Steve Jobs was an American information technology entrepreneur and inventor. He was the co-founder, chairman, and chief executive officer (CEO) of Apple Inc., CEO and majority shareholder of Pixar Animation Studios, a member of The Walt Disney Company’s board of directors following its acquisition of Pixar, and founder, chairman, and CEO of NeXT Inc.
Find out interesting facts about him here!
1.Steven Paul “Steve” Jobs was born February 24, 1955 in San Francisco.
2.Jobs’s adoptive father, Paul Reinhold Jobs (1922–1993), grew up in a Calvinist household, the son of an “alcoholic and sometimes abusive” father.
3.The family lived on a farm in Germantown, Wisconsin.
4.Paul, ostensibly bearing a resemblance to James Dean, had tattoos, dropped out of high school, and traveled around the midwest for several years during the 1930s looking for work.
5.He eventually joined the United States Coast Guard as an engine-room machinist.
6.After World War II, Paul Jobs decided to leave the Coast Guard when it docked in San Francisco.
7.He made a bet that he would find his wife in San Francisco and promptly went on a blind date with Clara Hagopian (1924–1986). They were engaged ten days later and married in 1946. Clara, the daughter of Armenian immigrants, grew up in San Francisco and had been married before, but her husband had been killed in the war.
8.After a series of moves, Paul and Clara settled in San Francisco’s Sunset District in 1952. As a hobby, Paul Jobs rebuilt cars, but as a career he was a “repo man”, which suited his “aggressive, tough personality.”
9.Steve Jobs’s biological father, Abdulfattah “John” Jandali (b. 1931), was born into a Muslim household and grew up in Homs, Syria.
10.Jandali is the son of a self-made millionaire who did not go to college and a mother who was a traditional housewife.
11.He pursued a PhD in the latter subject at the University of Wisconsin, where he met Joanne Carole Schieble, a Catholic of Swiss and German descent, who grew up on a farm in Wisconsin.
12.Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs’s official biographer, additionally states that Schieble’s father “threatened to cut Joanne off completely” if she continued the relationship.
13.Schieble became pregnant in 1954 when she and Jandali spent the summer with his family in Homs, Syria.
14.Jandali has stated that he “was very much in love with Joanne … but sadly, her father was a tyrant, and forbade her to marry me, as I was from Syria. And so she told me she wanted to give the baby up for adoption.”
15.Jobs told his official biographer that Schieble’s father was dying at the time, Schieble did not want to aggravate him, and both felt that at 23 they were too young to marry.
16.In addition, as there was a strong stigma against bearing a child out of wedlock and raising it as a single mother, and as abortions were illegal and dangerous, adoption was the only option women had in the United States in 1954.
17.Schieble put herself in the care of a “doctor who sheltered unwed mothers, delivered their babies, and quietly arranged closed adoptions.”
18.After giving birth, Schieble chose an adoptive couple for him that was “Catholic, well-educated, and wealthy.”
19.That couple, however, changed their mind and decided to adopt a girl instead.
20.When the baby boy was then placed with the Bay Area blue collar couple Paul and Clara Jobs, neither of whom had a college education, Schieble refused to sign the adoption papers.
21.She then took the matter to court, attempting to have her baby placed with a different family and only consented to releasing the baby to Paul and Clara after they promised that he would attend college.
22.When Jobs was in high school, Clara admitted to his then-girlfriend, 17-year-old Chrisann Brennan, that she “was too frightened to love [Steve] for the first six months of his life … I was scared they were going to take him away from me. Even after we won the case, Steve was so difficult a child that by the time he was two I felt we had made a mistake. I wanted to return him.”
23.When Chrisann shared this comment with Jobs, he stated that he was aware of it and would later say that he was deeply loved and indulged by Paul and Clara.
24.Jobs would become upset when Paul and Clara were referred to as “adoptive parents” as they “were my parents 1,000%.”
25.With regard to his biological parents, Jobs referred to them as “my sperm and egg bank. That’s not harsh, it’s just the way it was, a sperm bank thing, nothing more.”
26.Paul and Clara adopted Jobs’s sister Patricia in 1957 and the family moved to Mountain View, California in 1961.
27.By the time he was ten, Jobs was deeply involved in electronics and befriended many of the engineers who lived in the neighborhood.
28.He had difficulty making friends with children his own age, however, and was seen by his classmates as a “loner.”
