Steve Jobs, the Genius Behind Apple and Pixar

Steve Jobs: 1955 - 2011

Quick Bio

Name: Steven Paul Jobs

Born: February 24, 1955, in San Francisco, CA. - adopted at birth

Parents: Steven Reinhold Jobs (1922-1993) and Clara Jobs (1924-1986)

Married: Laurene Powell 1991 to his death

Children: Reed, Erin, Eve and step-daughter Lisa Brennan-Jobs

Siblings: Patricia, born 1957. He later learned he had a biological sister, author Mona Simpson, born in 1957

Died: October 5, 2011, pancreatic cancer, at age 56

Occupation: Co-Founder Chairman and CEO, Apple Inc., Co-founder and CEO, Pixar, Founder and CEO, NeXT Inc.

Board Member: The Walt Disney Company and Apple Inc.

Steve Jobs - 1972 high school yearbook photo

Without adoption, life could have turned out very differently for Steve Jobs

They say we are a product of our upbringing and environment, and if that is true, Steve's life might have taken a very different turn if he had not been adopted by Paul and Clara Jobs.

Recounting some of his adoption story in his 2005 commencement speech at Stanford University (see video below), he realized that life with his biological parents would have been a much different upbringing, most likely without the exposure to electronics as much as he had, the friendships he cultivated or living and working among the new technology companies of Silicon Valley.

Although Paul and Clara Jobs had both passed away by 2005, Steve Jobs told the graduating class that he was very proud to be their son and to have had them as his parents, his only parents.

Given the times in the 1970s and how quickly technology advanced, Steve "Woz" Wozniak's idea for the Apple computer probably would still have come to be without the input of Steve Jobs, but likely under another name and different leadership, possibly with one of the other hi-tech Silicon Valley companies.

Steve Jobs: Early Life - An Adoption Success Story

The man we came to know as Steve Jobs was born in San Francisco, CA to a college teacher, Abdulfattah (John) Jandali, of Syrian descent, and a college student, Joanne Schieble, of Swiss descent, who were unmarried at the time. They gave their baby boy up for adoption because Joanne Schieble's family did not approve of her relationship with Jandali.

On February 24, 1955, he was named Steven Paul Jobs by his adopted parents, Paul and Clara Jobs, a blue-collar Armenian American couple in their early 30's.

One of the stipulations of the biological mother for adopting her baby was that she wanted the new parents to be college graduates. After learning Paul and Clara were not college graduates, she did sign the adoption papers, but only after getting assurance that the child would be college educated or at least encouraged to attend. Trying to fulfill this promise when Steve graduated from high school would threaten to financially deplete the couple's retirement savings account.

Unbeknownst to the adoptive couple and the biological parents at the time, they didn't need to worry too much about a college education when life lessons would serve the child just as well, if not better.

When Steve was five, the Jobs family moved from San Francisco to Los Altos, California, the mecca of what was to become the electronics capital of the world - Silicon Valley. There were many opportunities to get into the ground floor of technology. Clara Jobs went to work for Varian Associates, a Silicon Valley technology firm, as a payroll accountant. Paul Jobs was a mechanic, carpenter, and later an electronics enthusiast.

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Surrounded by electronic companies like Atari and Hewlett Packard, both for whom Steve would work during his teenage summers, even his father couldn't help but dabble in gadgets and electronics in his garage as one of his many hobbies. Of course, it rubbed off on his son as assembling and reassembling, building and repairing became a much enjoyed father and son past time. Before he entered his teen years, Steve was well on his way to eagerly pursuing a life centered around electronics.

In June 1957, the Jobs family became complete with the adoption of a daughter, Patricia (Patty). Steve was raised in the Lutheran faith, but later followed Zen Buddhism. Both parents lived long enough to see some of Steve's success; Clara died in 1986; Paul in 1993.

It wasn't until Steve started searching for his biological parents in 1985 that he found out they had indeed married in December 1955, eleven months after they gave him up for adoption. He was happy to learn he had a biological sister, Mona Simpson, who was born in 1957 and grew up to become an accomplished novelist. The Jandalis divorced in 1962 and went their separate ways.

