STEVE JOBS BIOGRAPHY

Steve Jobs was an American business magnate, industrial designer, investor, and media proprietor. He was the chairman, chief executive officer (CEO), and co-founder of Apple Inc.; the chairman and majority shareholder of Pixar; a member of The Walt Disney Company‘s board of directors following its acquisition of Pixar; and the founder, chairman, and CEO of NeXT.

Steven Paul Jobs is widely recognized as a pioneer of the personal computer revolution of the 1970s and 1980s, along with his early business partner and fellow Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak.

CHILDHOOD [ Birth, Biological, and Adoption Family]

Jobs was born in San Francisco, California, and put up for adoption. Steven Paul Jobs was born on February 24, 1955, to Abdulfattah Jandali and Joanne Schieble, and was adopted by Paul and Clara Jobs (née Hagopian).[2]

His biological father, Abdulfattah ‘John’ al-Jandali (Arabic, grew up in Homs, Syria, and was born into an Arab Muslim household.

While an undergraduate at the American University of Beirut in Lebanon, he was a student activist and spent time in prison for his political activities.

He pursued a Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin, where he met Joanne Carole Schieble. As a doctoral candidate, Jandali was a teaching assistant for a course Schieble was taking, although both were the same age.

Mona Simpson, Jobs’s biological sister, notes that her maternal grandparents were not happy that their daughter was dating a Muslim, that Schieble’s father “threatened to cut Joanne off completely” if she continued the relationship.

See Also: Mark Zuckerberg Biography

Steve Jobs’ adoptive father, Paul Reinhold Jobs, was a Coast Guard mechanic. After leaving the Coast Guard, Paul Jobs married Clara Hagopian in 1946.

Their attempts to start a family were halted after Clara had an ectopic pregnancy, leading them to consider adoption in 1955.

Schieble became pregnant with Jobs in 1954 when she and Jandali spent the summer with his family in  Syria.  Jandali said, Schieble deliberately did not involve him in the process. Joanne upped and left to move to San Francisco to have the baby without anyone knowing, including me.”

Schieble gave birth to Jobs on February 24, 1955, in San Francisco and chose an adoptive couple for him that was “Catholic, well-educated, and wealthy, but the couple later changed their mind.

Steve Jobs was then placed with Paul and Clara Jobs, neither of whom had a college education, and Schieble refused to sign the adoption papers.

She then took the matter to court and only consented to release the baby to Paul and Clara after the couple pledged to pay for the boy’s college education.

In his youth, Steve’s parents took him to a Lutheran church. When Steve Jobs was in high school, Clara admitted that she “was too frightened to love [Steve] for the first six months of his life.

I was scared they were going to take him away from me. Even after we won the case, Steve was so difficult a child that by the time he was two I felt we had made a mistake and wanted to return him.

When Chrisann shared this comment with Steve, he stated that he was already aware and would later say he was deeply loved and indulged by Paul and Clara.

Many years later, Steve Jobs’s wife Laurene also noted that “he felt he had been blessed by having the two of them as parents.”Jobs would become upset when Paul and Clara were referred to as his “adoptive parents”; he regarded them as his parents “1,000%”. Concerning his biological parents, Jobs referred to them as “my sperm and egg donor.

EARLY LIFE

Paul Jobs worked in several jobs that included a try as a machinist, several other jobs, and then “back to work as a machinist.”

Paul and Clara adopted Jobs’s sister Patricia in 1957 and by 1959 the family had moved to the Monta Loma neighborhood in Mountain View, California.

It was during this time that Paul built a workbench in his garage for his son to “pass along his love of mechanics. Jobs, admired his father’s craftsmanship “because he knew how to build anything, if we needed a cabinet, he would build it when he built our fence, he gave me a hammer so I could work with him.

I wasn’t that into fixing cars … but I was eager to hang out with my dad. By the time he was ten, Jobs was deeply involved in electronics and befriended many of the engineers who lived in the neighborhood  He had difficulty making friends with children his age, however, his classmates saw him as a “loner.

See Also: Tim Cook Biography

Jobs had difficulty functioning in a  classroom, tends to resist authority figures, misbehaved, and was suspended a few times. Clara had taught him to read as a toddler, and Jobs stated that he was “pretty bored in school and turned into a little terror.

