Stephen Paul Jobs

1955-

American Computer Pioneer

Steve Jobs helped revolutionize the personal computer industry, creating the innovative Macintosh computer and developing Apple Computer, Inc., into a multibillion dollar company.

Steve Jobs was born in 1955. Orphaned as an infant, he was adopted by Paul and Clara Jobs, and grew up in the California suburbs of Mountain View and Los Altos, which would later become the heart of Silicon Valley. While in high school, Jobs was hired as a summer employee at the Hewlett-Packard electronics firm in Palo Alto. There he met Stephen Wozniak (1950- ), an engineering whiz kid. Wozniak was in the process of developing his "blue box," an illegal device that allowed a user to make free long-distance calls. Jobs helped Wozniak sell his device, forging a partnership that would several years later change the face of the home-computer industry.

In 1972 Jobs entered Reed College in Portland, Oregon, but his college career was short-lived. After one semester, he dropped out to become involved with the counterculture of the 1970s. In early 1974 he signed on as a video game designer with Atari, Inc., which in the early 1980s would become famous for its Pac-Man and Space Invaders arcade games.

After only a few months at Atari, Jobs had saved up enough money to travel to India on a search for spiritual enlightenment. When he returned in the fall of 1974, Jobs again caught up with Wozniak, who was then holding regular meetings of his "Homebrew Computer Club." Unlike Wozniak, Jobs was not interested in building computers; instead, he wanted to market them. Jobs convinced Wozniak to help him create their own personal computer, one which was smaller, cheaper, and easier to use than what was currently available to consumers. In Jobs's bedroom and garage they designed and built their prototype. With $1,300 (earned from selling Jobs's Volkswagen microbus and Wozniak's scientific calculator), they started their own company. Wozniak quit his job at Hewlett-Packard to become vice president in charge of research and development. Jobs came up with the name Apple, in honor of the summer he worked in an Oregon orchard.

The first computer the pair designed and marketed, the Apple I, sold for $666 in 1976. It was the first single-board computer with built-in circuitry allowing for direct video interface, along with a central ROM, which allowed it to load programs from an external source. The Apple I earned Jobs and Wozniak $774,000. A year later, the Apple II was launched with a simple, compact design like the Apple I, plus a color monitor. Within three years, the Apple II's sales had grown by 700 percent, to $139 million.

In 1980 Apple made its move on Wall Street, its stock rising to $29 on the first day of trading, bringing the company's value to $1.2 billion. Business was good for the two Apple founders, but the fledgling computer company was not without competition. The corporate might of IBM, with its two-year-old personal computer (PC), was beginning to get the edge with consumers. Jobs realized that to compete against this industry Goliath, Apple would have to make its operating system compatible with that of IBM.

Enter the Macintosh, a powerful new computer with 128K of memory—twice that of the PC. The Mac, as it became known, had a 32-bit microprocessor, which outperformed the PC's 16-bit version. Not only was it faster, it was more versatile and easier to use than the PC, offering—as its print campaign suggested—a computer "for the rest of us." The Macintosh was introduced to the world on Super Bowl Sunday 1984 in an Orwellian-themed commercial that promised a revolutionary new wave in personal computing. The world was watching, and the Macintosh caught on like wildfire.

But just as sales of the Macintosh were taking off, president John Sculley persuaded Apple's board of directors that Jobs's emphasis on technical performance over consumer needs was hurting the company, and Jobs was sent off to a remote office that he termed "Siberia"—far from the inner workings of the company he had created. In September of 1985 Jobs resigned as chairman of Apple. In 1989 he formed a new computer company called NextStep, which he believed would compete with Apple in the personal-computer market. Eight years and $250 million later, NextStep was forced to close its hardware division. Ironically, Apple went on to acquire NextStep several years later.

By the late 1990s Jobs had moved on to a new venture as chairman and CEO of Pixar, the Academy Award–winning computer animation studio he founded in 1986. Pixar's first feature film, Toy Story, was released by Walt Disney Pictures in 1995 and became the third-highestgrossing animated film up to that time.

STEPHANIE WATSON