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Steven Paul "Steve" Jobs (/ˈdʒɒbz/; February 24, 1955 – October 5, 2011) was an American pioneer of the personal computer revolution of the 1970s (along with engineer, inventor, and Apple Computer co-founder, Steve Wozniak). Shortly after his death, Jobs's official biographer, Walter Isaacson described him as the "creative entrepreneur whose passion for perfection and ferocious drive revolutionized six industries: personal computers, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, and digital publishing."[2]

Adopted at birth in San Francisco and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area during the 1960s, Jobs's countercultural lifestyle was a product of his time. As a senior at Homestead High School, in Cupertino, California, his two closest friends were the older engineering student (and Homestead High alumnus) Steve Wozniak and his countercultural girlfriend, the artistically inclined Homestead High junior Chrisann Brennan. Jobs briefly attended Reed College in 1972 before dropping out, deciding to travel through India in 1974, and study Buddhism.

In addition, Jobs's proximity to Silicon Valley influenced his interest in the budding personal computer industry of the 1970s. After a brief period at Atari, Inc., he co-founded Apple in 1976 in his parents' Los Altos home on Crist Drive in order to sell Wozniak's Apple I personal computer. "Jobs and Woz" gained fame and wealth a year later for the Apple II (which was designed primarily by Wozniak, but Jobs oversaw the development of its unusual case and Rod Holt developed the unique power supply) one of the first highly successful mass-produced personal computers. The Apple II dominated the personal computer market until it was destabilized by the introduction of the IBM-PC (powered by Microsoft's MS-DOS) in 1981.

In 1979, after a tour of Xerox PARC, Jobs saw the commercial potential of the Xerox Alto (which was mouse-driven and had a graphical user interface or GUI). After failing to create such a device with the Apple Lisa (which Jobs named after his daughter with Chrisann, Lisa, a fact that Jobs would only admit years later after he initially denied paternity), he turned to the struggling Macintosh team. In January 1984, Jobs launched the original Macintosh (the first mass-produced computer with a graphical user interface) with the 1984 commercial broadcast during the Super Bowl. The Macintosh also instigated the sudden rise of the desktop publishing industry in 1985 with the addition of the Apple LaserWriter, the first laser printer to feature vector graphics.

Despite the fanfare, the expensive Macintosh was a hard sell.[3] Shortly after its release in 1985, Bill Gates' then-developing company, Microsoft, threatened to stop developing Mac applications unless it was granted "a license for the Mac operating system software. Microsoft was developing its graphical user interface ... for DOS, which it was calling Windows and didn't want Apple to sue over the similarities between the Windows GUI and the Mac interface."[4] Sculley granted Microsoft the license which later led to problems for Apple.[4] In addition, cheap IBM PC clones that ran on Microsoft software and had a graphical user interface began to appear. Although the Macintosh preceded the clones, it was far more expensive, so "through the late '80s, the Windows user interface was getting better and better and was thus taking increasingly more share from Apple."[5] Windows based IBM-PC clones also led to the development of additional GUIs such as IBM's TopView or Digital Research's GEM, [5] and thus "the graphical user interface was beginning to be taken for granted, undermining the most apparent advantage of the Mac...it seemed clear as the '80s wound down that Apple couldn't go it alone indefinately against the whole IBM-clone market."[5]

Jobs continued to promote the Macintosh undeterred by its prohibitive cost, much to the ire of Apple's board. After a long power struggle, Jobs was forced out of the company in September in 1985.[6] He then underwent a number of changes during the period of 1985-1996. After leaving Apple, he subsequently took a few of its members with him to found NeXT, a computer platform development company specializing in state of the art, higher end computers for higher-education and business markets. A few years later in 1990, Tim Berners-Lee would use a NeXT Computer to create the first browser for the World Wide Web. In addition to NeXT, Jobs helped to instigate the development of the visual effects industry when he purchased the computer graphics division of George Lucas' company Lucasfilm in February 1986. The new company, renamed Pixar, would eventually produce the first fully computer-generated animated film, Toy Story, an event made possible in part due to Jobs's financial support.

Jobs also focused on his family during this time period. After the death of his adoptive mother from cancer in 1986, he found his birth mother and discovered that his biological sister is the author Mona Simpson. He also fully acknowledged paternity for Lisa, and had her name legally changed to Lisa Brennan-Jobs. Finally, in 1991, Jobs married Stanford Business School graduate, Laurene Powell in a Buddhist ceremony and had three more children with her.

By 1997, Apple was nearly bankrupt. Jobs thus negotiated Apple's purchase of NeXT (the NeXTSTEP platform would become the foundation for Mac OS X) which would allow him to return as the company's interim CEO. He would eventually became Apple's CEO and bring the company back to profitability by 1998. Beginning in 1997 with the Think different campaign, Jobs began to work closely with designer Jonathan "Jony" Ive towards a line of devices (named by ad executive Ken Segall) that would have larger cultural ramifications: the iMac (1998); iTunes, the Apple Stores, and the iPod (2001); the iTunes Store (2003); the iPhone (2007); the App Store (2008); and the iPad (2010).