Years later during her brother's eulogy, Mona Simpson told about how her father bragged that he once managed a large Silicon Valley Mediterranean restaurant which was so popular that even Steve Jobs ate there, adding that he was a great tipper.

In a 2003 interview with 60 Minutes, a television magazine show, Jobs said what little he had learned about Jandali from Mona, he didn't like. He asked her not to share anything about himself with Jandali, nor to tell him that the two had ever met when he owned that restaurant in Silicon Valley.

Jandali had little way of knowing that Steve Jobs was his biological son because he had cut off all ties with his ex-wife and daughter after the bitter divorce. When Joanne Jandali remarried, Mona took her stepfather's name, Simpson. From 1987 until his death, Steve and Mona maintained a close relationship.

Hewlett-Packard

As a pre-teen, he attended lectures and workshops at the Hewlett-Packard plant in what was then a very young Silicon Valley. He became a member of the Hewlett-Packard Explorer Club which exposed him to new electronic products and according to the Encyclopedia of World Biography, it was this club that made him want to work with computers.

Other sources give credit to many other relationships:

• his friendship with Bill Fernandez,
• his introduction to Steve Wozniak,
• his summer jobs at Hewlett-Packard and Atari
• learning in his father's garage.

Really, it could have been any or a combination of all of these factors.

Author's note: At this point, it seems a little silly to this author that various websites and some people (who are now writing or filming biographies), are emphatically quibbling over just who should take credit for Steve's start in his life path and at what juncture in his life. One should view and be proud of his accomplishments, not worry about the credit for getting him started on those accomplishments.

Chance meetings

When Steve attended Homestead High School in Cupertino, California, he became friends with electronics enthusiast Bill Fernandez, who introduced then 13 year old Steve to his 18 year old neighbor and recent Homestead graduate, Steve "Woz" Wozniak.

The two had a lot in common since they both played pranks on people at Homestead High School during their time there.

"Woz" was a whiz kid, always tinkering and constructing electronic gadgets. By 1969, he was building a personal computer with Bill Fernandez. Woz and Steve's friendship carried over to employment when they both worked at Atari, an electronic game developer.

Despite their five year age difference, their friendship would become one of the most important relationships in their lives.

When Steve graduated from high school in 1972, he chose a rather expensive college to attend - Reed College in Portland, Oregon. His parents poured in their life savings and borrowed from their retirement funds to paying his tuition, only to watch him drop out six months later when he began using the psychedelic drug, LSD and developed an interest in Eastern Philosophy.

He expressed his desire to travel to India to meet Hindu guru, Neem Karoli Baba. To get there, he had to earn the money.

You won't know if you don't ask

Ideas for the Mac

One of the courses Steve audited at Reed College was in calligraphy. He credits the course with giving him the foresight and creativity of incorporating typefaces and fonts on the Mac.

"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."

-- Steve Jobs.

Source: wikipedia.com

Atari

Steve Jobs had a knack of being in the right place at the right time -- and making the right friends didn't hurt either. He became a driven salesman through and through, whether the idea was his or someone else's didn't matter - he could sell it.

He believed that if he didn't ask for help with something, then he'd never know if help would have come his way.

He was also very competitive, a trait which seemed to have served him well all his life, but was often taken for bullyness.

By 1972, Woz was nearly finished building his first Apple computer. On another side project (there always seemed to be side projects), Woz created his own version of "Pong," an arcade game. Jobs said he could take it to Atari, an electronics and video game developer, to see if they would be interested in buying it.

Woz agreed, gave him the circuit boards and Steve Jobs ended up getting hired at Atari. Several sources say an Atari executive thought Jobs had built the game himself, so that was why he hired him as a video game technician. Later Wozniak was hired at Atari as a video game developer.

Finally Going To India

Jobs worked for Atari until 1974, earning enough money to travel to India in search of spiritual enlightenment from Neem Karoli Baba, a spiritual leader he had heard so much about.

When he arrived in India, he learned Neem Karoli Baba had died in September 1973 - some six months before Jobs had started saving to go on the trip. At this point, he had already sacrificed to travel there, so he stayed for seven months bumping around India on their bus system.

