Sunday 27 October 2024

Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs with my favorite gadget, the IPad

This is the incredible story of the genius who gave us the IPad, the IPod, the IPhone and so much more – Steve Jobs. Let’s let him tell us his own story...’ My natural mother was a young unwed woman who got pregnant with me. She didn’t want to keep me, but accepted to give birth to me and gave me up for adoption. She requested only that whoever adopts me must be a graduate. A couple who were lawyers agreed to adopt me, but they wanted a girl! Another couple finally adopted me, even though my natural mother discovered later that they didn’t even finish High School. At 17 I entered the University even though my parents could not afford the full tuition. After 6 months I got bored and abandoned the course I was assigned to and started to attend the lectures that I enjoyed. I had no money for lodging, so I often slept on the floor of some of my friends’ apartments. Once a week I walked 7 miles to get to a Hare Krishna temple who feed the poor and homeless people. I took a course in calligraphy, which would prove beneficial in my future work, even though at that time, some friends were telling me it was useless for any career. The spacing of letters, etc was a blessing when we created Macintosh, which was later copied by Microsoft.’

Steve Jobs around 1985

Steve Jobs recalls ‘I started working on the Apple Computer when I was 20, with a friend of mine, Steve Wozniak, in the garage of our home, as well as in my kitchen. After 10 years our company grew to 4000 employees with a capital of 2 billion dollars. However, because of a disagreement, I was expelled from the company which I had founded. I was 30 years old, and you can imagine how distraught I felt, being taken away from something I had created. Yet, I was still in love with the work I did, and I was determined to start form scratch. And this turned out to be a big blessing for me. I started a company that does films using computers, also with the help of a woman I loved. The company was called PIXAR, and from it came such films as Toy Story, Finding Nemo, A Bug’s Life and many more animations which won Oscars over the last years. Then Apple bought my new company and I ended up in the same place where I started, with income of many billions of dollars.’ Steve Jobs was the mind behind the innovations that invaded our lives over the past 20 years, IPods, ITunes, IPhones, IMacs, IPads. He died from pancreatic cancer in 2011.

No comments:

Post a Comment