[Messiahtosh]

I wrote this a long time ago.

Steve Jobs has been labeled a visionary by many, and rightfully so. Though he may not be the tech celebrity that he once was, the charismatic, passionately counterculture chief executive officer of Apple Computer was once the most important individual in Silicon Valley. No longer is his name so strongly associated with the basic commonplace components of software and hardware design that he helped to pioneer and that computer users the world over, take for granted. Even today, he dictates the trends and, some would say, overall health of the industry, continuing to drive innovation.

Steven Paul Jobs was born on February 24, 1955 in Los Altos, California. According to several sources regarding Steve Jobs’ childhood, he was adopted from infancy by a Northern Californian machinist named Paul Jobs and an accountant, Clara Jobs, who are both now deceased. Being mostly a typical boy, Steve did well in school with no significant disciplinary problems. He was a person that was not easy to get to know, guarding himself carefully, which is something he still does today. His girlfriend from Homestead High School in Cupertino California remembered him saying, “Someday I will be a millionaire,” in a completely serious manner. Steve would talk about the future a lot and was usually involved in some form of a crusade over one thing or another.

Steve’s obsessive personality meshed quite well with his best friend Steve Wozniak, whom he called “Woz.” Steve Wozniak was a brilliant engineer and is responsible for some of the amazingly complex circuitry designs for computers. Woz was a prankster and a happy go lucky guy where as Steve Jobs was a motivator and usually serious. The two Steve’s were great friends since high school and still are friends today. After a brief one-semester stay at Reed College in Oregon, Steve Jobs sold his VW Bus and used the money saved from working at Atari (a computer game company) to travel to India. Steve went to India in search of spiritual enlightenment and guidance. He trekked around India with a shaven head and returned to California where he worked in the apple orchards on a Communal farm. After the short time spent working on the farm, he found that his friend Woz was working at Hewlett-Packard and building computers to impress pals at the Homebrew Computer Club. Wozniak was regarded as an engineering genius and soon Jobs realized the brilliance that Woz possessed. Jobs began attending Homebrew meetings with Woz. As a result, they both made names for themselves among hobbyists. At Homebrew, hobbyists from around the area would bring in their latest inventions, trying to outdo each other, all in good fun. But Wozniak had created a computer that Jobs saw as more than just fun: he thought this latest invention would attract a far wider audience than hobbyists. Jobs persuaded his friend into launching a business together.

Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak started Apple Computer in Jobs’ garage on April Fools day in 1976. The name Apple Computer comes from the pleasant summer job Steve had while working in an apple orchard. Little did Wozniak know that this company was not going to be a joke. Steve Jobs was totally convinced that the future of computers was for home users and education, something that seemed completely unreasonable to industry executives at that time. Mike Markkula, a former Intel board member, was looking for a venture opportunity when he heard about Steve Jobs. After meeting Steve, he was convinced Apple would be a winner. Mike took the Mom and Pop operation that Apple was and invested $250,000 into the upstart company. Having the luxury of starting in obscurity and brainstorming with Steve Wozniak, as the legend goes, Jobs built the Apple I in his parents garage. During the early 1970’s, this was the most affordable personal computer of its time. In truth, it wasn’t much more than an assembly-required toolkit consisting of a motherboard, crucial components, and a small frame. But its “cheaper-than-hell” $666 price tag put it in the hands of masses. Later, the duo would go on to craft the Apple II, and its many variations which marked the first true buying explosion in computer history. The Apple 1 Personal Computer was a success at the time, selling 33 units (a large sale at the time) to a local dealer. Wozniak and Jobs expanded upon the original design of the Apple 1 as they worked feverishly on the follow up, the Apple II. The Apple II was released in 1977 and was the first mass marketed personal computer. It had a plastic case and included color graphics. This is where Steve Jobs’ genius lies: in his ability to market a product. He has an amazing business sense about how the populous will perceive a product. By building the first personal computer that appealed to both businesses and home users, Apple quickly became a $335 million company. When the company went public in 1980 for $22 per share, the market value of Apple rose to 1.2 billion dollars. Steve Jobs became an overnight millionaire and in the process, a generational icon.

Meanwhile, Jobs was leading a development team that would change the face of personal computing forever. In December of 1979, Steve and his engineering team visited the elite Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). Inside PARC, they saw the Alto Computer, a prototype that featured a graphical user interface (GUI) and an input device called the Mouse. Xerox executives saw no use for such technologies and thus let Apple use any knowledge gained from the PARC in their own business. Steve Jobs left the PARC with a look of amazement. He knew the future of personal computing was in the GUI. Steve and his team rushed back to Apple to implement these technologies (more than a billion dollar head start over competitors) into their latest computers.

