San Francisco, California, U.S.Died October 5, 2011 (aged 56)
Palo Alto, California, U.S.Resting placeAlta Mesa Memorial ParkEducationReed College (attended)OccupationEntrepreneurindustrial designermedia proprietorinvestorYears active1975–2011Known forPioneer of the personal computer revolution with Steve WozniakCo-creator of the Apple II, Macintosh, iPod, iPhone, iPad, and first Apple StoresTitleCo-founder, chairman and CEO of Apple Inc.Co-founder, primary investor and chairman of PixarFounder, chairman and CEO of NeXTBoard member ofThe Walt Disney Company[1]Apple Inc.Spouse(s)
(m. )Partner(s)Chrisann Brennan (1972–1977)Children4, including LisaRelativesMona Simpson (sister)Bassma Al Jandaly (cousin)Malek Jandali (cousin)
Steven Paul Jobs (February 24, 1955 – October 5, 2011) was an American entrepreneur, inventor, business magnate, media proprietor, and investor. He was the co-founder, the chairman, and CEO of Apple; 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. He 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.
Jobs was born in San Francisco to a Syrian father and a German-American mother. He was adopted shortly after his birth. Jobs attended Reed College in 1972 before withdrawing that same year. In 1974, he traveled through India seeking enlightenment and studying Zen Buddhism. He and Wozniak co-founded Apple in 1976 to sell Wozniak's Apple I personal computer.A year later, the duo gained fame and wealth with production and sale of 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.
In 1985, Jobs was forced out of Apple 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.
In 1997, Jobs returned to Apple as CEO after the company's acquisition of NeXT. He was largely responsible for reviving Apple, which was on the verge of bankruptcy. He worked closely with English designer Jony Ive to develop a line of products that had larger cultural ramifications, beginning with the "Think different" advertising campaign and leading to the Apple Store, App Store, iMac, iPad, iPod, iPhone, iTunes, and iTunes Store. 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 operating system a modern Unix-based foundation for the first time. In 2003, Jobs was diagnosed with a pancreatic neuroendocrine tumor. He died of respiratory arrest related to the tumor on October 5, 2011. He was 56.BackgroundBiological and adoptive families
Steven Paul Jobs was born in San Francisco, California, on February 24, 1955, the son of Joanne Carole Schieble and Abdulfattah Jandali (Arabic: عبد الفتاح الجندلي). He was adopted by Clara (née Hagopian) and Paul Reinhold Jobs.[2]
Jandali, Jobs' biological father, was Syrian and went by the name "John". He grew up in an Arab Muslim household in Homs, Syria.[3] 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.[3] He pursued a PhD at the University of Wisconsin, where he met Schieble, an American Catholic of German and Swiss descent.[3][4] As a doctoral candidate, Jandali was a teaching assistant for a course Schieble was taking, although both were the same age.[5] Novelist Mona Simpson, Jobs' biological sister, noted that Schieble's parents were not happy that their daughter was dating a Muslim.[6] Walter Isaacson, author of the biography Steve Jobs, additionally states that Schieble's father "threatened to cut her off completely" if she continued the relationship.[4]
Jobs' adoptive father was a Coast Guard mechanic.[7] After leaving the Coast Guard, he married Hagopian, an American of Armenian descent, in 1946.[8] Their attempts to start a family were halted after Hagopian had an ectopic pregnancy, leading them to consider adoption in 1955.[7][8] Hagopian's parents were survivors of the Armenian genocide.[10]Birth and early life
Schieble became pregnant with Jobs in 1954, when she and Jandali spent the summer with his family in Homs. According to Jandali, Schieble deliberately did not involve him in the process: "Without telling me, Joanne upped and left to move to San Francisco to have the baby without anyone knowing, including me."[12]
Schieble gave birth to Jobs in San Francisco on February 24, 1955, and chose an adoptive couple for him that was "Catholic, well-educated, and wealthy",[13][14] but the couple later changed their mind.[13] 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 in an attempt to have her baby placed with a different family,[13] and only consented to releasing the baby to Paul and Clara after the couple pledged to pay for the boy's college education.[16] Jobs' cousin, Bassma Al Jandaly, maintains that Jobs' birth name was Abdul Lateef Jandali.[17]
In his youth, Steve's parents took him to a Lutheran church. When Jobs was in high school, Clara admitted to his girlfriend, Chrisann Brennan, 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. I wanted to return him."[13] When Chrisann shared this comment with Steve, he stated that he was already aware,[13] and would later say he was deeply loved and indulged by Paul and Clara.[19][page needed] Many years later, Jobs' wife Laurene also noted that "he felt he had been really blessed by having the two of them as parents."[19][page needed] Jobs would become upset when Paul and Clara were referred to as his "adoptive parents"; he regarded them as his parents "1,000%". With regard to his biological parents, Jobs referred to them as "my sperm and egg bank. That's not harsh, it's just the way it was, a sperm bank thing, nothing more."[7]Childhood
"I always thought of myself as a humanities person as a kid, but I liked electronics… then I read something that one of my heroes, Edwin Land of Polaroid, said about the importance of people who could stand at the intersection of humanities and sciences, and I decided that's what I wanted to do."
Paul Jobs worked in several jobs that included a try as a machinist,[21]several other jobs,[22] and then "back to work as a machinist."
Paul and Clara adopted Jobs' sister Patricia in 1957 and by 1959 the family had moved to the Monta Loma neighborhood in Mountain View, California.[24] It was during this time that Paul built a workbench in his garage for his son in order to "pass along his love of mechanics." Jobs, meanwhile, 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.[26][page needed] He had difficulty making friends with children his own age, however, and was seen by his classmates as a "loner."[26][page needed]