[Amir Shahbazzadeh]

Date of Birth
24 February 1955, San Francisco, California, USA

Date of Death
5 October 2011, Palo Alto, California, USA (pancreatic cancer)

Birth Name
Steven Paul Jobs

Height
6' 2" (1.88 m)

Mini Biography

Steven Paul Jobs was born on 24 February 1955 in San Francisco, California, to students Abdulfattah Jandali and Joanne Schieble who were unmarried at the time and gave him up for adoption. He was taken in by a working class couple, Paul and Clara Jobs, and grew up with them in Mountain View, California

He attended Homestead High School in Cupertino California and went to Reed College in Portland Oregon in 1972 but dropped out after only one semester, staying on to "drop in" on courses that interested him

He took a job with video game manufacturer Atari to raise enough money for a trip to India and returned from there a Buddhist

Back in Cupertino he returned to Atari where his old friend Steve Wozniak was still working. Wozniak was building his own computer and in 1976 Jobs pre-sold 50 of the as-yet unmade computers to a local store and managed to buy the components on credit solely on the strength of the order, enabling them to build the Apple I without any funding at all

The Apple II followed in 1977 and the company Apple Computer was formed shortly afterwards. The Apple II was credited with starting the personal computer boom, its popularity prompting IBM to hurriedly develop their own PC. By the time production of the Apple II ended in 1993 it had sold over 6 million units

Inspired by a trip to Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), engineers from Apple began working on a commercial application for the graphical interface ideas they had seen there. The resulting machine, Lisa, was expensive and never achieved any level of commercial success, but in 1984 another Apple computer, using the same WIMP (Windows, Icons, Menus, Pointer) interface concept, was launched. An advert during the 1984 Super Bowl, directed by Ridley Scott introduced the Macintosh computer to the world (in fact, the advert had been shown on a local TV channel in Idaho on 31 December 1983 and in movie theaters during January 1984 before its famous "premiere" on 22 January during the Super Bowl)

In 1985 Jobs was fired from Apple and immediately founded another computer company, NeXT. Its machines were not a commercial success but some of the technology was later used by Apple when Jobs eventually returned there

In the meantime, in 1986, Jobs bought The Computer Graphics Group from Lucasfilm. The group was responsible for making high-end computer graphics hardware but under its new name, Pixar, it began to produce innovative computer animations. Their first title under the Pixar name, Luxo Jr. (1986) won critical and popular acclaim and in 1991 Pixar signed an agreement with Disney, with whom it already had a relationship, to produce a series of feature films, beginning with Toy Story (1995)

In 1996 Apple bought NeXT and Jobs returned to Apple, becoming its CEO. With the help of British-born industrial designer Jonathan Ive, Jobs brought his own aesthetic philosophy back to the ailing company and began to turn its fortunes around with the release of the iMac in 1998. The company's MP3 player, the iPod, followed in 2001, with the iPhone launching in 2007 and the iPad in 2010. The company's software music player, iTunes, evolved into an online music (and eventually also movie and software application) store, helping to popularize the idea of "legally" downloading entertainment content

In 2003, Jobs was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and underwent surgery in 2004. Despite the success of this operation he became increasingly ill and received a liver transplant in 2009. He returned to work after a six month break but eventually resigned his position in August 2011 after another period of medical leave which began in January 2011. He died on 5 October 2011

Spouse
Laurene Powell    (18 March 1991 - 5 October 2011) (his death) 3 children

Trade Mark

Black turtleneck sweatshirt and blue jeans - he owned over a hundred

Trivia

Co-founded Apple Computer Inc. in 1977 with Steve Wozniak. Was later ousted and then brought back as interim CEO in 1997. His new reign has been controversial: bringing Apple back to profitability (and visibility), yet disappointing many for discontinuing the Newton MessagePad hand-held device.

Officially dropped the word "interim" from his title at Apple Computer sometime in the autumn of 1999

brother of Mona Simpson [biological]

When Apple Computer appointed its first Board of Directors, the Board insisted that all employees wear name badges with a number indicating the order in which they were hired. They assigned Steve Wozniak, who did all the engineering of the highly successful Apple II computer, the title Employee No. 1. Steve Jobs was officially Employee No. 2. Jobs protested but the Board refused to change the badge assignments. Jobs offered a compromise: He would be Employee No. 0, since 0 comes before 1 on the mathematical model known as a number line. (Source: "Accidental Empires" by Robert X. Cringely)

CEO of Pixar Animation Studios - the creators of Toy Story (1995), A Bug's Life (1998), Toy Story 2 (1999), Monsters, Inc. (2001), and Finding Nemo (2003) - as well as various shorts, including Oscar-winning Tin Toy (1988), Geri's Game (1997), and For the Birds (2000)

Purchased the computer graphics division of LucasFilm from George Lucas. This was later renamed Pixar

Has a daughter, Lisa, from a previous relationship. She is the namesake of Apple's computer, the Lisa

Attended Reed College (Portland, Oregon), but dropped out after one semester

Adopted from infancy by Mountain View, California, couple, Paul and Clara Jobs. He was machinist for a laser manufacturer; she was an accountant.

