“Death is very likely the single best invention of life. It’s life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. And right now the new is you!”—Steve Jobs, 2005, Stanford University
THE Apple co-founder’s death was mourned throughout Silicon Valley and by customers all over the world, who have flooded Apple stores with flowers and post-it notes, while the celebrations of his life continue many weeks after his death.
Steve Jobs was born in San Francisco to graduate students Joanne Carole Schieble (American) and Abdulfattah “John” Jandali (Syrian), and was immediately placed for adoption after Schieble’s father opposed to their marriage.
He was adopted by the family of Paul and Clara Jobs; Paul was a machinist for a company that made lasers—who taught Steve rudimentary electronics and how to work with his hands—while Clare was an accountant.
While in high-school, he frequented after-school lectures at Hewlett-Packard in Palo Alto, where he was later hired as a summer employee and worked with Steve Wozniak.
After his graduation in 1972 he enrolled at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, but soon dropped out; he later said, “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.”
He later took a job as a technician at Atari.
In 1976, Steve Jobs founded Apple along with Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne, with later funding from Mike Markkula.
In the early 1980s, Steve was among the first who saw commercial potential in Xerox PARC’s mouse-driven graphical user interface, which inspired the creation of the Apple Lisa, and led to the Macintosh released in 1984.
The Macintosh became the first commercially successful small computer with a graphical user interface.
In 1985, after a power struggle with John Sculley (Apple’s CEO), the board of directors removed Steve from his managerial duties, which lead him to resign from Apple a few months later.
Twenty years later, Steve said in his speech at Stanford University that being fired from Apple was the best thing that could have happened to him: “The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life … It was awful-tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it.”!
After leaving Apple, he founded NeXT, a computer platform development company specialising in the higher-education and business markets.
NeXT developed a number of hardware and software products, notably NeXTSTEP, which later evolved into Mac OS X.
At the same period, he also co-founded Pixar Animation Studios, the computer graphics division of Lucasfilm, which later led him to the board of directors of the Walt Disney Company in 2006, following the acquisition of Pixar by Disney, and making him Disney’s largest individual shareholder at seven percent.
Apple’s 1996 buyout of NeXT brought Steve Jobs back to the company he co-founded.
He held the position of CEO until a couple of months before his death, when he eventually resigned while on his third medical leave; he was then elected chairman of Apple’s board of directors.
Steve Jobs died at his home in Palo Alto, California, on October 5th 2011, around 3:00 p.m., at age 56.
A copy of his death certificate indicated respiratory arrest as the immediate cause of death, with “metastatic pancreas neuroendocrine tumour” as the underlying cause.
You can watch Steve’s inspiring speech about his life, “How to live before you die”, that he gave at Stanford University on TED’s Best of the web Talks page.
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