29.In the sixth grade, Steve attended at Crittenden Middle School where he was bullied for allegedly being odd. This resulted in Steve giving his parents an ultimatum – he would drop out of school if they didn’t move.
30.The family moved to Los Altos in California (the birthplace of Apple) where he met fellow engineer Bill Fernandez, who introduced him to Apple’s co-founder Steve Wozniak.
31.Before starting Apple, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak built and sold digital blue boxes, a $100 equipment that could hack telephone systems and allowed them make calls to any number in the world. One of their first calls they made using the blue box was to the Vatican with Wozniak pretending to be Henry Kissinger, they asked to talk to the pope. Without success.
32.When asked why he had named his company Apple, he said: “Because it came before Atari in the phone book.” Jobs worked for Atari before starting Apple and he also said that he likes apples and that they had to come up with a name by 5 o’clock that day.
33.Steve Jobs never wrote a single line of programming code.
37.He was an official college dropout, but continued his education by informally auditing classes.
38.One class Jobs audited was a calligraphy course, which he says was instrumental in the future Apple products’ attention to typography and font.
39.In the mid 90s, with NEXT sinking after failing at coming up with a successful computer, Steve Jobs faced the discouraging prospect of having to sell the software they had developed. “But Steve,” a friend told him, “why don’t you just sell PCs?” Steve replied: “I’d rather sell dogs’ shit than PCs.”
42.Jobs was moved to the night shift when working at Atari due to complaints about his hygiene. He rarely showered and would walk around barefoot in the Atari offices.
43.He spent seven months traveling around India, experimenting with psychedelic drugs and eventually adopting the practices of Zen Buddhism.
44.Jobs has called experimenting with LSD as “one of the two or three most important things I have done in my life.”
45.There was actually a third founder of Apple–Ronald Wayne, who even designed Apple’s first logo. Wayne sold his 10 percent stake just two weeks after partnering with Jobs and Wozniak for only $800 (talk about regrets).
46.Jobs ended up connecting later in life with his biological sister, Mona Simpson, whom he grew very close with. Both were naturally artistic and shared much in common.
47.The original Apple I computer was priced at $666.66.
48.A secretary once told Steve Jobs she was late for work because her car wouldn’t start. That afternoon, Jobs threw her a set of keys for a brand new Jaguar, saying: “Here, don’t be late anymore.”
49.Shortly after being shooed out of Apple, Jobs applied to fly on the Space Shuttle as a civilian astronaut (he was rejected) and even considered starting a computer company in the Soviet Union.
50.Jobs had an illegitimate child, Lisa Brennan, when he was 23, whose paternity he denied for years. Lisa’s mother had to use welfare checks to raise her child. Eventually, Jobs did accept Lisa as his legitimate child, and she changed her name to Lisa Brennan-Jobs.
51.Despite initially denying paternity, around the time Lisa was born, Jobs named a new Apple computer the Apple Lisa (although Jobs claimed it simply stood for Local Integrated Software Architecture).
52.Steve Jobs believed that his vegan diet would eliminate the need of showering.
53.Jobs had an entire team devoted to packaging who studied the experience of opening a box to learn how to achieve the excitement and emotional response that is now common with Apple products.
54.Α well-known egomaniac, Jobs was infamous for being difficult and demanding. In 1993, he held a spot on Fortune‘s list of America’s Toughest Bosses.
64.He was furious when Google created its Android devices, entering as an Apple competitor in the phone market.65.He was found to have pancreatic cancer in 2003, but rather than taking the doctor-recommended path of immediate operation, Jobs subscribed to an alternative-medicine regimen, including a vegan diet, acupuncture, and herbal remedies, even consulting a psychic.
66.After nine months, Jobs gave in and underwent surgery. Many consider the delay a major factor in his eventual decline.
67.Steve Jobs turned down a partial liver transplant from now Apple-CEO Tim Cook 2 years before dying of cancer.
68.Apple, Microsoft, and Disney properties (including Disneyland and Disney World) flew their flags at half-staff when Jobs passed away.
69.His last words on his deathbed were, “Oh wow, oh wow, oh wow,” while gazing over his family’s shoulders.Tim Cook revealed in a 2014 interview that Jobs’s main office and nameplate are still as they were in 2011, when Jobs passed away.
70.Bill Gates wrote rival Steve Jobs a letter as he was dying. He kept it by his bed.
71. 71He is buried in an unmarked grave.
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