Steven Paul "
Steve"
Jobs (
February 24, 1955 – October 5, 2011)
was an American
entrepreneur and inventor,
best known as the co-founder, chairman, and CEO 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, transforming "one industry after another, from computers and smartphones to music and movies..."
Jobs also co-founded and served as chief executive of
Pixar Animation Studios; he became a member of the board of directors of
The Walt Disney Company in 2006, when Disney acquired Pixar. 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
Apple Lisa and, one year later, the
Macintosh. He also played a role in introducing the
LaserWriter, one of the first widely available laser printers, to the market.
After a power struggle with the board of directors in 1985, Jobs left Apple and founded
NeXT, a
computer platform
development company specializing in the higher-education and business
markets. In 1986, he acquired the computer graphics division of
Lucasfilm, which was spun off as
Pixar.
He was credited in
Toy Story (1995) as an executive producer. He served as CEO and majority shareholder until
Disney's purchase of Pixar in 2006.
[14] In 1996, after Apple had failed to deliver its operating system,
Copland,
Gil Amelio turned to NeXT Computer, and the
NeXTSTEP platform became the foundation for the
Mac OS X.
Jobs returned to Apple as an advisor, and took control of the company
as an interim CEO. Jobs brought Apple from near bankruptcy to
profitability by 1998.
As the new CEO of the company, Jobs oversaw the development of the
iMac,
iTunes,
iPod,
iPhone, and
iPad, and on the services side, the company's
Apple Retail Stores,
iTunes Store and the
App Store.
[19]
The success of these products and services provided several years of
stable financial returns, and propelled Apple to become the world's most
valuable publicly traded company in 2011.
[20] The reinvigoration of the company is regarded by many commentators as one of the greatest turnarounds in business history.
[21][22][23]
In 2003, Jobs was diagnosed with a
pancreas neuroendocrine tumor.
Though it was initially treated, he reported a hormone imbalance,
underwent a liver transplant in 2009, and appeared progressively thinner
as his health declined.
[24]
On medical leave for most of 2011, Jobs resigned in August that year,
and was elected Chairman of the Board. He died of respiratory arrest
related to his metastatic tumor on October 5, 2011.
Jobs received a number of honors and public recognition for his
influence in the technology and music industries. He has been referred
to as "legendary", a "futurist" or simply "visionary",
and has been described as the "Father of the Digital Revolution",
a "master of innovation",
"the master evangelist of the digital age"
[32] and a "design perfectionist"
Production of apple:-
Apple was established on April 1, 1976, by
Steve Jobs,
Steve Wozniak and
Ronald Wayne to sell the
Apple I personal computer kit. The kits were hand-built by Wozniak
and first shown to the public at the
Homebrew Computer Club.
The Apple I was sold as a
motherboard (with
CPU,
RAM, and basic textual-video chips), which is less than what is today considered a complete personal computer.
The Apple I went on sale in July 1976 and was market-priced at $666.66 ($2,690 in 2013 dollars, adjusted for inflation).
Apple was incorporated January 3, 1977,
without Wayne, who sold his share of the company back to Jobs and Wozniak for $800. Multi-millionaire
Mike Markkula provided essential business expertise and funding of $250,000 during the incorporation of Apple.
The
Apple II was introduced on April 16, 1977, at the first
West Coast Computer Faire. It differed from its major rivals, the
TRS-80 and
Commodore PET, due to its character cell-based color graphics and an
open architecture. While early models used ordinary cassette tapes as storage devices, they were superseded by the introduction of a 5 1/4 inch
floppy disk drive and interface, the
Disk II.
The Apple II was chosen to be the desktop platform for the first "
killer app" of the business world,
VisiCalc, a
spreadsheet program.
VisiCalc created a business market for the Apple II and gave home users
compatibility with the office, an additional reason to buy an Apple II.
Apple was a distant third place to
Commodore and
Tandy until
VisiCalc came along.
By the end of the 1970s, Apple had a staff of computer designers and a production line. The company introduced the
Apple III in May 1980 in an attempt to compete with
IBM and
Microsoft in the business and corporate computing market.
Jobs and several Apple employees, including
Jef Raskin, visited
Xerox PARC in December 1979 to see the
Xerox Alto.
Xerox
granted Apple engineers three days of access to the PARC facilities in
return for the option to buy 100,000 shares (800,000 split-adjusted
shares) of Apple at the pre-IPO price of $10 a share.
Jobs was immediately convinced that all future computers would use a graphical user interface (
GUI), and development of a GUI began for the
Apple Lisa.
On December 12, 1980, Apple went public at $22 per share,
generating more capital than any IPO since
Ford Motor Company in 1956 and instantly creating more millionaires (about 300) than any company in history.
first product.
.