In 1984, Jobs and a dedicated team at Apple created the Macintosh. During a time when most computer users displayed a single, raw, fluorescent font of text, the Mac was something remarkably new with its graphic user interface—an intuitive first in computer interaction—representing files and folders with friendly icons and windows, and its use of the 3.5” Floppy (it was the first computer to adopt the format, which would later be standardized so strongly that it is still being used today). The Mac opened the door to entirely new applications, involving graphics and then-breathtaking WYSIWYG text, which allowed users to see what their papers would look like on printed paper using PostScript fonts. There would be nothing even remotely close to it on IBM compatibles for years to come. The Macintosh was born. Sold with a mouse and a point-and-click graphics interface, the Macintosh radically changed the way people thought of computers. The advent of the GUI was practically like finding a use for the wheel. The interface brought ease of use to a whole new level, causing a paradigm shift in the use of technology. Any ordinary person was capable of using a computer after the Macintosh’s release. Apple ran an advertisement during the 1984 Super Bowl, which has become one of the most famous in history. Featuring an Orwellian set, the ad showed a woman in red, representing Apple, destroying a dictator-like figure on a giant screen by throwing a large sledgehammer into the talking propagandizing face. The message was that 1984 would not be like the book “1984” in that there would be power given to the people by a new means of communication. The first major computing revolution was underway. The Macintosh was the computer that single handedly stole the industry from IBM and Microsoft, brining droves of customers to Apple. The war for market share was on and Apple was winning it. It would be 10 more years until the goliaths of IBM and Microsoft would retake the lead.

As amazing as the Macintosh was, the original sales predictions were not met and Apple’s board took issue with Steve Jobs over the problem. Steve Jobs had previously lured Pepsi President John Sculley to become the President of Apple. John Sculley brought a sense of reassurance to Wall Street. John was a proven businessman and was friends with Jobs for a few years in the early 80’s, sharing his insights and knowledge about the industry. Sculley was secretly using Jobs, stealing his ingenious ideas and making personal use of them. Tension was building because soon Jobs realized what was happening. It was too late though, and Jobs had lost control of his very own company. In a famous coup attempt, Jobs attempted to take the power struggle to a vote by the Apple board members. Jobs said, “If you want innovation, you should vote for me. If you want a business man, you should vote for John.” The board voted Jobs out by a slim margin. Crushed, Jobs resigned from the company in late 1985. Steve sold his Apple stock worth an estimated 100 plus million dollars and started a new company.

Steve was now on the outside of his true passion, Apple Computer. Steve loved everything he did at Apple and was now watching from outside as its once prominent place in the industry was diminishing. He started his own computer company, NeXT Computer, hoping to reinvent the success of Apple. NeXT made some incredibly advanced hardware and software. The NeXTStep operating system was the most advanced of the time but ran on hardware called the NeXT Cube (a stunning 10’’ solid black cube-shaped computer) that cost from 6,000 to 10,000 dollars. The price of this technology was too much for an ordinary person to afford. The commercially unsuccessful NeXT computers in many ways emulated the wealth of innovation delivered by the original Macintosh, this time on the multimedia front. The sleek, austere magnesium cubes (which themselves were considered revolutions in computer aesthetics) housed circuitry that could pump out full stereo sound and play full motion video—both industry firsts. NeXT’s programming interfaces and operating system software were, and still are, considered such breakthroughs in developmental ease of use that programmers are using the API (an Applications Programming Interface called, “NEXTSTEP”) to create applications for the Macintosh Operating System version Ten (Mac OS X).

NeXT burned through hundred of millions of dollars with a terrible return on investment. NeXT became the laughing stock of Silicone Valley. The media that had once adored Steve now spurned him. For the first time in his life, Steve had produced a business failure, but at the same time it was a technological success.

Steve wasn’t completely down though because the other venture of his was a success. Jobs had bought Pixar Animation Studios from George Lucas in 1986 for a “mere” $10 million. The animation house was a success from the start, creating the first ever wholly computer-generated film was called “Luxo Jr.” Luxo Jr. was a cartoon about a desk lamp getting into mischief until its father lamp comes along and scolds it for jumping on and popping a ball. Pixar’s animation continues to be state of the art and stunningly creative under the brilliant direction of John Lassetar. Lassetar created movies such as “Toy Story,” “Toy Story 2,” “A Bugs Life,” and “Monsters Inc.” Steve Jobs, to this day, is the CEO of Pixar, the Academy Award winning film studio.

