Jobs, Steven P.

1955–

Entrepreneur

Co-founder of the companies Apple and NeXT, Steve Jobs did not invent any of the radical computing technologies that he has promoted; rather, his role has been that of an evangelist, driving the world toward things it never knew it needed. In the 1970s, the Apple II pioneered the world of user-friendly personal computing. The Apple Macintosh, although borrowing heavily from previous innovations at Xerox PARC, influenced the “look and feel” of almost every desktop computer produced in the 1980s and 1990s.

Jobs' career in Silicon Valley began in 1974, when he took a job designing video games for Nolan Bushnell's company, Atari. He was soon attending meetings of the Homebrew Computer Club in Menlo Park, California. Jobs' old friend and fellow club member Steve Wozniak produced a machine called the Apple I. Jobs persuaded Wozniak to give up his job as [Page 263]an engineer at Hewlett-Packard so they could go into business together selling the machine. Apple Computer was formed on April 1, 1976, and soon produced the classic microcomputer called the Apple II. With sound and color graphics, and a price of $1,298, it became the most widely used computer in homes and schools; it was used by businesses primarily for its VisiCalc spreadsheet software. By 1979, the sales of the Apple II computer totaled $139 million, which represented a phenomenal 700 percent growth. One can fully grasp the pioneering role of Apple by noting that it was not until four years later that IBM sold its first personal computer.

Technically innovative though the Apple II was, what made it remarkable was its design and usability; it was not a machine for electronics enthusiasts, but a mass-market consumer product. Jobs' revolutionary influence was even more evident in his next projects, the Apple Lisa and Macintosh computers. Featuring an interface that was substantially influenced by a visit that Jobs and his engineers paid to the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) in late 1979, these computers were supremely easy to use; it was Jobs who referred to the Macintosh as “the computer for the rest of us.”

In an effort to find a killer application for the Macintosh, Jobs also helped to pioneer the field of desktop publishing. While the Mac was favored for its graphic capacities and ease of use, its slow speed, small monochrome screen, and closed architecture limited its use in the business sector. Nevertheless, the Lisa and the Macintosh were considered milestone achievements, as many components of the Macintosh graphical user interface (GUI) later became de facto standards, and were adopted by other operating systems such as Microsoft Windows.

For all his visionary thinking, and his ability to inspire devotion in Apple's customers and employees, popular accounts of Jobs the revolutionary paint him as an arrogant, intolerant workaholic who drove his engineers into the ground, then berated them for not working harder. In May 1985, Jobs became the casualty of a boardroom fight with Apple chief executive officer (CEO) John Sculley. Sculley stripped Jobs of all his official duties and banished him to a one-person office on the Apple campus.

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