He frequently played pranks on others at Monta Loma Elementary School in Mountain View. His father Paul (who was abused as a child) never scolded him,  instead of blaming the school for not challenging his brilliant son.

Jobs would later credit his fourth-grade teacher, She bribed him into learning. She would say, ‘I want you to finish this workbook. I’ll give you five bucks if you finish it.’

That kindled a passion in me for learning things! I learned more that year than I ever thought I learned in any other year in school.

They wanted me to skip the next two years in grade school and go straight to junior high to learn a foreign language but my parents very wisely wouldn’t let it happen.

Steve Jobs skipped the 5th grade and transferred to the 6th grade where he became a “socially loner“. Steve Jobs was often “bullied”, and in the middle of 7th grade, he told his parents that they either take him out of Crittenden or he would drop out of school.

Though the Jobs family was financially buoyant, they used all their savings in 1967 to buy a new home, allowing Jobs to change schools.

The new house (a three-bedroom home on Crist Drive in Los Altos, California) was in the better Cupertino School District, Cupertino, California, and was embedded in an environment that was even more heavily populated with engineering families than the previous one.

The house was declared a historic site in 2013, as it was the first site for Apple Computer; as of 2013, it was owned by Jobs’s sister, Patty, and occupied by his step-mother, Marilyn.

When he was 13 in 1968, Jobs was given a summer job by Bill Hewlett (of Hewlett-Packard) after Jobs cold-called him to ask for parts for an electronics project.

EDUCATION

He attended Reed College in 1972 before dropping out that same year, and picked a job where he worked as a video game designer and  later went to India in 1974 seeking enlightenment and experiencing Buddhism

See Also: Elon Musk Biography

MARRIAGE

In 1989, Jobs first met his future wife, Laurene Powell, when he was giving a  lecture at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, where she was a student. Soon after the event, he stated that Laurene “was right there in the front row in the lecture hall, and I couldn’t take my eyes off of her.

After the lecture, Jobs walked up and met up with her and invited her out to dinner.  forward, they were together.

Jobs proposed on New Year’s Day 1990. They married on March 18, 1991, in a Buddhist ceremony at the Ahwahnee Hotel in Yosemite National Park. Fifty people, including Jobs’s father, Paul, and his sister Mona, attended. Palo Alto, California.

Steve Jobs Career

Jobs and Wozniak co-founded Apple in 1976 to sell Wozniak’s Apple I personal computer. Together they gained fame and wealth a year later with the Apple II, one of the first highly successful mass-produced microcomputers.

Jobs saw the commercial potential of the Xerox Alto in 1979, which was mouse-driven and had a graphical user interface (GUI).

This led to the development of the unsuccessful Apple Lisa in 1983, followed by the breakthrough Macintosh in 1984, the first mass-produced computer with a GUI.

The Macintosh introduced the desktop publishing industry in 1985 with the addition of the Apple LaserWriter, the first laser printer to feature vector graphics. Jobs was forced out of Apple in 1985 after a long power struggle with the company’s board and its then-CEO John Sculley.

That same year, Jobs took a few Apple employees with him to found NeXT, a computer platform development company that specialized in computers for higher education and business markets.

In addition, he helped to develop the visual effects industry when he funded the computer graphics division of George Lucas‘s Lucasfilm in 1986.

The new company was Pixar, which produced the first 3D computer-animated feature film Toy Story (1995), and went on to become a major animation studio, producing over 20 films since then.

Jobs became CEO of Apple in 1997, following his company’s acquisition of NeXT. He was largely responsible for helping revive Apple, which had been on the verge of bankruptcy.

He worked closely with designer Jony Ive to develop a line of products that had larger cultural ramifications, beginning in 1997 with the “Think different” advertising campaign and leading to the iMac, iTunes, iTunes Store, Apple Store, iPod, iPhone, App Store, and the iPad.

In 2001, the original Mac OS was replaced with the completely new Mac OS X (now known as macOS), based on NeXT’s NeXTSTEP platform, giving the OS a modern Unix-based foundation for the first time.

Steve Jobs was diagnosed with a pancreatic neuroendocrine tumor in 2003. He died of respiratory arrest related to the tumor at age 56 on October 5, 2011.

NETWORTH

According to Forbes list, he was one of the youngest people to make it on the list of the nation’s richest people, and one of only a handful to make it themselves without inheritance before his death his worth grew to $250 million.