Biography

Jobs was raised by foster parents in Cupertino, California, which is located in the so-called Silicon Valley. Although he was interested in engineering, his passions for youth varied. He left Reed College in Portland, Oregon, and took a job with his friend Steve Wozniak at the Atari Corporation as a video game designer in early 1974; The two later decided to set up their own business, founding the Apple Computer on April 1, 1976. To finance himself, Jobs sold his Volkswagen van and Wozniak his calculator. The company was founded together with Ronald Wayne, who Jobs had met at Atari; Wayne left the company almost immediately, however, as soon as Apple received the first order. The first location of the new company was the garage of Jobs' parents: here they worked on their first computer, the Apple I, initially sold to members of the Homebrew Computer Club. They were later awarded a loan from industrialist Mike Markkula, who paid the company's coffers the sum of 250,000 dollars, obtaining a third of Apple in return. In 1977, Jobs and Wozniak launched the Apple II, whose sales reached one million dollars.

On December 12, 1980, Apple went public on the stock exchange and after a few days it was worth 256 million dollars. At the end of December, it was valued at USD 1.79 billion. On January 24, 1984, Apple produced a compact, graphical operating system: the Apple Macintosh. But it did not reach expected sales levels given the increasing competition. As Steve was held responsible for this loss, he announced his irrevocable resignation. After leaving Apple, he founded a new company: the NeXT computer. In 1996, Apple Computer needed to update the operating system mounted on its computers and contacted Jobs who proposed NeXTSTEP, NeXT's operating system. In return, he demanded that Apple acquire NeXT, which was in serious crisis at the time. Jobs negotiated a deal with longtime rival Microsoft with the aim of developing Microsoft Word and Excel applications for Apple's operating system and ending some legal disputes between the two companies.

While the development of Mac OS X was still ongoing, Jobs launched the iMac, an all-in-one personal computer model, that includes screen and other components in the same computer frame. With this model, Apple, which had isolated itself from the IBM world, was part of the mass-produced market. That same year, Jobs opened the first Apple Store on the second floor of the Tysons Corner Center in Virginia, a store exclusively for selling Apple products. Almost at the same time as the launch of the new operating system and computer, Jobs also decided to launch into the digital music industry with the iPod, a digital music player that in 2011 became the best-selling music player in the world, with a higher market share 80%. To signify the shift of the main business branch from the computer market to the more general one of multimedia, Jobs decided to rename Apple Computer Inc. simply calling it Apple Inc.

In March 1991 he married Laurene Powell, in a ceremony officiated by a Buddhist monk. Reed was born in September 1991, Erin in 1995 and Eve in 1998.

In 2003, Jobs was diagnosed with a rare form of pancreatic cancer. He postponed the surgery for about nine months while he tried alternative medicine approaches. In 2004 he underwent major reconstructive surgery known as Whipple surgery.