Steven Paul Jobs (February 24, 1955 – October 5, 2011) was an American businessman,
inventor, and invSestor best known for co-founding the technology company Apple Inc. Jobs
was also the founder of NeXT and chairman and majority shareholder of Pixar. He was a
pioneer of the personal computer revolution of the 1970s and 1980s, along with his early
business partner and fellow Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak.
Jobs was born in San Francisco in 1955 and adopted shortly afterwards. He attended Reed
College in 1972 before withdrawing that same year. In 1974, he traveled through India, seeking
enlightenment before later studying Zen Buddhism. He and Wozniak co-founded Apple in 1976
to further develop and sell Wozniak's Apple I personal computer. Together, the duo gained
fame and wealth a year later with production and sale of the Apple II, one of the first highly
successful mass-produced microcomputers.
Jobs saw the commercial potential of the Xerox Alto in 1979, which was mouse-driven and had
a graphical user interface (GUI). This led to the development of the largely unsuccessful Apple
Lisa in 1983, followed by the breakthrough Macintosh in 1984, the first mass-produced
computer with a GUI. The Macintosh launched the desktop publishing industry in 1985 (for
example, the Aldus Pagemaker) with the addition of the Apple LaserWriter, the first laser
printer to feature vector graphics and PostScript.
In 1985, Jobs departed Apple after a long power struggle with the company's board and its
then-CEO, John Sculley. That same year, Jobs took some Apple employees with him to found
NeXT, a computer platform development company that specialized in computers for higher-
education and business markets, serving as its CEO. In 1986, he bought the computer graphics
division of Lucasfilm, which was spun off independently as Pixar.[2] Pixar produced the first
computer-animated feature film, Toy Story (1995), and became a leading animation studio,
producing dozens of commercially successful and critically acclaimed films.
In 1997, Jobs returned to Apple as CEO after the company's acquisition of NeXT. He was largely
responsible for reviving Apple, which was on the verge of bankruptcy. He worked closely with
British designer Jony Ive to develop a line of products and services that had larger cultural
ramifications, beginning with the "Think different" advertising campaign, and leading to the
iMac, iTunes, Mac OS X, Apple Store, iPod, iTunes Store, iPhone, App Store, and iPad. Jobs was
also a board member at Gap Inc. from 1999 to 2002.[3] In 2003, Jobs was diagnosed with a
pancreatic neuroendocrine tumor. He died of tumor-related respiratory arrest in 2011; in 2022,
he was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Since his death, he has won
141 patents; Jobs holds over 450 patents in total.[4]