He shaved his head, took to wearing Indian clothing, started using LSD and became a lifelong follower of Zen Buddhism. Seventeen years later, he and his wife Laurene were married in a traditional Buddhist ceremony in 1991.

He did not return home to his parents in California. Instead, he went to Portland, Oregon to join a commune where his daily job was caring, cultivating and picking apples. Some say this is where he got the idea to name his company, Apple.

He would continue to audit classes at Reed College while hanging out with an Oregon Hare Krishna group to get whatever free meals he could and slept on the dorm floors of whomever would let him. He never took a degree from his studies.

In June 1975, he went back to work at Atari. Steve and Woz began attending meetings of the Homebrew Computer Club in Menlo Park, CA. Woz impressed the Club when he showed them his first computer, the Apple I, which was unique in several ways - it displayed characters on a TV-like screen and it could run video.

Apple I at the Smithsonian Museum

Another side job: How to get free long distance phone service

Woz had designed an electronic digital "blue box" which was a device that people would use to make free long distance phone calls thereby cheating the phone company out of being paid them.

Again, Steve Jobs saw the potential to make money on this venture, even though it was an illegal device.

In the following video, he partially credited the experience of building and marketing the blue boxes for some of Apple's success and in being able to go up against large companies.

Creating blue boxes for free long distance phone calls

Steve Jobs, Apple 1, 1975-76

With Woz's brains and Jobs' salesmanship, they were a good match.

Steve Jobs, always seeing opportunity, told Woz he wanted to market the Apple I computer as a circuit board.

Throughout my research, Woz didn't exhibit much ambition for the actual marketing of his ideas.

Truth be told, his ideas were great, but he needed someone like Steve to get them off the ground.

Clearly marketing strategies and suggestions were not Woz's niche.

However, he was very agreeable to kicking in some funds to finance Steve's suggestions.

The two sold some of their possessions and worked in the Jobs' garage creating a total of fifty circuit boards.

When they sold them, they had some of the needed capital to start their new company.

Woz, age 26, was the brains behind building, development and design in this partnership.

Jobs, age 21, was the salesman to get the projects to interested parties for financial backing and to get the each completed product to market.

It was a good match.

First home of Apple Computer Company

1979 - 1980

Apple Computer Company is born

In 1976, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne, (who had worked with them at Atari), created the Apple Computer Company in the garage of the Jobs home in Los Altos, California. Jobs was 21, Woz was 26 and Wayne was 42.

Ronald Wayne drew the logo, wrote the original Apple I manual as well as their partnership agreement. However, due to a bad experience in a previously failed venture to develop a slot machine company five years earlier, he didn't want to be a permanent partner in another company. Less than two weeks later, he sold his interest for $800 and agreed to forfeit any interest in the company.

Financially, it was a very poor business decision on his part.

A year later, in 1977, Apple's sales exceeded $2.7 million and in 1978 went to $7.8 million.

Ronald Wayne left Atari in 1978 and went on to sell rare stamps. Upon retirement, he moved to a mobile home park in a small town in Nevada.

****

As two of the youngest entrepreneurs to own their own computer company, Jobs and Wozniak were making a name for themselves with their product, but they were rather inexperienced in how to run the actual company. They also realized that they needed more funding to get their Apple II into the manufacture phase.

Working on his lifelong belief that if you don't ask, you'll never know, Steve Jobs then asked angel investor Mike Markkula, a semi-retired executive from Intel (a microchip company) to invest in Apple. With his investment of $250,000, Markkula became the third Apple employee in a company who liked to number their employees on their employee ID badges.

In February 1977, Mike Markkula approached entrepreneur Michael Scott to become CEO of Apple and to run the day to day operations. He held the position until March 1981 when a little power went to his head one Wednesday and he fired over 40 employees whom he believed were surplus.

Michael Scott was the first of many CEO's that would pass through Apple's doors. Scott was demoted to vice chairman in March 1981; Mike Markkula took over as CEO until 1983 but remained employed with the company until 1997.

Mike Markkula was a beta tester and programmer of early Apple software. He wrote a program to balance a checkbook in 1978, loading it onto a data cassette. When he complained it took too long to boot up from the cassette, Woz got to thinking and tinkering - which led to the development of the Disk II floppy disk drive.

