By Christiana Ioannou
Steve Jobs (full name Steven Paul Jobs) was a young entrepreneur also known as a pioneer of the personal computer revolution of the 1970s and 1980s.
He was born in San Francisco, California 1955 and adopted by a couple named Paul and Clara Jobs at birth. He proudly used to call his adoptive parents real parents. Jobs’s mother Clara – an accountant and his father – a mechanist, always wanted their son to be well-educated and embrace learning.
By learning electronics from his father, Jobs showed an early interest in gadgetry & and electronics. He worked for the Hewlett-Packard Company after high school, where he met and befriended Steve Wozniak.
Steve Wozniak was his high-school senior and a Young engineer at that time. Later on, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak worked together and co-founded Apple in 1977, introducing Apple I and then Apple II.
He was an industrial designer, business magnate, media proprietor, and investor. Jobs
died at the age of 56 on October 5, 2011, due to pancreatic cancer. His legacy includes the iPad, the Mac Computer, iPad, and iPhone.
STEVE JOBS FINANCIAL JOURNEY
APPLE I & APPLE II
In 1974, Jobs was reconnected with Steve Wozniak and get to know about his progress in designing his computer logic board. He urged Wozniak that they should go into business together.
They built the Apple I – a logic board in the Jobs family garage with the money they obtained by selling Wozniak’s programmable calculator and Jobs Volkswagen minibus.
With Jobs’s handling the sales and Wozniak doing the building process, they made enough money to design an improved version of Apple I with a keyboard, a sleek, and a molded plastic case to enclose the unit. The improved model was called Apple II.
The Apple II was one of the most highly mass-produced microcomputers that lead to the formation of the company Apple. With this fame and wealth, the company had a record-setting Public Stock Offering (IPO) in 1981 and then made an entrance into the Fortune 500 list of America’s top countries at that time.
In 1985, Jobs was fired out from Apple after a long power struggle with company’s CEO and board of directors.
Foundation of NEXT & PIXAR
After leaving Apple, Jobs founded NEXT Computer Co., which produces sophisticated computers for research, higher education, and business markets. The NEXT computer-enhanced a host of innovations, including exceptional graphics, fast processing speeds, and an optional disk drive.
The NEXT priced at $9,950 was too expensive to attract enough sales so, Jobs switched the focus of the company from hardware to software. In 1986, he also purchased a controlling stake in a company called Pixar from George Lucas. Pixar time was struggling to survive during that time.
Fuelled by this success, Jobs took Pixar public in 1996, and by the end of the first day of trading, his 80 percent share of the company was worth $1 billion
Return to Apple
Jobs’s famous founding company, Apple, was facing huge losses and was on the verge of collapse during that time because it was failed to produce a next-generation Macintosh operating system.
Within days of the revolutionary arrival of Pixar, Apple bought NEXT $400 million and re-appointed Jobs to Apple as its board of directors as an advisor to Apple chairman and CEO Gilbert F. Amelio.
Apple announced a quarterly loss of $708 million in March 1997 while Amelio resigned and Jobs took over as interim CEO. Jobs made a deal with Microsoft for a $150 million investment and cooperation on several sales and technology fronts.
He then installed the G3 PowerPC microprocessor in all Apple computers, spearheaded the development of the iMac, a new line of affordable home desktops, which debuted in August 1998 to rave reviews.
Under Jobs’s guidance, Apple quickly returned to profitability, and by the end of 1998, boasted sales of $5.9 billion.
Over the next decade, Apple rolled out a series of revolutionary products, including the iPod portable digital audio player in 2001, an online marketplace called the Apple
iTunes store in 2003, the iPhone handset, in 2007 and the iPad tablet computer in 2010.
The design and functionality of these devices resonated with users worldwide. In August 2011, Apple’s board of directors announced that Jobs had resigned as CEO and that he would be replaced by COO Tim Cook while Jobs remained as company chairman.
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