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Steve Jobs
Co-founder of Apple Computer with Steve Wozniak.
He grew up in Los Altos, California, a stone’s throw away from Cupertino. Jobs was a true son of Silicon Valley: his adopted parents worked as a payroll clerk at Varian and a machinist at Spectra Physics.
Steve Jobs met Steve “Woz” Wozniak when he was a sophomore at Homestead High School. The two met through a mutual friend, Bill Hernandez, who was a classmate of Jobs’ and a neighbor of Wozniak. As a teenager, Jobs was a loner and an electronics enthusiast, like Woz. Jobs’ phone call to William Hewlett of Hewlett-Packard about some parts got him a summer job at the electronics company.
Jobs attended Reed College in Portland, Oregon. While there, he embraced the counter-culture with open arms—he was on a search for enlightenment. He became a vegetarian and studied Richard Alpert’s Be Here Now. Before long, Jobs dropped out of school.
Hoping to make a pilgrimage to India to become a follower of Alpert’s guru, Jobs returned to Silicon Valley to earn some money. He managed to get a job at Atari, the video-game pioneer, where he was not well-liked and had a nasty habit of insulting the engineers. Jobs eventually managed to get his boss to send him to Germany on business. This was his ticket to India. Steve Jobs spent several months in India, but left disillusioned. He returned to work at Atari as a technician. Between 1974 and 1976, Jobs returned frequently to Oregon, living for a time in a commune and undergoing primal scream therapy.
In 1975, Jobs began to attend meetings of the Homebrew Computer Club with Wozniak. When Woz built his own computer and showed it to the members of the club, Jobs had found his calling: the computer business. Jobs convinced Wozniak to go into business selling Woz’s new computer. They received an order for 50 of the new Apple Is from The Byte Shop , and Apple Computer was born. From the start, Jobs was driven to build Apple into something great.
While Woz focused on the technical side of the business, Jobs did everything he could to expand Apple. He convinced A.C. “Mike” Markkula , who had made his fortune at Fairchild and Intel, to invest in the newfound venture. Markkula managed to make the disheveled Jobs more presentable, and he helped make Jobs one of the new personal computer industry’s visionary spokespeople.
In the late 70s, Jobs led the team that created Apple’s first failure, the Apple III. A significant contribution to the Apple III’s difficulties was Jobs himself. His specifications for the project changed almost daily. He also decided on the design of the case without regard to the parts that would have to fit inside it. When it was clear the Apple III was a failure, Jobs tried to distance himself from the fiasco by turning his sights to the Lisa project.
The Lisa project team was charged with designing the next generation computer to succeed the Apple II line. As the project progressed, Jobs’ involvement became less and less welcome. His micro-management of every detail slowed the project down and annoyed the rest of the project team. In a 1980 reorganization, Jobs was removed from the Lisa project by Apple president Mike Scott. Scott was concerned that Jobs’ combative style and sometimes capricious technical decisions would lead the Lisa down the same path the Apple III had taken.
Angry, but far from defeated, Jobs turned his sights to yet another project: the small Macintosh project headed by Jef Raskin. Jobs gradually took control of the Macintosh project, eventually prompting Raskin to leave in 1982. Under Jobs’ combative, zealous, and visionary leadership, the Macintosh project gave birth to the Macintosh product we all know and love. In the midst of it all, Jobs managed to convince John Sculley to leave his position at Pepsi and come to Apple as CEO.
Following the Mac’s flashy debut, Jobs assumed control of the merged Lisa and Macintosh projects. As he had done before, Jobs began to meddle in parts of the business over which he had no authority. In the difficult times Apple was facing, his exploits were becoming a liability.
In May 1985, Jobs discovered that Sculley planned to have him stripped of his responsibilities, and planned a coup of his own. When Sculley was in China on business, Jobs hoped to have him removed from his position. Sculley caught wind of the plan and promptly canceled his trip. At an emergency meeting, the executive staff unanimously backed Sculley. Jobs was removed from his operational role but retained the chairmanship.
Four months later, in September 1985, Jobs resigned from Apple and announced his plans to form a new company, NeXT, to cater to the educational computing market. His announcement that several key Apple employees would be joining him raised the ire of Apple’s board. The dispute was later settled when Jobs agreed not to hire any additional Apple employees for a period of six months and not to compete directly with Apple. After starting up NeXT, Jobs bought the computer division of George Lucas’ LucasFilm, Ltd., Pixar. In addition to creating some breakthrough animation software, Pixar is the company responsible for Disney’s computer-generated movie Toy Story. The hoopla surrounding Toy Story has put Jobs back in the spotlight.
Steve Jobs has remained a unique character in the computer industry. As John Sculley wrote in his book Odyssey, “He was arrogant, outrageous, intense, demanding—a perfectionist. He was also immature, fragile, sensitive, vulnerable. He was dynamic, visionary, charismatic, yet often stubborn, uncompromising, and downright impossible.”