Steve Jobs

Steven Paul Jobs was born in San Francisco in 1955 and was adopted at birth by Paul and Clara Jobs, a working-class couple from the Mountain View area. As a teenager he attended the Homebrew Computer Club and befriended Steve Wozniak, an electronics engineer four years his senior. In 1976, in the Jobs family garage in Los Altos, they founded Apple Computer with Ronald Wayne and unveiled the Apple I. The Apple II, released in 1977 in an integrated plastic case, became the first mass-market success of personal computing. Apple's 1980 IPO made Jobs one of the youngest American multimillionaires. In 1984 Apple launched the Macintosh, the first successful personal computer with a graphical interface and mouse, ideas discovered during a visit to Xerox PARC in 1979. Ousted from Apple in 1985 after a clash with John Sculley, Jobs founded NeXT and in 1986 bought the animation division of Lucasfilm, renaming it Pixar. Pixar revolutionised digital animation with Toy Story in 1995 ; NeXTSTEP, its operating system, returned to Apple with the 1996 acquisition of NeXT. Becoming interim then permanent CEO in 1997, Jobs turned the company around with the iMac (1998), the iPod (2001), the iTunes Store (2003), the iPhone (2007) which launched the modern smartphone, and the iPad (2010). Diagnosed with a neuroendocrine pancreatic cancer in 2003, he went through several years of treatment, underwent a liver transplant in 2009, and resigned in August 2011 from leading Apple, succeeded by Tim Cook. He died in October 2011, aged 56, at his home in Palo Alto, one week before Dennis Ritchie. His authorised biography by Walter Isaacson appeared the same year and became a worldwide bestseller. Jobs embodies two periods of this site : personal computing, with the Apple II and the Macintosh, in direct rivalry with Bill Gates's Microsoft, and the mobile-cloud transition, with the iPhone that redefined Internet use after iMode and preceded the App Store ecosystem launched in 2008.