Steve Paul Jobs

Steven Paul Jobs ( February 24, 1955 – October 5, 2011) was an American businessman and inventor widely recognized as a charismatic pioneer of the personal computer revolution.[4][5] He was co-founder, chairman, and chief executive officer of Apple Inc. Jobs was co-founder and previously served as chief executive of Pixar Animation Studios; he became a member of the board of directors of The Walt Disney Company in 2006, following the acquisition of Pixar by Disney.

In the late 1970s, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak engineered one of the first commercially successful lines of personal computers, the Apple II series. Jobs directed its aesthetic design and marketing along with A.C. "Mike" Markkula, Jr. and others.

In the early 1980s, Jobs was among the first to see the commercial potential of Xerox PARC's mouse-driven graphical user interface, which led to the creation of the Apple Lisa (engineered by Ken Rothmuller and John Couch) and, one year later, creation of Apple employee Jef Raskin's Macintosh. After losing a power struggle with the board of directors in 1985, Jobs left Apple and founded NeXT, a computer platform development company specializing in the higher-education and business markets.

In 1986, he acquired the computer graphics division of Lucasfilm Ltd, which was spun off as Pixar Animation Studios.[6] He was credited in Toy Story (1995) as an executive producer. He remained CEO and majority shareholder at 50.1 percent until its acquisition by The Walt Disney Company in 2006,[7] making Jobs Disney's largest individual shareholder at seven percent and a member of Disney's Board of Directors.[8][9]

In 1996, NeXT was acquired by Apple. The deal brought Jobs back to the company he co-founded, and provided Apple with the NeXTSTEP codebase, from which the Mac OS X was developed."[10] Jobs was named Apple advisor in 1996, interim CEO in 1997, and CEO from 2000 until his resignation. He oversaw the development of the iMac, iTunes, iPod, iPhone, and iPad and the company's Apple Retail Stores.[11]

In 2003, Jobs was diagnosed with a rare form of pancreatic cancer. Though it was initially treated, Jobs reported of a hormone imbalance, underwent a liver transplant in 2009, and appeared progressively thinner as his health declined.[12] In August 2011, during his third medical leave, Jobs resigned as CEO, but continued to work for Apple as Chairman of the Board until his death.

On October 5, 2011, he died in his Palo Alto home, aged 56. His death certificate listed respiratory arrest as the immediate cause of death, with "metastatic pancreas neuroendocrine tumor" as the underlying cause. His occupation was listed as "entrepreneur" in the "high tech" business.[13]

Early life and education

Steven Paul Jobs was born in San Francisco on 24 February 1955, to two university students, Joanne Carole Schieble and Syrian born Abdulfattah "John" Jandali , who were both unmarried at the time.[14] He was adopted at birth by Paul Reinhold Jobs (1922–1993) and Clara Jobs (1924–1986). Clara's maiden name was Hagopian.[15] When asked about his "adoptive parents," Jobs replied emphatically that Paul and Clara Jobs "were my parents."[16] He later stated in his authorized biography that they "were my parents 1,000%."[17] His biological parents subsequently married (December 1955), had a second child Mona Simpson in 1957, and divorced in 1962.[17]

The Jobs family moved from San Francisco to Mountain View, California when Steve was five years old.[1][2] Paul and Clara later adopted a daughter, Patti. Paul Jobs, a machinist for a company that made lasers, taught his son rudimentary electronics and how to work with his hands.[1] Clara was an accountant,[16] who taught him to read before he went to school.[1] Clara Jobs had been a payroll clerk for Varian Associates, one of the first high-tech firms in what became known as Silicon Valley.[18]

Jobs attended Monta Loma Elementary, Mountain View, Cupertino Junior High and Homestead High School in Cupertino, California.[2] He frequented after-school lectures at the Hewlett-Packard Company in Palo Alto, California, and was later hired there, working with Steve Wozniak as a summer employee.[19] Following high school graduation in 1972, Jobs enrolled at Reed College in Portland, Oregon. Although he dropped out after only one semester,[20] he continued auditing classes at Reed, while sleeping on the floor in friends' rooms, returning Coke bottles for food money, and getting weekly free meals at the local Hare Krishna temple.[21] Jobs later said, "If I had never dropped in on that single calligraphy course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts."[21]

Honors and public recognition

After Apple's founding, Jobs became a symbol of his company and industry. When Time named the computer as the 1982 "Machine of the Year", the magazine published a long profile of Jobs as "the most famous maestro of the micro".[201][202]

Jobs was awarded the National Medal of Technology by President Ronald Reagan in 1984, with Steve Wozniak (among the first people to ever receive the honor),[203] and a Jefferson Award for Public Service in the category "Greatest Public Service by an Individual 35 Years or Under" (also known as the Samuel S. Beard Award) in 1987.[204] On November 27, 2007, Jobs was named the most powerful person in business by Fortune magazine.[205] On December 5, 2007, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and First Lady Maria Shriver inducted Jobs into the California Hall of Fame, located at The California Museum for History, Women and the Arts.[206]

In August 2009, Jobs was selected as the most admired entrepreneur among teenagers in a survey by Junior Achievement,[207] having previously been named Entrepreneur of the Decade 20 years earlier in 1989, by Inc. magazine.[208] On November 5, 2009, Jobs was named the CEO of the decade by Fortune magazine.[209]

In September 2011, Jobs was ranked No.17 on Forbes: The World's Most Powerful People.[210] In December 2010, the Financial Times named Jobs its person of the year for 2010, ending its essay by stating, "In his autobiography, John Sculley, the former PepsiCo executive who once ran Apple, said this of the ambitions of the man he had pushed out: 'Apple was supposed to become a wonderful consumer products company. This was a lunatic plan. High-tech could not be designed and sold as a consumer product.' How wrong can you be".[211]

At the time of his resignation, and again after his death, Jobs was widely described as a visionary, pioneer and genius[212][213][214][215]—perhaps one of the foremost—in the field of business,[209][216] innovation,[217] and product design,[218] and a man who had profoundly changed the face of the modern world,[212][214][217] revolutionized at least six different industries,[213] and who was an "exemplar for all chief executives".[213] His death was widely mourned[219] and considered a loss to the world by commentators across the globe.[215]

After his resignation as Apple's CEO, Jobs was characterized as the Thomas Edison and Henry Ford of his time.[220][221] In his The Daily Show eulogy, Jon Stewart said that unlike others of Jobs's ilk, such as Thomas Edison or Henry Ford, Jobs died young. He felt that we had, in a sense, "wrung everything out of" these other men, but his feeling on Jobs was that "we're not done with you yet."[222]
Steve Jobs statue at Science Park, Budapest

At Budapest, on December 21, 2011 Graphisoft company was presenting the world's first bronze statue of Steve Jobs, calling him one of the greatest personalities of the modern age.[223]

In February 2012, Jobs will be receiving the Grammy Trustees Award, an award for those who have influenced the music industry in areas unrelated to performance.[224]

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