<He was the first man among us. A great light has gone out>

Steve Jobs

1955- 2011

<He was the first man among us. A great light has gone out>

Steven Paul "Steve" was an American businessman, designer and inventor. He is best known as the co-founder, chairman, and chief executive officer of Apple Inc. Through Apple, he was widely recognized as a charismatic pioneer of the personal computer revolution and for his influential career in the computer and consumer electronics fields.

Steve Jobs was truly a remarkable human being. His contributions to the computer world were more than innovative, they made people's lives better and brought technology to a whole new level. He made Apple products one of the few in the world that not only did everything he said they would do, but even more. He made technology fun and easy to work with. This is what made his very first computers so popular. He cared about people and will be greatly missed by many people.

Steve Jobs has revolutionized the computer, hardware, software, animation and music industries. Steve Jobs' insistence of innovating always has cost him millions of dollars but has created a cult-like following for his products.

Steve Jobs regularly made it to most rosters of the rich and powerful. It was surprising for a guy who takes home an annual salary of U.S. $1. The reasons why he was on all power lists were; Apple, Next, iPod and Pixar. Jobs was also known as the one man who could have upstaged Bill Gates. But Jobs was as excited about innovation as Bill Gates was interested in making money.

Steve Jobs….the man who transformed the world with his innovative approach, ideas and creativity. The former Apple CEO was a visionary in the world of computing and is largely responsible for the level at which computers are integrated with our everyday lives. Initially, from a mouse to making of iMac, iPod, iPad, iTunes and iPhone….this guy revolutionized the world of computers.

Steve Jobs was born in Green Bay, Wisconsin to Joanne Simpson and an Egyptian-Arab father. Paul and Clara Jobs of Mountain View, Santa Clara County, California then adopted him. The writer Mona Simpson is Jobs' biological sister. In 1972, Jobs graduated from Homestead High School in Cupertino, California and enrolled in Reed College in Portland, Oregon. One semester later he had dropped out. But instead of going back home he hung around college and took up the study of philosophy and foreign cultures.

Steve Jobs had a deep-seated interest in technology so he took up a job at Atari Inc. which was a leading manufacturer of video games. He struck a friendship with fellow designer Steve Wozniak and attended meetings of the "Homebrew Computer Club" with him. Wozniak and Jobs developed a system with a toy whistle available in the Cap'n Crunch cereal box to make it possible to make free long distance telephone calls. They called off the amateur venture after someone told them of the possible legal consequences.

After saving up some money Steve Jobs took off for India in search of enlightenment with his friend Dan Kottke. Once he returned he convinced Wozniak to quit his job at Hewlett Packard and join him in his venture that concerned personal computers. They sold items like a scientific calculator to raise the seed capital. There is controversy as to where did the name Apple originate. According to one belief, Apple originated from a pleasant summer, Jobs had spent as an orchard worker in Oregon. There is another school of thought that says that the symbol of a rainbow-colored apple that has been bitten into is a tribute to Alan Turing who was a homosexual and had died after biting a cyanide-laced apple.

In 1976, Jobs, then 21, and Wozniak, 26, founded Apple Computer Co. in the Jobs family garage. The first personal computer was sold for $666.66. By 1980, Apple had already released three improved versions of the personal computer. It had a wildly successful IPO which made both founders millionaires many times over. Steve Jobs had managed to rope in John Sculley of Pepsi to head the marketing function in Apple.

A tiff with the Apple board and John Sculley led to the resignation of Steve Jobs. As soon as he resigned he immersed himself in his brand new venture. Steve Jobs decided that he wanted to change the hardware industry. The company was called NeXTStep and the new machine was called NeXT Computer. He plowed in more than U.S. $250 million into the company. The machine was a commercial washout but it did help in object-oriented programming, PostScript, and magneto-optical devices. Tim Berners-Lee developed the original World Wide Web system at CERN on a NeXT machine. Bitterly disappointed with NeXTStep, Jobs accepted the offer that Apple made him.

Steve Jobs also started Pixar Inc., which has gone on to produce animated movies such as Toy Story (1995); A Bug's Life (1998); Toy Story 2 (1999); Monsters, Inc. (2001); Finding Nemo (2003); and The Incredibles (2004). This venture has made him one of the most sought-after men in Hollywood.

Post Pixar, Steve Jobs wanted another round of revolutionizing to do. This time it was the music industry. He introduced the iPod in 2003. Later he came up with iTunes, which was a digital jukebox. A million and a half iPods later, the music industry still does not know whether this invention will save it or destroy it. Apple has a great advertising track record and its 'Rip, Mix, Burn' campaign was another feather in its cap. Now the industry uses a Mac to make the music and an iPod to store it.

Steve Jobs lived with his wife, Laurene Powell and their three children in Silicon Valley. Lisa Jobs is his daughter from a previous relationship.

In 2004, there was a cancerous tumor in his pancreas, which was successfully operated upon. At the Apple Computer Worldwide Developers Conference in 2006, when Jobs addressed the audience during his keynote speech, he looked weak and his speech was not as vibrant as it would usually be. This raised concern about his health. In 2008, rumors about his health issues intensified after an article in Fortune Magazine said that Jobs did not consider undergoing surgery to treat his pancreatic cancer. The rumors about his health were fueled further by his obituary published by Bloomberg, which they later declared was a mistake.

In 2009, Jobs announced that he would be going on a 6-month leave of absence and that Tim Cook would be the acting CEO of Apple. It was clear that Jobs had serious issues with his health. In June 2009, it was reported that Jobs had undergone a successful liver transplant. It looked like he would soon resume work. In 2011, after a brief leave of absence, Steve Jobs resigned. His resignation from the position of Apple CEO came as a shock to many. But he had always maintained that he would step down on the day he felt he wouldn't be able to meet his duties and expections as the CEO. On October 5, 2011, Steve Jobs passed away. His innovation did distinguish him as a leader; a true leader who left behind a legacy.

Address at Stanford University (2005)

· Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life.

Stanford University commencement address (12 June 2005)

· Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking.

· The only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it.

· When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

· I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

· Death is the destination we all share, no one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be because death is very likely the single best invention of life.

· Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

· Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure — these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

· No one wants to die. Even people who wanna go to heaven don't wanna die to get there.

· When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960's, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and Polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

· I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to [learn calligraphy]. I learned about serif and sans-serif typefaces, about varying the space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful. Historical. Artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture. And I found it fascinating. None of this had any hope of any practical application in my life. But 10 years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would never have multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it's likely that no personal computer would have them.

· Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

· Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking. Don’t settle.

Дата добавления: 2015-11-04