Steve Jobs

He was born on February 24, 1955 in San Francisco, California, United States and
died on October 5, 2011 in Palo Alto, California, United States. American computer
scientist and businessman. Father of the first personal computer and founder of
Apple Computer, probably the most innovative company in the sector, this computer
wizard was one of the most influential in the vertiginous technological escalation in
which the world still lives today, contributing decisively to the popularization of the
computing. His visionary ideas in the field of personal computers, digital music and
mobile telephony have revolutionized markets and the habits of millions of people
for more than three decades.

His parents, two university students with no material means to support him, gave
little Steve up for adoption to the couple formed by Paul and Clara Jobs (railroad
engineer and housewife, respectively). Since 1961, the Jobs family has lived in the
small Californian city of Mountain View, an important center of the American
electronics industry. There is no doubt that the local environment influenced his
future professional inclinations; At just twelve years old, he joined the Hewlett-
Packard Explorer Club, a youth association in which Hewlett-Packard company
engineers taught children and young people the latest creations in the field of
computing.
After graduating from Homestead High School in Mountain View, Steve Jobs
entered Reed College, a liberal arts college based in Portland, Oregon, but dropped
out a semester later. At that time he flirted with drugs and became interested in
philosophy and counterculture, even traveling to India in search of spiritual
enlightenment. After an internship at the Hewlett-Packard Company in Palo Alto, in
1974 Jobs was hired as a designer by Atari, a pioneer company in the then-nascent
video game industry.

Apple is born

At that same time he joined what would be his first partner, the engineer
Stephen Wozniak. Jobs was immediately able to appreciate the commercial
interest of the home microcomputer project his friend was working on;
Among the belongings and household items in the garage, they first created
an imaginative motherboard and then a complete computer, the Apple I,
considered the first personal computer in history. In 1976, with the money
obtained from the sale of their Volkswagen van, they founded the Apple
Computer company, based in the Jobs family garage. Steve Jobs chose the
name Apple as a reminder of the days when he worked to harvest his favorite
fruit, the apple.
The Apple II, an improvement on the previous model, was introduced in
1977, becoming the first consumer computer. After an impressive barrage of
orders, Apple became the fastest growing company in the United States.
Three years later, Apple went public with a price of $22 per share, making
Jobs and Wozniak millionaires. Steve Jobs had already acquired his
reputation as a two-faced genius, magnificently gifted for technology and
business: exceptional creative talent had allowed him both to devise a
revolutionary computer and to succeed in marketing it.

After the Apple II, Jobs and Wozniak got involved in the creation of the
Macintosh, the first affordable and easy-to-use computer without having to
know computers: it was the realization of the dream that the industry had
cherished since the invention of the first microprocessor (1971). The launch
of the Macintosh in 1984 marked a reversal in the prospects of the market.
Its great innovation was a graphical interface with an exquisite and friendly
design that simulated a work table (the desktop), and the introduction of the
mouse to execute the functions by clicking on the icons, windows, and option
menus that opened on the screen. Which greatly facilitated the interaction
between the user and the computer: it was no longer necessary to
understand, memorize and enter a multitude of esoteric commands through
the keyboard, so that even a child could use it. In this sense, Jobs made a
great contribution to the introduction of personal computers in education.

In 1981, Apple's strongest competitor, IBM, had released its first personal
computer, largely copying the Apple II specifications that Apple itself had
somewhat ingeniously made public. With the aim of maintaining the
competitiveness of his company, Steve Jobs decided to recruit the then
president of the well-known multinational soft drink Pepsi, John Sculley, for
the management of Apple, without imagining that he would end up kicking
him out of his own company. Sculley's style, an executive of the old guard,
clearly clashed with the rebellious and unorthodox ways of Jobs.

At the same time, problems arose between Jobs and Wozniak, they repeated
in the background after one, although, according to other versions, the
deterioration of their relations was due to the difficult character of Jobs,
branded in the computer media as a "charismatic tyrant". The result of both
personal conflicts was that Wozniak left Apple in 1985, the year in which
1,200 employees were laid off as a result of a construction expansion at the
company, and Jobs resigned to embark on a new and maturing business
alone.

NeXT Computer and Pixar

Steve Jobs founded a new computer company, NeXT Computer (1985), and
then bought the American film director George Lucas, for ten million dollars,
the animation division of the filmmaker's production company, Lucasfilm
Limited. This is how Pixar Animation Studios was born in 1986, focused on
the computerized production of cartoon films; just three years later, one of
the films made by the studios, Tin Toy (1988), won the Academy Award for
Best Animated Short Film.

In 1989, NeXT Computer released its first computer, packed with amazing
features, but it proved unprofitable due to its high price and incompatibility
with most systems on the market. Finally, the visionary Jobs closed the
computer division in 1993, with the merit of having created the device with
which the British programmer Tim Berners-Lee devised the World Wide
Web, which would be the basis for the development and popularization of
the Internet.