Ranked #23 in Premiere's 2003 annual Power 100 List with Pixar partner John Lasseter. They had ranked #31 in 2002

Graduated from Homestead High School in Cupertino, California, in 1972

July 2004: he had surgery to remove a cancerous tumor from his pancreas

He was a pescetarian, one whose diet includes fish but no other meat

Was portrayed by Noah Wyle in Pirates of Silicon Valley (1999) (TV)

Ranked #1 on Premiere's 2004 annual Power 100 List with Pixar co-head John Lasseter. Had ranked #23 in 2003

Ranked #3 on Premiere's 2005 Power 50 List with Pixar co-head John Lasseter. They had ranked #1 in 2004

In Forbes Magazine's listing of the 400 Richest Americans in 2005, Steve Jobs came in at number 67 with a total worth of $3.3 Billion

Ranked #1 on Premiere's 2006 "Power 50" list with Pixar co-head John Lasseter. They had ranked #3 in 2005 and #1 in 2004

Invited to join the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (Executives Branch) in 2005

Received a liver transplant in April 2009

Merited a position in Time magazine's "The 100 Most Influential People in the World" ("Thinkers" category) with an homage contributed by Jeff Koons. [May 10, 2010]

Merited the #2 position in "The Vanity Fair 100" magazine's 16th annual ranking of the most influential people of the Information Age. [2010]

Has a child from a relationship he had when he was 23 with a woman whom he didn't marry. The daughter was named Lisa N. Brennan Jobs born on 17 May 1978

Jobs gave the commencement address to the graduating class of at Stanford University in the state of California

Biological son of immigrants to the U.S., Syrian Abdul Fattah Jandali and German-Swiss Joanne Carol Schieble. He was placed for adoption at a very early age, where he was adopted by an Armenian-American couple, Paul and Clara Jobs, who raised him. As a result of his adoption, Jobs was fluent in the Armenian language

Made the cover of TIME magazine 8 times: February 1982, August 1997, October 1999, January 2002, October 2005, April 2007 (group shot), April 2010, October 2011 (special issue)

Had intended to volunteer his service in designing the ad campaign for _Barack Obama_'s 2012 reelection campaign

Jobs was posthumously awarded the Grammy Trustees Award at the 54th Annual Grammy Awards in 2012. The Trustees Award is awarded to "individuals who, during their careers in music, have made significant contributions, other than performance, to the field of recording."

Was friends with President Bill Clinton, and allowed him to stay at his California mansion whenever Clinton visited his daughter Chelsea, then a student at Stanford University. Clinton in turn hosted Jobs as a guest of the Lincoln Bedroom

Personal Quotes

I don't think I've ever worked so hard on something, but working on Macintosh was the neatest experience of my life. Almost everyone who worked on it will say that. None of us wanted to release it at the end. It was as though we knew that once it was out of our hands, it wouldn't be ours anymore. When we finally presented it at the shareholders' meeting, everyone in the auditorium gave it a five-minute ovation. What was incredible to me was that I could see the Mac team in the first few rows. It was as though none of us could believe we'd actually finished it. Everyone started crying. (Playboy Interview, Febuary 1985)

(1985) I'll always stay connected with Apple. I hope that throughout my life I'll sort of have the thread of my life and then the thread of Apple weave in and out, like a tapestry. There may be a few years when I'm not there, but I'll always come back

(2003) There are downsides to everything; there are unintended consequences to everything. The most corrosive piece of technology that I've ever seen is called television -- but then, again, television, at its best, is magnificent

(1998) A lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them

Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn't really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while

(1993) I'm sorry, it's true. Having children really changes your view on these things. We're born, we live for a brief instant, and we die. It's been happening for a long time.

That's been one of my mantras -- focus and simplicity. Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it's worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains. (BusinessWeek interview, May 1998)

Simple can be harder than complex. You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it's worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains

My model for business is the Beatles. They were four guys who kept each other's kind of negative tendencies in check. They balanced each other and the total was greater than the sum of the parts

Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything - all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important

In most people's vocabularies, design means veneer. It's interior decorating. It's the fabric of the curtains and the sofa. But to me, nothing could be further from the meaning of design. Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service

I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again

The unions are the worst thing that happened to education because it's not a meritocracy. It turns into a bureaucracy, which is exactly what happened. The teachers can't teach, and administrators run the place, and nobody can be fired. It's terrible

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