Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs grew up in California's emerging electronics culture, where hobbyist computing, counterculture design ideas, and Silicon Valley engineering were beginning to overlap. He briefly attended Reed College before dropping out, worked at Atari, and spent time around the Homebrew Computer Club through Steve Wozniak. Jobs was not the engineer behind the Apple I, but he saw that Wozniak's board could become a product if it was packaged, sold, and explained properly. His pre-Apple experience gave him a feel for product presentation, retail persuasion, and the emotional side of technology adoption.

Apple Computer was founded on April 1, 1976, by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne, who sold his 10% stake back to his partners for $800 twelve days later. Two college dropouts built circuit boards in the garage of Jobs' childhood home in Los Altos, California. The engineering came from Wozniak, who designed the Apple I and then the Apple II, a machine with color graphics and an integrated keyboard that made the personal computer accessible to people outside the hobbyist world. Jobs supplied the commercial drive and the conviction that computers should be designed for ordinary users rather than for corporations, a view that produced the Macintosh in 1984, the first mass-market computer sold with a graphical interface and a mouse. His management style brought him into conflict with then-CEO John Sculley, and he was pushed out of Apple in 1985. The second chapter matters as much as the first. Without Jobs the product line lost focus and the company came close to failing in the late 1990s, so Apple bought his company NeXT in 1997 and he returned as chief executive. He cut the product lineup, took a $150 million investment from Microsoft, and worked closely with designer Jony Ive on the iMac, iPod, iPhone, and iPad, the sequence that turned Apple into the most valuable company in the industry.