Steve Jobs

Overview

Steven Paul Jobs (February 24, 1955 – October 5, 2011) was the co-founder of Apple Computer, Inc. (now Apple Inc.) and a charismatic pioneer of the personal computer era, who built the Apple II and the Macintosh, was removed from his own company in 1985, built NeXT and Pixar in exile, and returned in 1997 to lead Apple through the iMac, iPod, iPhone and iPad era before dying of complications from pancreatic cancer (Britannica). Jobs was raised by adoptive parents in Cupertino, California, in what is now Silicon Valley (Britannica).

Jobs’s youth mixed engineering with counterculture: he dropped out of Reed College in Portland, Oregon, took a job at Atari Corporation as a video game designer in early 1974, and saved enough money for a pilgrimage to India to experience Buddhism (Britannica). Back in Silicon Valley in autumn 1974, he reconnected with Stephen Wozniak, a former high-school friend working for Hewlett-Packard (Britannica). When Wozniak told Jobs of his progress designing his own computer logic board, Jobs suggested they go into business together — which they did after Hewlett-Packard formally turned down Wozniak’s design in 1976 (Britannica). The Apple I was built in the Jobs family garage with money from selling Jobs’s Volkswagen minibus and Wozniak’s programmable calculator (Britannica).

Founding Apple and the Macintosh

Jobs was one of the first entrepreneurs to understand that the personal computer would appeal to a broad audience, at least if it did not look like a science-fair project (Britannica). With his encouragement, Wozniak designed the improved Apple II, complete with a keyboard and a sleek molded plastic case, and Apple Computer — incorporated in 1977, the same year the Apple II was completed — became synonymous with the personal-computer boom (Britannica). Britannica’s Apple biography dates the company’s public offering precisely to December 1980, offering 4.6 million shares at $22 each (see open items for a wording discrepancy in the Jobs biography) (Britannica). In 1983 Jobs recruited PepsiCo president John Sculley as chief executive, winning him over with the challenge: “Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life?” (Britannica).

In 1979 Jobs led a small group of Apple engineers to a technology demonstration at Xerox PARC to see how the graphical user interface could make computers easier to use (Britannica). Soon afterward he left the team designing Lisa, a business computer, to head a smaller group building a lower-cost machine; both computers were redesigned to exploit and refine the PARC ideas, but Jobs explicitly favoured the Macintosh (Britannica). He demanded the Macintosh be not merely great but “insanely great,” and in January 1984 he introduced it himself in a choreographed demonstration later pointed to as the archetype of event marketing (Britannica). The first Macs, however, were underpowered and expensive with few software applications, and sales disappointed (Britannica). In 1985 Sculley convinced Apple’s board of directors to remove the company’s famous co-founder (Britannica).

NeXT, Pixar, and the return

Jobs quickly started another firm, NeXT Inc., designing powerful workstation computers for the education market, with funding partners including Texan entrepreneur Ross Perot and Canon Inc. (Britannica). Although the NeXT computer was notable for its engineering design, it was eclipsed by less costly competitors such as Sun Microsystems, and in the early 1990s Jobs focused the company on its innovative NEXTSTEP software system (Britannica). Meanwhile, in 1986 Jobs acquired a controlling interest in Pixar, a computer graphics firm founded as a division of Lucasfilm (Britannica). Over the following decade he built Pixar into a major animation studio that produced the first full-length feature film to be completely computer-animated, Toy Story, in 1995; Pixar’s public stock offering that year made Jobs a billionaire for the first time, and he eventually sold the studio to the Disney Company in 2006 (Britannica).

Apple announced that it would purchase NeXT in 1996, which brought Jobs back into the company; much of NeXT’s technology was integrated into Mac OS X, and Jobs became interim CEO in 1997 (ETHW). Britannica’s Apple biography adds that the board recruited Jobs in mid-1997 after Apple’s market share fell to roughly 3%, and that he then streamlined the product lines, announced an alliance with Microsoft, and launched the iMac (Britannica). In subsequent years Apple branched away from the personal computer toward devices such as the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad (ETHW). Britannica dates those launches to the iPod in 2001, the iPhone in 2007 and the iPad in 2010 (Britannica).

The Adobe thread: buyout, stake, and Flash

Jobs’s relationship with Adobe bookends his career, and it began with a failed takeover. A friend who had left Xerox to work for Jobs on the Macintosh brought Jobs to see what Adobe’s founders were doing, and Jobs told them: “Sell me your company, come work for me and I’ll put it in my product” (Knowledge at Wharton). Co-founder Charles Geschke recalled that the founders were polite but firm — “We really want to start our own company” — and that Jobs then settled for a licensing deal in which Apple bought 19.9% of Adobe at five times the original venture valuation, with prepaid royalties bringing Adobe about $3.5 million in total (Knowledge at Wharton). That deal put Adobe’s PostScript into Apple’s LaserWriter, the printer that launched desktop publishing. Twenty-five years later, on April 29, 2010, Jobs published his 1,685-word “Thoughts on Flash,” saying Flash had too many bugs, drained batteries too quickly and was designed for PCs using mice rather than touchscreens — and, most importantly, that Flash put a third party between Apple and its developers (Associated Press). Adobe chief executive Shantanu Narayen had said the company was “committed to bringing Flash to any platform on which there is a screen” and that the ban “has nothing to do with technology” (Associated Press).

Illness, resignation, and death

In 2003 Jobs was diagnosed with a rare form of pancreatic cancer, and the following year he announced that he had undergone surgery to remove a tumor (Britannica). In 2009 he received a liver transplant (Britannica). After a long battle with cancer, he resigned as CEO of Apple on August 24, 2011, and died on October 5, 2011, at age 56 (ETHW). Britannica likewise records that he died two months after resigning, of complications from pancreatic cancer (Britannica). He was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2022 (Britannica).

What this profile does not claim

This profile sticks to documented public and professional facts about a deceased public figure. It does not assert a single settled account of why Jobs was removed in 1985 beyond Britannica’s account that Sculley convinced the board; internal board deliberations were not part of this research pass. It does not cover Jobs’s personal and family life beyond the documented facts above, and it makes no claim about the unverified details of his medical treatment beyond the diagnosis, surgery, transplant, resignation and death dates that the sources state. The December 1980 IPO date follows Britannica’s Apple biography, the more specific account, over the Jobs biography’s “1981” wording (see open items).