Πέμπτη 6 Οκτωβρίου 2011

Steve Jobs 1955 - 2011

[ WIKI ]
Jobs was born in San Francisco[1] and was adopted by the family of Paul Jobs and Clara Jobs (née Hagopian) of Mountain View, California.[5] Paul and Clara later adopted a daughter, Patti. Jobs' biological parents – Abdulfattah John Jandali, a Syrian Muslim immigrant to the U.S.,[23][24] who later became a political science professor at the University of Nevada and is presently a vice president of Boomtown Hotel Casino in Reno, Nevada,[25] and Joanne Schieble (later Simpson), an American graduate student[26] of Swiss and German ancestry[27] who went on to become a speech language pathologist[28] – eventually married. The marriage produced Jobs' biological sister, novelist Mona Simpson; the two of them first met in 1986 as adults and enjoyed a close relationship since, with Jobs regularly visiting Simpson in Manhattan. From Simpson, Jobs learned more about their birth parents and he invited his biological mother Joanne to some events.[29][30] Jandali claims that he didn't want to put Jobs up for adoption but that Simpson's parents did not approve of her marrying a Syrian. Jandali's few attempts to contact Jobs were unsuccessful;[31] Jobs did not contact his biological father either.[32] Jandali gave an interview to The Sun in August 2011 when Jobs resigned as CEO of Apple; Jandali also mailed in his medical history after Jobs' pancreatic disorder was made public that year.[33][34]





Jobs introducing the iPhone 4 in 2010.
Jobs attended Cupertino Junior High and Homestead High School in Cupertino, California. He frequented after-school lectures at the Hewlett-Packard Company in Palo Alto, California, and was later hired there, working with Steve Wozniak as a summer employee.[35] Following high school graduation in 1972, Jobs enrolled at Reed College in Portland, Oregon. Although he dropped out after only one semester,[36] he continued auditing classes at Reed, while sleeping on the floor in friends' rooms, returning Coke bottles for food money, and getting weekly free meals at the local Hare Krishna temple.[15] Jobs later said, "If I had never dropped in on that single calligraphy course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts."[15]
In the fall of 1974, Jobs returned to California and began attending meetings of the Homebrew Computer Club with Wozniak. He took a job as a technician at Atari, a manufacturer of popular video games, with the primary intent of saving money for a spiritual retreat to India.
Jobs then traveled to India to visit the Neem Karoli Baba[37] at his Kainchi Ashram with a Reed College friend (and, later, the first Apple employee), Daniel Kottke, in search of spiritual enlightenment. He came back a Buddhist with his head shaved and wearing traditional Indian clothing.[38][39] During this time, Jobs experimented with psychedelics, calling his LSD experiences "one of the two or three most important things [he had] done in [his] life".[40] He later said that people around him who did not share his countercultural roots could not fully relate to his thinking.[40]
Jobs returned to his previous job at Atari and was given the task of creating a circuit board for the game Breakout. According to Atari founder Nolan Bushnell, Atari had offered $100 for each chip that was eliminated in the machine. Jobs had little interest in or knowledge of circuit board design and made a deal with Wozniak to split the bonus evenly between them if Wozniak could minimize the number of chips. Much to the amazement of Atari, Wozniak reduced the number of chips by 50, a design so tight that it was impossible to reproduce on an assembly line. According to Wozniak, Jobs told Wozniak that Atari had given them only $700 (instead of the actual $5,000) and that Wozniak's share was thus $350.[41]



Steven Paul "SteveJobs (February 24, 1955 – October 5, 2011)[5][6][7] was an American computer entrepreneur and inventor. He was co-founder,[8] chairman, and chief executive officer of Apple Inc.[9][10] Jobs also previously served as chief executive of Pixar Animation Studios; he became a member of the board of directors of The Walt Disney Company in 2006, following the acquisition of Pixar by Disney. He was credited in Toy Story (1995) as an executive producer.[11]
In the late 1970s, Jobs—along with Apple co-founder Steve WozniakMike Markkula[8] and others—designed, developed, and marketed one of the first commercially successful lines of personal computers, the Apple II series. In the early 1980s, Jobs was among the first to see the commercial potential of Xerox PARC's mouse-driven graphical user interface, which led to the creation of the Macintosh.[12][13]After losing a power struggle with the board of directors in 1985,[14][15] Jobs resigned from Apple and founded NeXT, a computer platformdevelopment company specializing in the higher-education and business markets. Apple's subsequent 1996 buyout of NeXT brought Jobs back to the company he co-founded, and he served as its CEO from 1997 until August 2011.
In 1986, he acquired the computer graphics division of Lucasfilm Ltd which was spun off as Pixar Animation Studios.[16] He remained CEO and majority shareholder at 50.1 percent until its acquisition by The Walt Disney Company in 2006.[17] Consequently Jobs became Disney's largest individual shareholder at 7 percent and a member of Disney's Board of Directors.[18][19] On August 24, 2011, Jobs announced his resignation from his role as Apple's CEO.
On October 5, 2011, Jobs died in California at age 56, seven years after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.[20][21][22]