Born: February 24, 1955
Place of Birth: Green Bay, Wisconsin
Major Notes:
Steve Jobs is a co-founder of Apple Inc., one of the world's most popular computer companies.
He attended public school in Cupertino, California, and while in high school attended after-school lectures given at the Hewlett-Packard Company.
Jobs was hired by Hewlett-Packard for summer work along with another individual, Stephen Wozniak, who had an aptitude for working with electronics.
The two men became close friends and both were given employment by Atari designing arcade games.
Jobs was not so much the inventor as he was a entrepreneur interested in marketing products.
In 1976, working out of his garage, Jobs and Wozniak built a personal computer and decided to market it.
They formed a business, Apple Corporation, after getting a contract for 50 computers from a company called Byte Shop.
As the company grew, Jobs hired an executive, John Sculley, away from Pepsi-Cola to act as CEO of Apple.
Apple introduced a computer called the MacIntosh to the public which used a device called a mouse to move a cursor
on to picture icons on the screen.
When the cursor was on the icon and a button was clicked, a program would start or a document would appear on the screen.
This user interface, an invention of the Xerox company, became popular and was copied by nearly every computer company at the time.
In 1985, due to some difference of opinion with Sculley and because sales had slacked, Jobs resigned from Apple to start another computer company and introduced what was called the NeXT computer, designed
to operate with higher performance.
Because it was high priced, the NeXT computer did not do well in sales, but it was this computer that was used in the development of what is now called the World Wide Web.
Jobs had other plans in mind and, in 1986, purchased The Graphics Group which was a graphics animation company.
He renamed it Pixar and worked with Disney Studios to produce several highly animated films; many of which won Academy Awards for "Best
Animated Feature Film."
In 1996, Apple wanted Jobs back as CEO and offered him a large sum of money for NeXT contingent on his returning to Apple.
The sales of Apple improved with the return of Jobs and, over the next few years, several new products such as the iMac computer, the iPod music player, and the iPhone.
Steve Jobs was honored in 2009 by being named CEO of the Decade by Fortune Magazine.
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