Official:
Steven Paul (Steve) Jobs. February 24, 1955 – October 5, 2011. Pioneer of the IT technologies era. I-man.
Life and Work:
1. “Steve was brave enough to think differently, bold enough to believe he could change the world, and talented enough to do it. By making computers personal and putting the internet in our pockets, he made the information revolution not only accessible, but intuitive and fun,” told US President Barack Obama mourning his demise.
2. The famous actor and former governor of California Arnold Schwarzenegger, the creator of the social network Facebook Mark Zuckerberg, and millions of people who use products created by Steve Jobs’ mind and talent every day – all of them agree that Steve Jobs has changed the world.
3. “There’s an old Wayne Gretzky quote that I love,” Steve Jobs once said, “‘I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.’ And we’ve always tried to do that...” Yes, Jobs was always on the cutting edge of progress and always a little ahead of the rest.
4. Steve Jobs did not graduate from a university. “My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates...” Jobs’ mother made his foster parents promise that Steven would enter a college, and they kept the promise.
5. Once again the floor is given to Jobs: “There’s some notion that because I was abandoned, I worked very hard, so I could do well and make my parents wish they had me back, or some such nonsense, but that’s ridiculous. Knowing I was adopted may have made me feel more independent, but I have never felt abandoned. My parents, Paul and Clara Jobs, taught me how to feel special.”
6. The special boy did not like school at all, but the teachers literally bribed Steve. Sweets, money, and toys did their job, and Jobs was immediately transferred from the fourth grade to the sixth.
7. A personal computer, which Steve saw for the first time at the Hewlett-Packard research club, where the boy was taken by his neighbor, made a lasting impression on Jobs. Thirteen-year-old Jobs signed up for the club and did not hesitate to call Bill Hewlett personally when he needed some parts for a project. The company’s head was impressed – he offered the teenager a job at the HP assembly line.
8. By the age of fifteen, Jobs – though with his father’s financial assistance – already owned a car.
9. The adoptive parents kept their promise to his mother. Jobs went to Reed College, but six months later he realized that he was wasting his foster parents’ savings. He left college but signed up for calligraphy classes there. According to Jobs, all the amazing typographics of computers – initially, of Macintosh, and then of all the others that copied it – stemmed from these lessons.
10. In 1974, Jobs traveled to India in search of spiritual enlightenment. On the way, he went through dysentery and lost 15 kilograms. Jobs was soon joined by a college friend, and according to his memoirs, Jobs failed to achieve “inner silence” in India. After a seven-month stay in India, Jobs returned to the United States emaciated, red-brown from sunburn, and with a shaved head.
11. After returning to the United States, Jobs became a serious practitioner of Zen Buddhism, participated in long meditations at the Tassahara Zen Center, and even considered becoming an apprentice at the Eiheiji Temple in Japan.
12. Jobs met Steve Wozniak as a teenager. In the mid-1970s, Jobs convinced Wozniak to create his own personal computer, which could become a commercial success.
13. Modest working conditions – Jobs and Wozniak worked in Jobs’ parents’ garage – did not impede the partners: the Apple I computer was a success and sold well.
14. Steve invited his friends to work on creating the computer and for the first time showed himself as a rather tough, authoritarian leader. He made an exception only for Wozniak, at whom he never raised his voice – throughout all the time of their friendship and cooperation.
15. On April 1, 1976, Jobs and Wozniak registered the Apple Computer company. “You couldn’t dream a more appropriate logo: lust, knowledge, hope and anarchy,” said the company’s former vice Jean-Louis Gassee about the legendary bitten apple.
16. In 1984, the famous Macintosh was born – not everyone knows that it was named after an apple variety. It was born out of a commercial idea: Jobs immediately realized that users would like a computer that would be easy to control by clicking the icons on the display.
17. A year later, Jobs was fired from the company he created. He did not give up, but created two new companies, and eventually returned to Apple in triumph.
18. iMac and iPod, iPhone and iPad made Steve Jobs a real – as authors of his biography joked – i-con of the computer business. However, there is also a joke that Jobs should pay a commission to Korney Chukovsky because it was he who invented Aybolit.
19. By the age of 25, Steve Jobs had become a millionaire. By the end of his life, he had 5,426 million Apple shares worth a total of $2.1 billion.
20. When Steve Jobs was asked about the ideal business model, he replied, “My model for business is The Beatles. They were four guys who kept each other’s kind of negative tendencies in check. They balanced each other, and the total was greater than the sum of the parts. That’s how I see business: great things in business are never done by one person, they’re done by a team of people.”
21. Jobs had many affairs, but the IT genius was married only once. In his marriage to Lauren Powell, Jobs had a son, Reed, and two daughters, Erin and Eve. His eldest daughter, the American journalist Lisa Brennan Jobs, was born out of wedlock.
22. The Jobs family supported the US Democratic Party and became friends with the Clintons. Jobs even spent a night in Lincoln’s bedroom in the White House. Sometimes, Bill Clinton asked Jobs for advice at difficult moments of his life, such as amid the Monica Lewinsky scandal.
23. In his private life and in his work, Steve Jobs tried to adhere to Zen Buddhism and Bauhaus principles. He did not eat meat, and usually wore a black turtleneck by Issey Miyake, blue Levi’s model 501 jeans, and New Balance 991 sneakers. According to his biographer, Walter Isaacson, he wanted to have his own uniform: “both because of its daily convenience and its ability to convey a signature style.”
24. In 1980, Steve hired a detective to find his birth mother. The doctor who supervised the adoption lied to him that all the documents were lost in the fire. But after the doctor’s death, Jobs was given the documents from which he finally learned his parents’ names. After him, Steve found out, Joan Schieble and Abdulfatt Jandali had a daughter, Mona.
25. Jobs fought pancreatic cancer for many years and on the day of his death, Apple and Microsoft lowered the flags at their headquarters.
26. A dozen books have been written about Steve Jobs’ life and three feature films have been made.