Lisa Brennan-Jobs

Although Steve claimed "Lisa" was an acronym for "Local Integrated Software Architecture" it didn't hold much sway, especially after his friend, India traveling companion and twelfth Apple employee, Daniel Kottke, outed him in a 1982 Time Magazine article about the Apple Lisa, confirming that Lisa Brennan was his daughter.

A furious Steve Jobs said it was his private business. He then denied Kottke stock in Apple but Steve Wozniak later gave him some of his own shares of Apple stock.

Publicly, it all came up again in 2010 when Steve Jobs confirmed Lisa Brennan's paternity to Walter Isaacson during the many interviews he conducted while writing Jobs' biography. He said of the Apple Lisa, "Obviously, it was named for my daughter."

Lisa Brennan-Jobs lived with Steve and Laurene Jobs for a few years in her teens. Steve paid for her to go to Harvard University and she graduated in 2000. She is now a published author living in New York.

The Apple Lisa

In 1978, Steve Jobs had a baby girl with Christine Brennan, whom he had dated sporadically since high school. She named the baby, Lisa. Both parents were 23 years old. Steve had denied he was the father, stating he was sterile.

However he must have known in his heart that he was her father because that same year, Jobs started the development of a new Apple model, the Apple Lisa, aimed at individual business owners.

But by 1982, after four years of disagreements between Jobs and his development team, he was forced off the Apple Lisa project. In most cases, this would have been a bad thing, but he fell into an even better project. The Macintosh.

The Apple Lisa did come to be completed in 1983 and was offered for sale at a cost of $9,995. In 1984, a revision in the form of Lisa 2 brought the price down to between $3500 and $5000, still quite an expense in 1984 dollars.

When it was clear that no one wanted the Apple Lisa anymore, sales ceased in 1986.

If you have a working Apple Lisa, you may have a real collector's item. Depending on its condition, you could have a very valuable, albeit obsolete, computer!

Macintosh - 1984

Mac or Windows

The Macintosh

NeXT workstation

Steve Jobs: The Macintosh and NeXT, Inc

The Macintosh was offered to consumers in January 1984. At a large price tag, it had very poor sales, so it was not a commercial success.

In 1983, Steve Jobs approached Pepsi-Cola president, John Sculley, to become CEO of Apple while Jobs continued as CEO, chief marketing executive and head of Macintosh Division. With the failure of Macintosh and tension between the two men, it created a power struggle between them.

A year later, Steve Jobs would find himself demoted to no position in the company and exiled to his home. After being phased out of his own company by Sculley, he was forced to resign completely from the Apple Computer Company.

With lots of ideas, he wouldn't be down and out for long.

In 1985, he decided to switch gears and start a company for hardware and software. He called it NeXT, Inc. However, after $7 million and nothing much to show for it, he had to look for a big ticket investor.

He approached and received a heavy financial investment from billionaire investor Ross Perot.

By 1988, the first NeXT computer was ready for sale and in 1990 a smaller version called NeXTstation was distributed. Sales were not great, about 50,000 units sold, so NeXT got out of the hardware end and stayed in software and programming. In 1993, the company finally showed a profit of $1 million.

1986 and onward: Pixar

Life went on at Apple Inc as they went through many CEO's while Jobs was gone.

And, life went on for Steve Jobs as he bought another company and continued to make his mark on our world.

The Graphics Group, a division of LucasFilm (1971), was owned by Hollywood film director and Star Wars screenwriter George Lucas. Steve Jobs bought the company for $10 million in 1986 and renamed the company "Pixar."

While still running NeXT, his company Pixar would make another partnership that would change the way animated movies were made - with The Walt Disney Company in 1991.

Steve Jobs was instrumental in the development projects at Pixar, but heavily relied on creative chief, John Lasseter, for day to day development.

Pixar's first project was Luxo Jr. in 1986, followed by Toy Story, A Bug's Life, Toy Story 2 and the list goes on.

Both Lucas Film ($4 billion in 2012) and Pixar ($7.4 billion in 2006) were sold to The Walt Disney Company. Pixar was an all stock transaction making Steve Jobs the largest single stockholder in The Walt Disney Company, owning 7 percent of the company. Lucas Film was half stock, half cash.

