Steve Jobs - The Apple Man
It's not easy to write about someone who was and still is a guru and role model for thousands (if not millions) of people around the world, and trying to add something new to existing material is not easy. However, this visionary, who led the great computer revolution, cannot be ignored in our series.
Summary: Steve Jobs
Date of Birth: 24.02.1955/05.10.2011/XNUMX February XNUMX/XNUMX/XNUMX, San Francisco (died Oct. XNUMX, XNUMX, Palo Alto)
Citizenship: American
Family status: married to Lauren Powell, with whom he had three children; the fourth, Lisa's daughter, was from an early relationship with Chrisanne Brennan.
Net Worth: $8,3 billion. in 2010 (according to Forbes)
Education: Homestead High School, started at Reed College.
An experience: founder and CEO of Apple (1976-85) and CEO (1997-2011); founder and CEO of NeXT Inc. (1985–96); co-owner of Pixar
Additional achievements: National Medal of Technology (1985); Jefferson Public Service Award (1987); Fortune Awards for "2007 Most Influential Person" and "Modern Greatest Entrepreneur" (2012); monument erected by Graphisoft from Budapest (2011); Posthumous Grammy Award for contributions to the music industry (2012)
Interests: German technical and engineering thought, Mercedes products, automotive, music
“When I was 23, I was worth over a million dollars. At the age of 24, this increased to over $10 million, and a year later it was over $100 million. But it didn’t count because I never did my job for money,” he once said. Steve Jobs.
The meaning of these words can be reversed and said - do what you really love and what really fascinates you, and the money will come to you.
calligraphy lover
Steve Paul Jobs was born in 1955 in San Francisco. He was the illegitimate child of an American student and a Syrian mathematics professor.
Because the parents of Steve's mother were shocked by this relationship and the birth of an illegitimate child, the future Apple founder was given up for adoption shortly after birth to Paul and Clara Jobs from Mountain View, California.
He was a gifted, though not very disciplined, student. The local elementary school teachers even wanted to move him up two years at once so that he would not interfere with other students, but his parents agreed to miss only one year.
In 1972, Jobs graduated from Homestead High School in Cupertino, California (1).
Even before that happened, he met Bill Fernandez, a friend who inspired his interest in electronics, and met Steve Wozniak.
The latter, in turn, showed Jobs a computer that he had assembled himself, arousing considerable interest in Steve.
For Steve's parents, attending Reed College in Portland, Oregon was a huge financial effort. However, after six months, he quit regular classes.
For the next year and a half, he led a bit of a gypsy life, living in dormitories, eating in public canteens and attending elective classes... calligraphy.
“I didn’t even expect that any of this would ever find practical application in my life. However, 10 years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computersit all came back to me.
1. Photo of Steve Jobs from the school album
We have applied all these rules to the Mac. If I hadn't signed up for this one course, there wouldn't be a lot of font patterns or proportionally spaced characters on the Mac.
And since Windows was just copying the Mac, probably no personal computer would have them.
So, if I had never dropped out, I would not have signed up for calligraphy, and personal computers might not have beautiful typography, ”he later said. Steve Jobs about the meaning of your adventure with calligraphy. His friend "Woz" Wozniak created his own version of the legendary computer game "Pong".
Jobs brought her to Atari, where both men got jobs. Jobs was then a hippie and, following the fashion, decided to go to India for "enlightenment" and spiritual pursuits. He turned into a Zen Buddhist. He returned to the United States with his head shaved and in the traditional garb of a monk.
He found his way back to Atari where he continued to work on computer games with Woz. They also attended meetings at the Homemade Computer Club, where they could listen to prominent figures in the technological world of those times. In 1976, two Steves founded Apple computer company. Jobs associated apples with a particularly happy period of youth.
The company started in a garage, of course (2). Initially, they sold boards with electronic circuits. Their first creation was the Apple I computer (3). Shortly thereafter, the Apple II was launched and was a huge success in the home computer market. In 1980 Jobs Company and Wozniak debuted on the New York Stock Exchange. It was then that it premiered on the Apple III market.
2. Los Altos, California, the house is the first headquarters of Apple.
thrown out
Around 1980, Jobs saw a graphical user interface at Xerox PARC headquarters controlled by a computer mouse. He was one of the first people in the world to see the potential of such a solution. The Lisa PC, and later the Macintosh (4), which premiered in early 1984, were designed to use a graphical user interface on a scale that the computer world had not yet known.
