Steve Jobs was born in San Francisco, but raised in Mountain View, Santa Clara by his adoptive parents, Paul and Clara Jobs. He attended Reed College in Oregon but was to drop out after the first semester, returning home to attend the Homebrew Computer Club with friend , Steve Wozniak, who he met working summer employment at Hewlett-Packard, and working as a technician at Atari, a video game producer.
When Jobs was twenty-one he and Wozniak marketed a computer Wozniak had designed for his personal use. With the intent to only sell printed circuit boards, they ended their season with a lot of completed computers, selling them for just over $650.00. The Apple II sold the following year, then the Apple III was introduced in 1980, the same year Apple Computers became incorporated. The company later produced the Macintosh, the world’s first successful GUI (Graphical user interface) consumer computer. In three years, Jobs saw a 700% growth in his company. However, IBM was becoming a glaring advocate, having developed their own personal computer.
Jobs was able to hire John Scully from Pepsi-Cola to assist the company saying by coming to Apple he can change the world. Though Apple saw unprecedented success with the Macintosh, selling over 400,000 in the first year, Jobs left Apple having been demoted for his underdog business tactics by Wozniak and another corporate partner to open his own company: NeXR, that would produce educational programming. Jobs was to recieve the “1989 Software Publishers Association’s Lifetime Achievement Award” for his company’s final product, though it wasn’t successful in sales. His new company however was to harbor in the invention of the World Wide Web, having Tim Berners-Lee develop it on a NeXR server.
It was in the mid 1990’s that Apple’s focus of ancient software and some internal problems almost bankrupted the company. With an annual salary of $1.00 a year, Jobs was invited back to Apple and with his interests in Unix operation systems, Jobs was to rescue the handicapped company.
His influence in Apple remains rigorous and punctual. The term “getting Steved” refers to Job’s, rare but terrorizing, sacking of employees. To this day, Apple continues to grow, reaching to new venues owning the majority of today’s portable MP3 player market with the iPod, which was quick to become a cultural icon.
Jobs and Chris-Ann Brennan, with whom he never married, had a girl: Lisa Brennan-Jobs. Jobs married Laurene Powell in 1991 and had an additional two children.