Steve Jobs was born in San Francisco on February 24, 1955, and placed for adoption shortly after birth. Paul and Clara Jobs, a working-class couple in Mountain View, California, took him in and raised him. Paul Jobs was a machinist who tinkered with cars and electronics in the family garage, and that hands-on environment lit a spark in young Steve early on.
School was never a comfortable fit. Jobs was frequently bored in class and pulled pranks that landed him in serious trouble — he was even asked to repeat a grade at one point. His teachers in the Cupertino school district eventually recognized his unusual intelligence and pushed him ahead. By his early teens, he was already cold-calling industry executives to ask for spare parts for electronics projects.
Jobs enrolled at Reed College in Portland, Oregon in 1972 but dropped out after just one semester. He found most of the required classes meaningless and didn’t want to drain his adoptive parents’ savings on tuition. He stuck around campus for another 18 months, sleeping on floors and auditing classes that interested him — including a calligraphy course that would later influence the typeface design of the original Macintosh. He experimented with psychedelic drugs during this period and traveled to India in 1974 in search of spiritual clarity, spending months studying Zen Buddhism.
After returning from India, Jobs landed a job at Atari, one of the first major video game companies. He worked the night shift to avoid friction with colleagues who found his personality difficult. It was during this period that he deepened his friendship with Steve Wozniak, a gifted self-taught engineer he had known since his teenage years. Wozniak had a remarkable ability to design functional hardware with minimal components. Jobs saw the commercial potential in what Wozniak was building.
In 1976, Jobs and Wozniak founded Apple Computer in the Jobs family garage in Los Altos. Their first product, the Apple I, was a bare circuit board sold as a kit to hobbyists. It retailed for $666.66. The Apple II followed in 1977 and was a dramatic leap forward — it came fully assembled, supported color graphics, and included a keyboard. Schools and small businesses adopted it rapidly, and Apple grew from a garage operation into a serious company almost overnight.
By the early 1980s, Jobs had turned his focus to a new project: the Lisa. It was one of the first personal computers designed with a graphical user interface, meaning users clicked icons instead of typing commands. Jobs had visited Xerox PARC in 1979 and seen an early GUI demonstration that changed his thinking entirely. The Lisa launched in 1983 but was priced at $9,995 — far too expensive for most buyers.
While the Lisa struggled commercially, Jobs was already leading a separate team working on the Macintosh. He ran that team with relentless intensity, pushing engineers and designers to meet near-impossible standards. The team worked out of a building apart from the rest of Apple, and Jobs fostered a fierce sense of identity among them — they weren’t just building a computer, they were, in his words, putting a dent in the universe.
The Macintosh launched in January 1984, introduced to the world during a now-legendary Super Bowl commercial directed by Ridley Scott. The machine came with a mouse, displayed text in multiple fonts, and used windows and icons instead of command lines. It was unlike anything consumers had seen. Jobs personally introduced it on stage, pulling it from a bag to a standing ovation.
Despite the Macintosh’s cultural impact, its sales fell short of projections in 1984 and 1985. Jobs clashed repeatedly with Apple CEO John Sculley — a man Jobs himself had recruited from Pepsi. The board sided with Sculley, and in May 1985, Jobs was stripped of his management responsibilities. He resigned from Apple that September.
After leaving Apple, Jobs founded NeXT in 1985, aiming to build powerful workstations for universities and research institutions. The machines were beautifully designed but expensive, and the company never achieved mass market success. In parallel, Jobs had acquired the computer graphics division of Lucasfilm in 1986 for $10 million. That studio became Pixar. Under his ownership, Pixar developed groundbreaking animation technology and released Toy Story in 1995 — the first fully computer-animated feature film.
At NeXT, Jobs kept the same demanding work style he had practiced at Apple. He obsessed over every detail — including the perfect cube shape of the NeXT workstation’s magnesium casing. He held staff retreats to sharpen the company’s direction and brought in outside partners, including Canon, which invested $100 million in NeXT in 1989.
By 1996, Apple was in serious trouble. The company had burned through CEOs, its market share had collapsed, and it was months away from bankruptcy. Apple purchased NeXT in December 1996 for $429 million, bringing Jobs back into the fold. He was named interim CEO in 1997. He cut Apple’s product line from dozens of models down to four, refocused the company on design, and launched the iMac in 1998 — a translucent, colorful all-in-one desktop that signaled Apple’s creative rebirth. The iPod followed in 2001, and the iPhone in 2007, each one reshaping the industries it entered.