Things were going better at Pixar: with the support of Disney Motion
Pictures, the mega-producer of the empire founded by Walt Disney, the
studio launched Toy Story (1995), a production that is already part of cinema
history for being the first feature film made. Entirely by computer. The film
was a box office success and garnered an Oscar from the Hollywood
Academy. Pixar's next big hit was A Bug's Life (1998), followed by new
memorable titles like Monsters, Inc. (2001) and Finding Nemo (2003).
His old company, on the other hand, was going through difficult times. Since
the early 1980s, the so-called PC clones (IBM-compatible personal
computers) have dominated the market thanks to their low cost. With Jobs
at the helm, Apple had managed to weather the storm thanks to the
aforementioned Macintosh (1984): its intuitive graphical interface, easily
manageable with the mouse, was clearly superior to MS-DOS, the Microsoft
operating system used by the clones, and justified, along with other virtues,
its high price.
But when Microsoft released the first versions of the Windows operating
system (Windows 3.1 in 1992, Windows 95 in 1995), Apple lost one of its
main selling points. A clone PC equipped with Windows and a mouse was
just as easy to use as the Macintosh, and much cheaper. In the opinion of
almost all the experts, Windows was a copy of the Macintosh interface; this
is how Apple understood it, which immediately became involved in lawsuits
and lawsuits against Bill Gates' Microsoft. The enmity between two
personalities as opposed as the hypercreative Steve Jobs and the civil servant
Bill Gates would be the subject of a television movie entitled Pirates of
Silicon Valley, produced in 1998 by the TNT network. De Nuevo en Apple
Defeated in its lawsuits against Microsoft and submerged in a deep crisis, in
December 1996 Apple decided to buy NeXT Computer, which meant the
return of Steve Jobs to the company he founded with a position of interim
advisor (for which Jobs voluntarily, did not receive any salary). Nine months
later, the resignation of the president of Apple raised Jobs once again at the
helm of the company. In August 1997, a month before his appointment as
Apple's interim chairman, Jobs announced an agreement with rival
corporation Microsoft, which decided to invest $150 million in Apple. The
two companies ended up understanding that they needed each other and
complemented each other, since Microsoft was the main manufacturer of
programs for the Macintosh, and Apple one of the main witnesses in the
antitrust trial that the US court had instituted against Bill Gates' company.

During this second stage at Apple, in which he would remain as executive

director until 2009, Steve Jobs continued in his groundbreaking line,
promoting decidedly innovative products. Seen in perspective, there is no
doubt that he was right in his approaches. When Jobs took over Apple's
presidency again in September 1997, the battle seemed lost; in 2012, a year
after his death, Apple had become the most valuable company in the world:
the global price of its shares on the stock market was close to six hundred
billion dollars.

In 1998, just one year after his return, Steve Jobs once again revolutionized
the computer market with the launch of the iMac, a compact computer
integrated into the monitor, which, in addition to its spectacular avant-garde
design, was prepared to surf the Internet. Its sales success placed Apple once
again among the five largest manufacturers of personal computers in the
United States and led to a 50% appreciation of the company's shares. New
versions of the iMac, with greater power and increasingly sophisticated
features and design, would continue to appear in the following years, with
great acceptance among its legion of unconditional users.

As if the world of the personal computer had become too small for him, Jobs
soon began to display his inexhaustible inventiveness in other areas,
combining new features with maximum ease of use and elegant minimalist
designs as he had always done. The first was digital music: in 2001 he
entered the music industry with a pocket audio player, the iPod, and two
years later he created the iTunes music store, which immediately led the sale
of music online and continues to maintain its position. Dominant.
Unfortunately, his health problems forced him to take a temporary leave
from work in 2004, the year in which he was treated for pancreatic cancer.
In 2007 he presented the iPhone, the first of the family of high-end
smartphones produced by Apple. Declared "invention of the year" by Time
magazine, its touch screen integrated a keyboard with both vertical and
horizontal orientation, and incorporated a three-megapixel camera, a music
player (with the same functions as an iPod) and a web browser. Internet.
Initially it had a small number of applications, provided by Apple, but user
demand for more programs led to the creation of the App Store in July 2008,
an application store where all kinds of developers could sell software
designed for iPhones and other devices manufactured by the company.

The innovative features of the iPhone were soon imitated, but only another
great giant in the sector, Google (Sergei Brin and Larry Page), put up a fight
against Apple's leadership, launching that same year Android, a mobile
operating system. History repeated itself: the iPhone had its own operating
system integrated, iOS, and thanks to the development of Android, which
would end up being imposed almost as a standard among the other
manufacturers, Google managed to prevent a possible hegemony of Apple
from threatening its dominant position in Internet, since it was known that,
in the very near future, most Internet connections would be made from
mobile devices.

In 2009, the year he had to undergo a liver transplant, Steve Jobs delegated
most of his responsibilities to Timothy Cook. But even the visible
deterioration of his health would not reduce his dedication to work and his
eagerness to innovate. With his creativity intact, still in 2010 he surprised
the world with the iPad, a hybrid of tablet and mobile phone; a light and very
thin 9.7-inch touch screen contained in its back the processing power and all
the features of a laptop, without the need for a keyboard or mouse. Steve
Jobs presented the second version, the iPad 2, in March 2011, in what would
be one of his last public appearances. On October 5, 2011, at the age of 56, he
died at his home in Palo Alto, a victim of the advance of cancer that had been
detected in 2003.