RP105 Steve Jobs

 RP105 Steve Jobs

Take a quick look around you. Is someone typing on a Mac? Listening to an iPod? Calling on an iPhone? Using an iPad? Do you buy music from iTunes? Have you seen Toy Story 3 or any other movie by Pixar? Amazingly, we have one person to thank for all of these innovations: Steve Jobs.

Steven Paul Jobs was born in California in 1955 and adopted by Paul and Clara Jobs. He became interested in computers in high school, going to after-school lectures at the computer company Hewlett-Packard. He enrolled at Reed College in Oregon. Though he went to a variety of classes, he never graduated. Instead, he moved back to California and began working at Atari, the video game company. He also started working on his own computer projects with Steve Wozniak.

Jobs and Wozniak, along with Ronald Wayne, founded Apple (named after Jobs's favorite fruit) in 1976. Apple changed the way people thought about computers; the company made them small, easy to use, and accessible to normal people. The Macintosh computer was launched in 1984, but sales slowed in 1985, and Jobs was pushed out of his own company.

After leaving Apple, Jobs founded NeXT, Inc. The company decided to develop both computer hardware and software. In 1986, he bought the company that would end up being called Pixar. It paired with Disney to make computer-animated movies. The first was Toy Story, a huge success.

In 1996, Apple bought NeXT, and Jobs returned to his original company. He cut programs and jobs, but he also helped make Apple products more beloved than ever. Apple has been on a roll ever since, creating elegant, fast, user-friendly products that reflect the vision of Steve Jobs.