2009, he started giving interviews to writer Walter Isaacson to prepare for his first and only authorized biography, sharing with him his perspective on his life and career. He also spent his last days designing a yacht for his family on which he hoped to travel the world. Unfortunately, death took him too soon, and he died peacefully at home on October 5, 2011, surrounded by his family —the day following the introduction of the iPhone 4S, an Apple event that he most likely watched from his deathbed.

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© 2006-2024 Romain Moisescot

• Occupation: Entrepreneur and inventor
• Born: February 24, 1955 in San Francisco, California
• Died: October 5, 2011 in Palo Alto, California
• Best known for: Co-founding Apple Computers
• Jobs got the name for Apple Computers after spending some time at an apple orchard.
• The movie Brave from Disney Pixar was dedicated to Steve Jobs.
• Ashton Kutcher played the lead role in the 2013 film Jobs .
• He had four children including three daughters and a son.
• In 2013, Apple sold more than 350,000 iPhones a day.
• Fortune magazine named him as the "greatest entrepreneur of our time."
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Steve Jobs: The Man Who Thought Different: A Biography Paperback – Illustrated, February 14, 2012

A riveting biography of the groundbreaking innovator who was a giant in the worlds of computing, music, filmmaking, design, smart phones, and more. A finalist for the YALSA Excellence in Nonfiction Award! "Your time is limited. . . . have the courage to follow your heart and intuition." ―Steve Jobs From the start, his path was never predictable. Steve Jobs was given up for adoption at birth, dropped out of college after one semester, and at the age of twenty, created Apple in his parents' garage with his friend Steve Wozniack. Then came the core and hallmark of his genius―his exacting moderation for perfection, his counterculture life approach, and his level of taste and style that pushed all boundaries. A devoted husband, father, and Buddhist, he battled cancer for over a decade, became the ultimate CEO, and made the world want every product he touched, from the Macintosh to the iPhone, from iTunes and the iPod to the Macbook. Critically acclaimed author Karen Blumenthal takes us to the core of this complicated and legendary man while simultaneously exploring the evolution of computers. Framed by Jobs' inspirational Stanford commencement speech and illustrated throughout with black and white photos, this is the story of the man who changed our world. Read more thrilling nonfiction by Karen Blumenthal: Hillary Rodham Clinton: A Woman Living History (A YALSA Excellence in Nonfiction Award Finalist) Bootleg: Murder, Moonshine, and the Lawless Years of Prohibition Tommy: The Gun That Changed America Praise for Steve Jobs: The Man Who Thought Different: A Biography: “This is a smart book about a smart subject by a smart writer.” ― Booklist, starred review “Students who know Steve Jobs only through Apple's iTunes, iPhones, and iPads will have their eyes opened by this accessible and well-written biography.” ― VOYA “An engaging and intimate portrait. Few biographies for young readers feel as relevant and current as this one does.” ― The Horn Book Magazine “A perceptive, well-wrought picture of an iconic figure.” ― Kirkus Reviews “Blumenthal crafts an insightful, balanced portrait.” ― Publishers Weekly

• Reading age 12 - 18 years
• Print length 320 pages
• Language English
• Grade level 2 - 7
• Lexile measure 1110L
• Dimensions 5.45 x 0.85 x 8.2 inches
• Publisher Square Fish
• Publication date February 14, 2012
• ISBN-10 125001445X
• ISBN-13 978-1250014450
• See all details

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Editorial Reviews

“This is a smart book about a smart subject by a smart writer.” ― Booklist, starred review “Students who know Steve Jobs only through Apple's iTunes, iPhones, and iPads will have their eyes opened by this accessible and well-written biography.” ― VOYA “An engaging and intimate portrait. Few biographies for young readers feel as relevant and current as this one does.” ― The Horn Book Magazine “A perceptive, well-wrought picture of an iconic figure.” ― Kirkus Reviews “Blumenthal crafts an insightful, balanced portrait.” ― Publishers Weekly

From the Back Cover

About the author.

Karen Blumenthal (1959-2020) was a financial journalist and editor whose career included five years with The Dallas Morning News and twenty-five with The Wall Street Journal ―where her work helped earn the paper a Pulitzer Prize for its breaking news coverage of the September 11, 2001 attacks―before becoming an award-winning children’s non-fiction book writer. Three of her books, Hillary Rodham Clinton: A Woman Living History , Steve Jobs: The Man Who Thought Different , and Bootleg: Murder, Moonshine, and the Lawless Years of Prohibition , were finalists for the YALSA Excellence in Nonfiction for Young Adults Award. Karen was also the author of Six Days in October: The Stock Market Crash of 1929 (named a Sibert Honor Book), Let Me Play: The Story of Title IX (winner of the Jane Addams Children’s Book Award), Tommy: The Gun That Changed America , Bonnie and Clyde: The Making of a Legend , and Jane Against the World: Roe v. Wade and the Fight for Reproductive Rights .

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Steve jobs: the man who thought different, feiwel & friends, product details.

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Square Fish; 1st edition (February 14, 2012)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 320 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 125001445X
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1250014450
• Reading age ‏ : ‎ 12 - 18 years
• Lexile measure ‏ : ‎ 1110L
• Grade level ‏ : ‎ 2 - 7
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 11.2 ounces
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.45 x 0.85 x 8.2 inches
• #6 in Teen & Young Adult Inventions
• #17 in Teen & Young Adult Science & Technology Biographies
• #760 in Biographies of Business & Industrial Professionals

About the author

Karen blumenthal.

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Short Biography of Steve Jobs

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