One of the most iconic figures in the world of high technology, Steve Jobs co-founded the company that ignited the PC business, revolutionized portable music and how we buy music, and remade the cell phone industry - while helping to create the leading animation movie studio in the world.
Jobs was born on February 24, 1955 and raised in the area he would help make famous as Silicon Valley. He was adopted and named Steven Paul by Paul and Clara Jobs of Mountain View, CA. The Jobs family moved to nearby Los Altos, where Jobs attended Homestead High. He worked summers at Hewlett-Packard, where he met a recent dropout of the University of California at Berkeley, Steve Wozniak. After graduating high school, Jobs attended Reed College in Portland, Oregon, for a semester, but dropped out. While auditing philosophy classes he also worked in an apple orchard. In 1974, he went to work for video game pioneer Atari.
After saving some money, Jobs went on a spiritual journey to India. When he returned, he began to attend meetings of the Homebrew Computer Club, where he and Wozniak set out to build and market a computer for the home. To fund the new company named Apple in honor of Jobs' orchard work, Jobs sold his VW microbus and Wozniak his HP calculator.
The Apple I sold for $666 in 1976 and was essentially a single motherboard, a video interface and some ROM into which programs could be loaded. Apple I earned Jobs and Wozniak $774,000, which the pair plowed into their next product, the Apple II, introduced in April 1977. Considered one of the first PCs, the Apple II was comprised of a CPU, keyboard and disk drives and could be connected to a color TV.
Jobs recruited marketing muscle well as venture capitalists. In three years, the Apple II and its successors earned the company $139 million and made Apple, Jobs and Wozniak instant icons. Apple went public in 1980 and, two years later, its sales reached $583 million.
In the early 1980s, Apple suffered the failures of the Apple III and the $10,000 Lisa, which was the first PC to use a mouse and a graphic user interface, developed by PARC, the Palo Alto Research Center. In 1984, Apple produced the Macintosh, introduced by an Orwellian SuperBowl ad. However, the Macintosh's success led to conflict within Apple. Jobs saw his role marginalized and he resigned in 1985.
During the next decade, Jobs created a computer company called NeXT and also bought a Lucasfilm company called The Graphics Group, later renamed Pixar. Pixar's pioneering computer animated films have won numerous Oscars and have grossed more than $4 billion worldwide. In 2006, Pixar merged with The Walt Disney Company, with Jobs becoming the largest shareholder.
Jobs returned to an ailing Apple in 1996 to become interim CEO. He opened the first Apple retail stores in 1997 and the all-in-one iMac computer in 1998, re-energizing the company, its stock price and its reputation. In 2000, the "interim" was removed from Jobs' CEO title.
A year later, Apple introduced the iPod, the first commercially successful digital music player. Apple linked the iPod to iTunes, software which combined digital music management with an online music store to create a hardware/content "ecosystem" that enabled Apple to capture and maintain a dominant share in both the hardware and music businesses. Apple has sold more than 200 million iPods and in April 2008, Apple, a PC company, became the country's largest music retailer. The iPod also spawned a cottage industry in add-on products such as cases, auto connectors and speakers. As a result, the iPod has become the most accessorized product in CE history.
In 2007, Apple revolutionized the cell phone industry with its iPhone that also had a hardware/software ecosystem. Apple encouraged third-party developers to create small applications, or apps, for both the iPhone and the iPod. Today there are more than 50,000 iPhone apps available. Within two years, Apple sold more than 15 million iPhones, making Apple the world's third largest cell phone maker. iPhone's touchscreen smartphone/application store model was quickly emulated by several cell phone makers.
In early 2009, Jobs had a liver transplant but returned to work in June 2009. He oversees a company with 35,000 employees, annual revenues of more than $32 billion and a record of technological innovation and sales success.