Early Life

Steve Jobs was born on the 24th of February 1955 in San Francisco, where he was adopted by the Jobs family. He did his schooling in Cupertino, California and during high school he started attending lectures at Hewlett Packard Company in Palo Alto. Jobs was hired there during summer, and thats when he met Steve Wozniak. After graduation he joined Reed College, Portland but two years later, he dropped out after just one semester. Later he returned home and started attending meetings held by the Homebrew Computer Club with Steve Wozniak. Soon he started working with Atari, a video game maker. Steve and Wozniak went into business, producing 'blue boxes', which were illegal and enabled free long distance telephone calls.

Career
Fascinated by spirituality, Jobs saved money and traveled to India, in search for enlightenment. Later he returned home and began working for Atari again, along with Wozniak.

In 1976, Jobs and Wozniak founded Apple Computer Company, named after Jobs' favorite fruit, that produced home PCs, mostly based on Wozniak's expertise with computer electronics. Their first computer was called Apple I, and was followed later by Apple II, which was quite a hit. In 1980, at the time of launch of Apple III, Apple Computer Co became a publicly traded company.

To encourage the marketability of Apple, Jobs managed to convince John Sculley from Pepsi Co to become Apple's CEO. Apple Computer Co released its first graphical user interfaced computer, called Macintosh in 1984, which was a huge leap for Apple computers at that time.

Jobs charismatic leadership had greatly benefited Apple, but his hot temper and inconsistent behavior led to much led to much tension in the company. There was as a result, a power feud in 1985, at the end of which, Jobs was stripped off much of his responsibilities in the company, but the board of directors. After a while, Jobs resigned as chairman of Apple and later founded another company called Next Computers. His new company went on to produce an aesthetically pleasing, technologically superior workstation called The Cube. But this workstation was cost prohibitive and eventually, Jobs shifted his focused to software, which he believed would be the field of the next big technological breakthrough. But two huge implications of Next were that, its software would later be used for writing the first World Wide Web, and second, the NeXTSTEP operating system that was being created at Next, would eventually bring to Apple Computers, a very efficient, advanced operating system.

In 1996, with Apple purchasing Next, Steve was brought back to Apple as its CEO. His first objective was to bring the company back to profitability, for which he terminate several inefficient projects. Under his leadership and with the launch of iMac line of computers, Apple’s profits returned. Elegant, refreshing designs of the iMacs, backed by user friendly software, increased Apples appeal. Apple entered other consumer electronics fields, such as portable music players with their iPods, digital music distribution through iTunes and even mobile phones with iPhones.

Jobs purchased Lucasfilms computer graphics division for $10 million which he renamed Pixar, in 1986. Pixar began creating animated movies and struck a deal with Walt Disney, which agreed to co finance and distribute the movies. In 1995 Pixar's first movie, Toy Story was released and went on to become a box office hit. It was followed by other successful hits such as such- A Bug’s Life, Toy Story 2, Monsters Inc, Finding Nemo and The Incredibles.

Steve Jobs, along with Steve Wozniak, was awarded the National Medal Technology from President Ronald Reagan in 1985. They were the first people to receive the honor.

In its November issue, Fortune Magazine named Jobs as the most powerful person in business.

In December of 2007, Californian Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger inducted Steve Jobs into the California Hall of Fame.