It is interesting to note that Steve Jobs took $1 per year as salary as Apple CEO. However, he owned 5.4 million shares of Apple worth over $2 billion (in 2011), and 138 million shares of Disney stock (7% of the company) which was his payment for selling Pixar to Disney. The Disney stock was worth about $4.5 billion in 2011 at the time of Jobs' death.

His stock was transferred to the Steven P. Jobs Trust which is overseen by his wife, Laurene. The trust was later renamed Laurene Powell Jobs Trust.

Steve Jobs: On Pixar

About a cell phone idea

"You know, everybody has a cell phone, but I don't know one person who likes their cell phone. I want to make a phone that people love." -- Steve Jobs

iPhones

Although Apple started development of the iPhone around 2005, the first iPhone wasn't released for public sale until June 2007. It was a much publicized and much awaited piece of technology. The touch screen was something new to consumers.

In 2007, Time Magazine called it the Invention of the Year.

In 2008, the Apple iPhone 3G came out and it had a GPS program on it. Sales skyrocketed, this was definitely something consumers could use.

The iPhone 4S came out in October 2011. It was camera ready and had a voice recognition program.

Today, iPhones are the most popular brand of cellphone.

1996: Returning home to Apple

John Sculley, the man who was responsible for removing Steve Jobs from his own company in 1986, had been fired as CEO in 1993 for poor decisions regarding adding PowerPC, a microprocessor, to Apple's operating system. It cost the company dearly in profits. Sculley was replaced by Michael Spindler who was replaced a year later by Gil Amelio.

As Apple's CEO, Gil Amelio failed to revamp Mac's operating system so Steve Jobs' company NeXT, especially his NeXTSTEP operating system and WebObjects were looking real good to him.

$429 million later, Amelio agreed with angel investor Mike Markkula and several other Apple board of directors to hire Steve Jobs back as an advisor only. It was all Steve Jobs needed to get his foot back in the door after watching his company make a series of some not so great decisions over the last ten plus years.

It was no secret that Gil Amelio was on his way out of Apple's door partly because the price of Apple's stock was at a three year record low price per share and because the company was suffering big losses due to the many changes Amelio had proposed and supported in Apple's product lines.

In July 1997, Amelio was finally removed by the board of directors and Jobs was appointed interim CEO. Mike Markkula retired shortly after Jobs' return to Apple. It didn't last long; he went on to be a founding member of Echelon Corporation.

Jobs set about revamping the products to rebuild the company he and Woz had started back in 1976.

First up was to create an online store and sell Apple products over the internet, followed by terminating some projects like OpenDoc and Cyberdog which were not returning a profit. Employees worried also about being terminated because Jobs set about getting rid of dead weight - employees and products.

Apple went on to get into several other profitable markets with many products, including iMac, iBook, iPod, and iTunes store.

Success in most companies is not only determined by product sales but also by stock price. Stock price can also fluctuate due to the health of the man in charge. In 2003, Steve Jobs was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and Apple's stock reflected the news at $6 per share. After Jobs' health improved during 2006, it was at $80 per share.

Steve Jobs - 3 short stories

In 2005, Steve Jobs was invited to give the commencement speech at Stanford University. In his opening statement, he said he only had three short stories.

They may have been three short stories, but they left an impact truly worthy of a college commencement speech that students and viewers of the video will carry with them forever.

Steve Jobs had been cleared of pancreatic cancer after the Whipple procedure in 2004. But it is clear during his speech that his longevity was on his mind.

2005 Commencement Speech at Stanford University

Test Your Steve Jobs Knowledge

Comparison between 2007 and 2009

Walter Isaacson's book "Steve Jobs"

Steve Jobs talks about God and what he thinks happens after death

While being interviewed by Walter Isaacson for his biography "Steve Jobs," he told Isaacson, “I’m about fifty-fifty on believing in God.”

“I like to think that something survives after you die,” Jobs said. “It’s strange to think that you accumulate all this experience, and maybe a little wisdom, and it just goes away. So I really want to believe that something survives, that maybe your consciousness endures.”