Steve Jobs – Brief Biography

[Anonymous]

Steve Jobs was born on 24th February, 1955, in San Francisco, California. He was adopted by Paul and Clara Jobs.

He attended Cupertino Junior High School and Homestead High School. He was a frequent attendee at Hewlett-Packard Company lectures. He worked with Steve Wozniak as a summer employee at Hewlett-Packard.



Jobs enrolled in Reed College, Portland, Oregon. He dropped out after one semester, but carried on auditing classes at reed.



He returned to California in 1974 and started going regularly to the Homebrew Computer club with Wozniak. He worked as a technician at video-game maker Atari. His aim was to save up enough money to spend some time at a spiritual retreat in India.



He went to India with Daniel Kottke, an ex-Reed College classmate. Kottke eventually became Apple’s first employee. He came back a Buddhist, with shaven head wearing traditional Indian attire. He experimented with LSD, calling this period in his life "One of the two or three most important things I had done in my life."



He went back to work for Atari, with the task of making a circuit board for Breakout, a game. Atari offered him a $100 bonus for each chip that could be eliminated. Jobs suggested to Wozniak to split the bonus 50/50 if Wozniak could work on this. They managed to eliminate 50 chips – however, the design was so tight that it was not possible to reproduce on an assembly line. Jobs only got $700 bonus from Atari, rather than the $5,000 for 50 chips.



In 1976 he teamed up with Steve Wozniak to sell personal computers they had assembled in Jobs’ garage. Jobs says that was where Apple Computers started.



Jobs became a millionaire by the time he was 30 years old.



In 1985 he was forced out of Apple and set up the NeXT corporation. A decade later Apple bought NeXT and Jobs became CEO of Apple again. Following Jobs’ return to Apple, its fortunes improved dramatically.



Jobs also became CEO of animation company Pixar, which created such movies as Toy Story and Monsters, Inc. Pixar was bought out by the Walt Disney Company for $7.4 billion in 2006, making Jobs the largest individual shareholder of Disney shares.



Although Jobs’ official salary while chief executive of Apple was only $1 per year, he owns 5,426 Apple shares, and 138 Disney shares. In 2009, Forbes estimated his net wealth at $5.1 billion.