Steven Paul "Steve" Jobs (
/ˈdʒɒbz/; February 24, 1955 – October 5, 2011) was an American technology entrepreneur, visionary and inventor. He was the co-founder, chairman, and chief executive officer (CEO) of
Apple Inc.; CEO and largest shareholder of
Pixar Animation Studios; a member of
The Walt Disney Company's board of directors following its acquisition of Pixar; and founder, chairman, and CEO of
NeXT Inc. Jobs is widely recognized as a pioneer of the
microcomputer revolution of the 1970s, along with Apple co-founder
Steve Wozniak. Shortly after his death, Jobs's official biographer,
Walter Isaacson, described him as the "creative entrepreneur whose passion for perfection and ferocious drive revolutionized six industries: personal computers, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, and digital publishing.
Adopted at birth in San Francisco, and raised in the
San Francisco Bay Area during the 1960s, Jobs's
countercultural lifestyle was a product of his time. As a senior at
Homestead High School, in
Cupertino, California, his two closest friends were the older engineering student (and Homestead High alumnus) Wozniak and his countercultural girlfriend, the artistically inclined Homestead High junior
Chrisann Brennan. Jobs briefly attended
Reed College in 1972 before dropping out,
deciding to travel through India in 1974 and
study Buddhism.
Jobs co-founded Apple in 1976 to sell Wozniak's
Apple I personal computer. The duo gained fame and wealth a year later for the
Apple II, one of the first highly successful mass-produced personal computers. In 1979, after a tour of
Xerox PARC, Jobs saw the commercial potential of the
Xerox Alto, which was
mouse-driven and had a
graphical user interface (GUI). This led to development of the failed
Apple Lisa in 1983, followed by the successful
Macintosh in 1984. In addition to being the first mass-produced computer with a GUI, the Macintosh instigated the sudden rise of the
desktop publishing industry in 1985 with the addition of the Apple
LaserWriter, the first
laser printer to feature
vector graphics. Following a long power struggle, Jobs was forced out of Apple in 1985.
After leaving Apple, Jobs
took a few of its members with him to found NeXT, a
computer platform development company specializing in state-of-the-art computers for higher-education and business markets. In addition, Jobs helped to initiate the development of the
visual effects industry when
he funded the spinout of the computer graphics division of
George Lucas's company
Lucasfilm in 1986.The new company, Pixar, would eventually produce the first fully
computer-animated film,
Toy Story—an event made possible in part because of Jobs's financial support.
In 1997, Apple purchased NeXT, allowing Jobs to become the former's CEO once again. He would return the company, which was on the verge of bankruptcy, back to profitability. Beginning in 1997 with the "
Think different" advertising campaign, Jobs worked closely with designer
Jonathan Ive to develop a line of products that would have larger cultural ramifications: the
iMac,
iTunes,
Apple Stores, the
iPod, the
iTunes Store, the
iPhone, the
App Store, and the
iPad.
Mac OS was also revamped into
Mac OS X, based on NeXT's
NeXTSTEP platform.
Jobs was diagnosed with a pancreatic
neuroendocrine tumor in 2003 and died of
respiratory arrest related to the tumor on October 5, 2011.