During this time in the mid to late 80’s, Steve started a family. He met his wife Laurene when giving a speech at Stanford University. He was speaking to an audience when he saw her in the crowd. He approached her after the keynote and they soon became friends, eventually marrying.

Steve Jobs had a friend in Silicone Valley named Larry Elisson, the CEO of Software giant Oracle. Larry and Steve had talked about paying billions of dollars to try and pull out a hostile take over of Apple. Larry publicly stated that the only person that could ever run and save Apple was Steve Jobs. At the time, the CEO of Apple was Gil Amelio, an uncharismatic but smart tech leader. He wasn’t the brash visionary that Jobs had been. Apple was in need of a change. They were, ironically, looking for a next generation operating system for its Macintosh computers. Steve’s NextStep operating system was one of the choices that Apple was looking at as a possibility to buy. It seemed a far-fetched idea that Apple would pay money for a product that failed and for a manager that they fired nearly a decade ago. During Steve’s long exile, Apple had lost all of the qualities that had made it such an astonishing success during its early glory days. Apple’s software had once stood out as innovative, original, and uncommonly easy to use, but it hadn’t changed that much in a decade. However, Steve was coming back to Apple.

In 1997, through an odd coincidence, Jobs was summoned to Apple as an interim CEO. The company had suffered terrible losses due to corporate arrogance on behalf of its leader, Gil Amelio. Apple bought NeXT, along with Steve, for over $400 million. In a MacWorld Keynote address (a biannual Apple Centric Technology Convention) that the Apple CEO gave, Steve Jobs said, “There is… one last thing.” He was finally accepting the title of CEO instead of remaining the interim replacement that he had served as for 2.5 years. The thousands in attendance rose to their feet and applauded, chanting his name like a mantra, “STEVE, STEVE, STEVE!” “Thank you, thank you. You guys are making me feel funny now because I…I get to come to work everyday and work with the most talented people on the planet. It’s the best job in the world,” he said.

In the months and years after Jobs’ return, he revolutionized desktop computer design with the company’s best-ever seller, the iMac. With its translucent, colored plastics, the iMac was the forerunner of design elements of products in nearly every industry from consumer electronics to furniture. The man also rejuvenated the stale Mac OS operating system with “OS X” (pronounced “Oh Es Ten”), breathing life into the applauded NeXTSTEP technology, and marrying the usability of the classic Macintosh interface with a solid and secure UNIX core (the underlying code of an advanced modern operating system, shared by certain products). The operating system also brought unheard-of, jaw-dropping graphical elegance with features like real-time window shadowing, image scaling, and on-the-fly transparencies, a look that rival Microsoft attempted to emulate with its Windows XP release (a move that interestingly seemed to pay deference to the same interface war that was waged decades ago). Jobs also coined the “Digital Hub” strategy in early 2001, predicting that users would start using computers as a central hub for all of their electronic devices such as MP3 players, digital cameras, and even cell phones. Within months, one could see the entire industry beginning to lean towards the Digital Hub initiative. Jobs’ passion, the tangible hardware that he considers to be an art form, was also once again ignited as he helped craft works of utter beauty. These marvels include such products as a 23” wide-screen high-definition flat-panel monitor, the flat-panel ergonomically perfect iMac, a “One-Inch-Thin” Titanium laptop, and the iPod music player, which even garnered immense affection from Windows users. Who could forget, of course, what will probably go down in history as his greatest physical creation of all time: a seventeen-inch anamorphic notebook (the first of its kind) that writes DVD’s (Including DVD Video) and features a back-lit keyboard that relies on ambient light sensors to determine the exact illumination of the keys depending on the environment.

Jobs’ success has not gone unnoticed. He has received the National Medal of Technology (1985, presented by President Regan), the Jefferson Award for Public Service (1987), was named Entrepreneur of the Decade by Inc. Magazine (1989), and received a Lifetime Achievement Award from PC Magazine (1997). Apple is also the only computer company to have won a Grammy Award (2001). Pixar Animation won an Academy Award for best Song (Monsters Inc. 2001).

Steve Jobs has been so strongly tied to the computer industry ever since its inception that it is difficult to imagine it in his absence. He successfully became the Jackie Kennedy of business and technology, a figure who was ubiquitous as a symbol of his times, but little known as a human being. Countless times he has set new standards for usability and performance, and in many ways, is the ultimate example of the American entrepreneur (CEO of Apple and Pixar). Steve is now only 48 years old and his vision is only now starting to take shape. He will be around for many years to come, as will Apple. He overcame seemingly insurmountable odds and achieved his goal, though in a way he could never have anticipated when the story began.