The remarkable career of Steve Jobs
Health, however, was not on the side of technology's most celebrated star, and following his August resignation as Apple's CEO, Jobs died Wednesday. In honour of the 56-year-old, MSN looks back at the career milestones of the billionaire, the iPod maker, the husband and the father of four.
1955-1976
Steve Jobs was born in San Francisco, a fitting locale for the California boy who would later put a nearby town on the map.
While attending classes at high school in Cupertino, which later became famous for housing Apple's headquarters, Jobs found a summer gig at Hewlett-Packard, where he worked alongside a fellow employee named Steve Wozniak.Jobs would enrol in Portland's Reed College in 1972, but stay for only one semester, making him one of the most successful school dropouts of all-time.
After his college days, Jobs took up work at video game maker Atari, yet kept steady his partnership with Wozniak at a computer club in Silicon Valley. Steve Jobs' incomparable legacy,
1976-1984
In 1976, along with Wozniak and another man that would quickly be bought out of the company, Jobs founded Apple. The computer maker would flounder for years in the still untapped tech market, but Jobs' imprint on the business was felt immediately.
Two years after its founding, Jobs recruited an outside man - Mike Scott from tech manufacturer National Semiconductor - to serve as CEO, and while his reign left little mark on the company, it allowed Jobs to focus on the tech component of Apple's enterprise. ronald wayne sell apple shares,
In 1983, Jobs lured a man named John Sculley from Pepsi to act as Apple's chief exec, famously proposing, "Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life, or do you want to come with me and change the world?"
1984
Following Jobs' bringing of John Sculley to his company, Apple officially reached the mainstream with its stunning George Orwell-inspired commercial that aired during the 1984 Super Bowl. The dystopian ad, which famously cost $1.5 million and was directed by Ridley Scott, launched the Macintosh into public consciousness, going on sale two days after the well-received commercial. Sales weren't huge at the time - the computer's inflation-adjusted retail tag of more than $5,000 surely hindered consumer adoption - but the Macintosh, the first in the series of Macs that are still being issued today, proved no one knew how to release a product with more hype and fanfare than Steve Jobs.
1985-1996
Despite its recent success, Apple was not immune to turmoil in its early days, and remarkably the brand's most iconic figure was absent from the company for more than a decade beginning in the mid '80s. After being relieved of his duties as head of the Macintosh division, Steve Jobs left Apple to form his own business, NeXT Computer, in 1985. Even with the high consumer cost of the devices NeXT would put to market, Jobs was able to advance personal computing in his time apart from Apple, including the release of NeXTMail, an interactive email system that was among the first to support clickable graphics and audio within web messages. the next steve jobs,
1996-2001
Late in 1996, Apple announced it would buy NeXT Computer for $429 million, a deal that brought Jobs back to the company he co-founded. The blue jean, black turtleneck-clad Jobs returned to the tech maker's CEO position, a rank in which some colleagues say he glowered from - intimidating co-workers as the company's brooding boss. But Jobs may have been excused for his questionable temperament. At task for the tech titan was returning Apple to profitability, a lofty goal for the brand, whose portfolio was littered with sunken projects and a stock price of just $5.22 per share as 1996 closed. Certainly, the best move of Jobs' early return years was the release of the iPod, the transcendent portable music device that debuted in 2001. As of December, 2010, nearly 300 million iPods had been sold worldwide.
2007
The world’s best-selling cell phones, Though marketing and design guru Jonathan Ive gets much of the credit for Apple's consumer devices, it was nonetheless Steve Jobs captaining the ship when the company released its next-generation gadget, the iPhone. Jobs unveiled the first iPhone in January, 2007, showing the wonders of the touch-screen phone, which was to be released six months later. Surely, the buzz tactics Jobs practiced in 1984 with Apple's Super Bowl commercial helped the CEO build a fever pitch over the iPhone; blogs and Internet message boards brewed with anticipation ahead of its release, and fans lined up around corners for days to be the first to get their hands on the cell phone of the future. The iPhone, now in its fourth generation, has easily become the most coveted smartphone on the market today, and Jobs turned a risky move - entering the mobile marketplace - into a lucrative one: the iPhone is now Apple's largest money maker. The world’s best-selling cell phones,
2010
What's better than an iPhone? How about a bigger version, with no ability to make phone calls, yes, but enough appeal to change the personal computer market forever? Indeed, Apple's iPad tablet was a game changer when it released last year, yet remarkably it could have come sooner. Steve Jobs maintained that the iPad was in development before the iPhone, but shelved temporarily when the CEO realized its features could work just as well on a mobile device. When Jobs did release the iPad, its reasonable price point (as little as $499) made it a smash with consumers, who snapped up 300,000 of the units on its very first day in stores. In just one month, Apple had sold one million iPads, half the time it took to sell the same number of iPhones.
2011
Steve Jobs officially resigned from Apple's top post in August of this year, but his health has been poor since 2004, when he announced he'd been diagnosed with a cancerous tumour in his pancreas. Later that year, Jobs underwent a procedure that appeared to successfully remove the tumour, though he would be dogged by inquiries into his health for years - most notably in 2006, when he was observed looking thin, gaunt and lethargic at Apple's annual Worldwide Developers Conference. reaction to steve jobs death, The Apple boss would appear in good health in the subsequent years, but a 2009 liver transplant seemed to kick start another fall to sickness, and in January, 2011, Jobs was granted a medical leave ahead of his official resignation. Still, in spite of failing health, Jobs was very much a part of Apple's business, and one of his last cutthroat moves helped boost his company and doom a competitor. As Research In Motion prepared to debut its new tablet, a direct challenger to the iPad, Apple stepped in and released its iPad 2 just one month before the PlayBook, driving sales to the iPad's successor and totally undercutting any momentum RIM hoped to achieve. reaction to steve jobs death,
