Life Of Steve Jobs Essay, Research Paper

Life of Steven Paul Jobs

Steve Paul Jobs was born in 1955 in Los Altos, California. Steve was adopted by Paul and Clara Jobs of Mountain View, California. The Job’s were not happy with the school system of Mountain View so they packed up their bags and headed off to Los Altos where he attended Homestead High School.

Many people realized that Steve was sort of different when he spent all of his time attending lectures at the Hewlett-Packard electronics firm in Pal Alto, California. Steven got his first job at Hewlett Packard during the summer when he met Stephen Wozniak. Stephen Wozniak was a recent dropout of the University of California at Berkeley. He was a engineering major who also liked to invent electronic gadgets. Wozniak was working on an illegal pocket-size telephone attachment that would allow the user to make free long distance calls, when he met Jobs. Jobs thought Wozniak was an interesting individual so he decided to help Wozniak sell these telephone attachments. The telephone attachments made little or no money for Wozniak and Jobs but it was a start.

Jobs finally graduated high school in 1972 and attended Reed College in Portland Oregon were he dropped out after only one semester saying that school was just not the thing for me. After dropping out of college Jobs wonder around and found his way to Atari, Inc. as a video game designer. In the autumn of 1974 Steven returned to California and began attending meetings of his friend Wozniak called “Homebrew Computer Club.” During these meetings he convinced Wozniak to help him build a P.C. or a personal computer.

The first of the personal computers was called the Apple I which was built in Job’s garage. Jobs first showed the machine to a local electronics equipment retailer who ordered twenty five of them. Jobs and Wozniak raised the money that they needed by selling their most valuable possessions which only came out to $1300.00 (Cringely, 1992). That would not be enough money so they begged credit from the local electronic supplier and they set up their first production line. Jobs finally talked Wozniak into leave his job at Hewlett-Packard to become the new vice president in charge of research and development of the new company. The company that Jobs and Wozniak created would be called Apple which is in memory of the summers that Jobs had spent as an orchard worker in Oregon.

The Apple I came out on the market in the year 1976 at a sale price of $666.00. It was the first single board-computer with a built in video interface, and on board ROM. Apple Company made $774,000 from the sales of the Apple I (Denning & Frenkel, 1989). With this money Jobs and Wozniak started work on the Apple II. The Apple II was an upgrade over the Apple I. The Apple II had a built in circuitry allowing it to interface directly with a color video monitor.

Apple company was battling with the IBM corporation to become the leader in computer industry. Jobs knew for Apple to beat IBM he needed to have better marketing to the public by using any means necessary. So he brought in Regis McKenna and Nolan Bushnell. Both were highly respected men in the electronics business. Bushnell brought in Markkula the former marketing manager at Intel. Markkula invested at least 100,000 dollars into Apple and became the chairman of the company in May of 1977 (1989). In June of 1977 Michael Scott who was the director of manufacturing at Semi-Conductor Inc. became the president of Apple. With Markkula and Scott at the head of the company Apple established credit with the Bank of American and now had 600,000 dollars in capital to work with (1989).

Apple was now in control of the personal computer business. They had become the leader of the computer industry by having better technology then there opponent IBM. The Apple II had made the company over $139,000,000 within three years of being on the market (Slater 1987). Then in 1983 IBM finally made an impact in the computer industry. Two years after its personal computer came out IBM surpassed Apple in dollar sales of machines. IBM had an operating system which became the industry standard ,and that was not compatible with any of Apple’s products. Jobs knew that they only way he was going to be able to regain control of the personal computer industry was to make his Apple computers compatible with IBM’s.

Jobs created the Macintosh which was going to compete head to head to with IBM’s personal computer. The Macintosh had 128 kilobytes of memory which was twice that of the personal computer and also that memory could be expandable up to 192 k. The Mac’s 32 bit microprocessor did more and out performed the IBM PC’s 16-bit. The only thing wrong with the Mac was that it was still not compatible with the IBM PC (Young 1988) .

The Macintosh was finally introduced to the public on Super Bowl Sunday in 1984. The Macintosh was a big hit with the public, but the internal controls of Apple were almost destroyed. John Sculley who was the chief executive officer at Pepsi Company before coming to Apple felt that Jobs was hurting the Apple Company and he had the board of directors strip Jobs of his power.

After Jobs was stripped of his power he sold over 20 million dollars of his stock and spent his days at the beach wondering what he should do next. After a lunch with Paul Berg a Nobel laureate in biochemistry at Stanford, Jobs finally came up with an idea. On September 12, 1985, Steve Jobs left the Apple Company which he had founded.

Jobs’ first idea after leaving Apple was to start a company called NextStep in which he would develop a computer that would hopefully leave Apple wishing they had never taken away his powers. After eight years Jobs realized that his idea would not come true so he went back to the drawing board.

Jobs came up with the idea of OPP or Object Oriented Programming. This would let programmers write software in a fraction of the usual time. In 1989 NextStep introduced a 7,000 dollar monochrome system (Levy 1984). This system had no floppy disk, no useful software applications and a slow magneto optical disk. There was only about 50,000 NextStep machines ever built because the public rejected this new computer. In February of 1993 Jobs announced that NextStep would stop making hardware and focus on a new operating system. While working on the new operating system Jobs realizes that he will never be able to compete with Microsoft unless people realize that there must be alternative to Microsoft products. He hopes that with NextStep software will be the alternative to Microsoft (Caddes, 1986).

Steve Jobs came back to Apple Computer in 1995 as the intern chairmen and the CEO of the company. Steve Jobs and Apple Computer bought the computer company Next Inc. which helped increase their fight against Microsoft. In the year 1998, Steve Jobs and Apple introduced the I-Mac which is their new top of the line computer. Profits for Apple was increased greatly with the introduction of the I-Mac. With the profits increased under Steve Jobs, Apple finally dropped the word intern from Steve Jobs title and made him the CEO of Apple Computer (Jobs, 2000).

Steve Jobs changed the whole computer industry with his idea of the user friendly interface mouse. With this idea it was now easier for people to use a computer and now almost every computer in the world uses this idea.

References

“Apple Computer, Inc.,” Microsoft Encarta Online Encyclopedia 2000.http://encarta.msn.com 1997-2000 Microsoft Corporation

Caddes, Carolyn. 1986. Portraits of Success: Impressions of Silicon Valley Pioneers, Tioga Publishing Co., Palo Alto CA., pp. 18-28, 45, 105-113.

Cringely, Robert X. 1992. Accidental Empires, Williams Patrick/Addison Wesley, Reading MA.

Denning, Peter J. and Karen A. Frenkel. April 1989. “A Conversation with Steve Jobs”, Comm. ACM, Vol. 32, No. 4, pp. 437-443.

“Jobs, Steven” Microsoft Encarta Online Encyclopedia 2000.http://encarta.msn.com 1997-2000 Microsoft Corporation

Levy, Steven. 1984. Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, Anchor Press/Doubleday, Garden City, NY.

Slater, Robert. 1987. Portraits in Silicon, MIT Press, Cambridge MA, Chapter 28.

Young, Jeffrey S. 1988. Steve Jobs: The Journey is the Reward, Scott, Foresman and Co., Glenview IL.