His Life

Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple Inc., is an important contributor to technology’s advancement. Unfortunately, he passed away at the age of 56 on Oct. 5 after battling a rare form of pancreatic cancer for seven years.
Steve Jobs was born on February 24, 1955 to Joanne Simpson and Abdulfattah “John” Jandali. Simpson gave Jobs up for adoption because her father did not approve of her marrying a Syrian. Jobs was later adopted by Clara and Paul Jobs. During his childhood, Jobs was intelligent enough to skip ahead to high school in the fourth grade. However, he was very frustrated with school and greatly disliked studying.
Jobs attended Cupertino Junior High and Homestead High School in Cupertino, California. Upon graduating, he went to Reed College in Portland, Oregon. However, he dropped out after one semester because he felt that he was wasting his parents’ money by taking classes that did not help him figure out what path he wanted to take in life.
Although he dropped out of college, Jobs still continued to take classes to meet his graduation requirements, living off free weekly meals at the Hare Krishna temple and recycling Coke bottles while staying at his friend’s room.
In 1976, when Jobs was 21, Jobs along with Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne founded Apple together. Later, Mike Scott was hired as CEO because the three found they were insufficiently experienced to run this company. In 1978, Michael Scott was hired as CEO as he had more experience. However, after several unstable years, Scott left Apple Inc. and Jobs persuaded John Sculley to replace Scott as Apple’s CEO.
While Jobs was a good director for Apple, some of his employees felt he was a temperamental manager. He would often overwork them by holding meetings past midnight and then another one at seven in the morning the next day.
Jobs was fired from Apple Inc. in 1985 which caused him to start a new seven million dollar hardware and software company called NeXt Inc. A year later, billionaire Ross Perot invested heavily into Jobs’ company after Jobs ran into a financial crisis.
Jobs married Laurene Powell in 1991 after meeting her at Stanford Business School in the early 1990s. They had three children together, Reed Paul, Erin Sienna and Eve. His fourth daughter was with his previous girlfriend, Chris Ann Brennan, whom they named Lisa.
Jobs bought The Graphics Group in 1986, which was renamed Pixar. Pixar made its first huge profit when they contracted with Disney to make numerous animated films that Disney would co-finance and distribute.
Jobs was a very accomplished man and is considered the “Thomas Edison” of our time. He will be forever remembered for his contributions toward technology.

Deborah Chen
Staff Writer