Steve Jobs was the founder and leader of Apple Inc. When he died on October 5, 2011, the world lost an important inventor and entrepreneur. Jobs followed Apple’s company slogan “Think Different.” He changed the way many electronic devices looked and worked.
Jobs was born on February 24, 1955, in San Francisco, California. He was adopted as a baby and grew up in nearby Silicon Valley, where many high-tech companies began. In middle school, Jobs liked to put together do-it-yourself electronics kits. When he discovered that a part was missing from a kit he was working on, he called the company that made the kit. One of the company’s owners was impressed with Jobs’s knowledge of electronics. He asked Jobs to work as a summer intern.
Jobs did everything he could to learn about computers. One of his earliest jobs was working for a computer game maker. He joined a computer club and met Steve Wozniak. Wozniak built the first Apple computer in 1976. In those days, computers were very hard to use. Jobs thought that computers should be easy and fun to use. In 1977, he and Wozniak built the Apple II. This was the first computer made for people who wanted to use computers, not program them. By 1981, Apple was one of the world’s largest companies.
In 1985, Jobs was forced to leave Apple. He and other company leaders disagreed about how the company was being run. Jobs next bought a small computer graphics company. The company made a movie called Toy Story. The movie was released in 1995 and became very popular. It was the first full-length movie made with computer animation. The company made more movies and became a very successful film studio.
In the late 1990s, Jobs went back to work for Apple. He introduced Mac OS X, a kind of software that makes Apple computers and other Apple devices easy to use. Jobs changed the way people listen to, download, and organize music with the iPod and iTunes. Led by Jobs, Apple created the iPhone, the first smartphone to use a touch screen. The iPad, Apple’s tablet computer, is changing the way students learn in many classrooms. Jobs’ high standards and his ability to “think different” helped create one of the most successful companies in the world.
Loading...