However, sales of new items were not stunning. In 1985 Steve Jobs he parted ways with Apple. The reason was a conflict with John Scully, whom he had persuaded to take over as president two years earlier (Scully was at Pepsi at the time) by asking him the famous question "does he want to spend his life selling sweetened water or change the world."
It was a difficult time for Steve, because he was removed from the management of Apple, the company that he founded and which was his whole life, and he could not pull himself together. He had some pretty crazy ideas at the time. He applied for admission to the crew of the spacecraft.
He planned to establish a company in the USSR. Finally created a new company – NEXT. He and Edwin Catmull also bought $10 million in computer animation studio Pixar from Star Wars creator George Lucas. NeXT designed and sold workstations for customers more demanding than mass market customers.
4. Young Steve with Macintosh
In 1988 he debuted his first product. NeXTcube computer was unique in many ways. Most computers of that time were equipped with a floppy disk + hard disk 20-40 MB kit (larger ones were very expensive). So it was decided to replace this one with one, very capacious carrier. Canon's dizzying 256 MB magneto-optical drive, which made its debut on the market, was used.
The computer had 8 MB of RAM, which was a huge amount. The whole thing is enclosed in an unusual cubic case, made of magnesium alloy and painted black. The kit also included a black monitor with a huge resolution of 1120x832 pixels at that time (the average PC based on the 8088 or 80286 processor offered only 640x480). The operating system that came with the computer was no less revolutionary.
Based on the Unix Mach kernel with a graphical interface, a system called NeXTSTEP introduced a new look at modern operating system. Today's Mac OS X is the direct successor to NeXTSTEP. Despite outstanding projects, NeXT can hardly be called as successful as Apple. The company's profit (about one million dollars) was not reached until 1994. Her legacy is more durable than the equipment.
In addition to the aforementioned NeXTSTEP, NeXT's WebObjects platform has been used to build well-known services such as the Apple Store, MobileMe, and iTunes since its acquisition by Apple in 1997. In turn, the name Pixar today is known to almost every fan of computer animated films brought up on Toy Story, Once Upon a Time in the Grass, Monsters and Company, The Incredibles, Ratatouille. or WALL-E. In the case of the first product that glorified the company, the name Steve Jobs can be seen in the credits as producer.
big comeback
5. Jobs at Macworld 2005
In 1997 was Jobs returned to Appletaking over the presidency. The company had big problems for years and was no longer profitable. A new era began, which did not immediately bring complete success, but a decade later, all Jobs caused only admiration.
The launch of the iMac greatly improved the company's financial health.
The market has been fascinated by the simple fact that a PC can beautify rather than ruin a room. Another surprise for the market was the introduction of the iPod MP3 player and the iTunes record store.
Thus, Apple entered entirely new areas for a previously single computer company and succeeded in changing the music market, as we have known until now, forever (5).
The start of another revolution was the premiere of the camera iPhone June 29, 2007 Many observers noted that technologically this product was not something fundamentally new. There was no multi-touch, no idea of an Internet phone, not even mobile applications.
However, different ideas and inventions, already used separately by other manufacturers, are successfully combined in the iPhone with great design and great marketing, which has never been seen before in the mobile device market. A few years later, the introduction of the iPad (6) launched another revolution.
Again, neither the idea of a tablet-like device was new, nor the technologies used were the latest inventions. However, once again won the unique design and marketing genius of Apple, mostly himself. Steve Jobs.
7. Monument to Steve Jobs in Budapest
Another hand of fate
And yet, fate, having given him incredible success and great fame with one hand, with the other hand reached for something else, for health and, finally, for life. "I had a successful operation this weekend to remove my pancreatic cancer," he wrote in a July 2004 email to staff. Apple Lossless Audio CODEC (ALAC),. Nearly five years after the operation, he emailed his employees again about the sick leave.
In the letter, he acknowledged that his initial problems were much more serious than he suspected. Since the cancer also affected the liver, Careers he was forced to undergo a new organ transplant. Less than two years after the transplant, he decided to take another sick leave.
Without leaving the post of the most important person in the company, in August 2011 he entrusted its management to Tim Cook. As he himself assured, he had to remain involved in the most important strategic decisions of the company. He died two months later. “Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Do not fall into the trap of dogmas, which means living according to the instructions of other people.
Don't let the noise of other people's opinions drown out your inner voice. And most importantly, have the courage to follow your heart and your intuition. Everything else is less important” - with these words he said goodbye to people who sometimes surrounded him with almost religious adoration (7).
