1955
Steven Paul Jobs was born on February 24th, 1955. He was adopted by Paul and Clara Jobs, where they lived on 45th avenue in San Francisco. His father was of "imposing demeanor" and before he was a repo man, he was an engine room machinist in the Coast guard. He’d tinker with cars and sell them for a profit.
He was a hyperactive child. Somewhere in his childhood, he ingested a bottle of ant poison and had to be brought to the emergency room.
Of being adopted, Steve would later say, "I think it’s a natural curiosity for people to want to understand where certain traits come from." "But mostly, I’m an environmentalist. I thin the way you are raised, your values, and most of your worldview come from the experiences you had growing up."
Of being adopted, Steve would later say, "I think it’s a natural curiosity for people to want to understand where certain traits come from." "But mostly, I’m an environmentalist. I thin the way you are raised, your values, and most of your worldview come from the experiences you had growing up."
1963
Steve would later say this about his early school years, with a hint of pride: "You should have seen us in third grade." "We basically destroyed the teacher."
1965
Even at 10, Steve’s attraction to electronics was becoming obvious to his parents. At one point in his childhood he got a bad shock when jamming a bobby pin into a wall socket. Paul moved with the family to Palo Alto, to handle the greater number of car reposessions that went with the greater of number of loans in the fast growing area known as Silicon Valley.
1970-1971
Steve Jobs discovers marijuana. (Note: that there is what we call a photoshop.)
1970-1971 Part 2
Steve Jobs meets Steve Wozniac through a friend and they bonded quickly over electronics and pranks, Bob Dylan and the Beatles. They attempted and failed one particular prank, where a rigged sheet with the acronym SWAB JOB (The initals of the Steves’ and Allen Baum’s) was supossed to fall and cover a roof during graduation. The lesson Woz learned: never brag about your pranks. Woz was the first person he’d ever met who knew more about electronics than he did; Woz admired Steve’s confidence with people.
1970-1971 Part 3
After reading an article in Esquire about phone phreaking, they begin working on Blue Boxes used to crack codes on the public telephone systems for free calls. Steve Jobs was still a senior in high school. They sold these boxes for $150 on campus, spending $40 on parts. Woz prank called the Pope as Henry Kissenger. They met Captain Crunch, the subject of the article one night and when departing, their car shut down on the side of the road. Some police found them trying to make free calls and got suspicious. Woz and Jobs got out of trouble by telling the officers their Blue Box was a music synth.
1972
Jobs attends Reed college and drops out after one semester. (He stated in his Stanford Commencement speech that he went because his birth parents insisted to the Jobs that he go to college.)
Jobs and Woz take $3 an hour jobs at the Westgate Mall in San Jose, dressing up as Alice in Wonderland Characters.
1973
Jobs remains in the Reed college area for 18 months dropping in random classes like caligraphy, which would later impact the typography on Macs.
1974
Returned to California and worked at Atari. He just showed up and said he wouldn’t leave until they hired him.
Steve goes on a spiritual trip to India with his friend Dan Kottke and paid for his ticket. Upon wandering into a religious gathering, Jobs was taken away to the top of this mountain where the guru shaved his head. In India, Steve experimented with LSD. Dan shaved his head later, too, because he had lice. Steve left for California and gave Dan the rest of his money so he could continue his journey in India.
Back at atari, Nolan Bushnell asked Jobs to work on a special project that would eventually become the game Break-out. He made a deal to pay Jobs a certain amount if the machine had less than 40 chips. Woz, who was an expert at such things, helped Jobs complete the design in 48 hours, and Jobs got the bonus. The design was too complex to be manufactured. In 1985, Woz would later find out his friend shorted him his portion and is rumored to have been so hurt that he was moved to tears. When confronted, Jobs at the time is said to have repeated that he didn’t remember that happening. If he’d found out earlier, Woz may have never joined up with Jobs to create Apple.
1975
In the Homebrew Computer Club, Woz was showing off two printed circuit boards that were built to drive output to a TV. Jobs continued working at Atari while Woz continued at HP.
1976
Woz and Steve start Apple, naming it to differentiate the company from hobbyist boards. Apple wasn’t a thrilling name, but it would work and reminded him of the time he spent on an apple farm in Oregon. On April 1st, they signed papers for equal ownership. To raise capital, Woz sold his HP 65 electronic calculator for $520 and Jobs sold his red and white VW bus for $1500 — only half of which was ever paid, because the engine blew out soon after the sale. Their first order was for 50 Apple I computers, and Jobs made the sale barefoot. He confused the order and delivered circuitboards instead of finished machines with cases, and so had to take partial payment. By the end of the year, they shipped 150 computers.
1976 Part 2
Woz and Jobs decided the Apple II would lofdad their OS from the circuit board, instead of needing to be loaded manually. It would also have a fanless power supply, something that needed to be designed from scratch using a switching model instead of a linear source.
Mike Markkula is their first investor. Seeing their work, he thinks he can put Apple on the Fortune 500 in 5 years and he eventually does.
1977
Apple Computer becomes a corporation when Mike Markkula and Jobs and Woz sign papers at Mike’s house, on January 3rd.
Mike Scott, becomes Apple’s president, and offends Jobs in two ways: First he awards Woz the position of being employee number 1 because his design was instrumental in the company’s founding. Jobs would later insert himself as employee number 0. Later, he informs Jobs his body odor is stinking up the office.
Jobs begins leaving his mark on Apple’s design by hiring Intel’s ad agency, Regis McKenna Advertising to redesign the logo to the rainbow filled Apple, which would be easily recognizable when small, although expensive to reproduce with its many colors. The bite out of its side was a play on the word "byte" and kept it from being confused with a tcherry tomato. He also insisted the Apple II
The Apple II premiers at the West Coast Computer Faire on April 17th as the world’s sleekest personal computer, in its plastic case. Woz developed the machine with only 62 chips and Jobs insisted they be neatly placed on the board. It has no visible screws (all were on the bottom) and expansion slots.
Randy Wigginton, one of Apple’s first programmers, said that during the development of the Apple II, Woz and Jobs’ BFF friendship dissolved.
Jobs’ girlfriend, Chris-Ann Brennan, becomes pregnant, and Steve denies being the father. She refuses to get an abortion and it ends their relationship.
1978
May 17th 1978, Lisa Nicole, Jobs daughter is born at the All-One farmhouse in Oregon, near Apple orchards. Steve visited and helped name her but denied paternity. Steve Also begins pitching a next generation business machine that will eventually be called the Lisa.
Steve Jobs designs a case for the Apple III, and builds it too small to fit the components the engineering team had constructed.
Apple moves into Cupertino headquarters.
At the first Apple Halloween costume party, Jobs dresses up as Jesus Christ.
1979
He starts working on the Lisa project, rumored to be named after his then estranged daughter. They reversed engineered an acronym, "Local Integrated Software Architecture", and a joke at the time insisted it stood for "Let’s Invent Some Acronym." The computer would have a UI based on the windowed and mouse driven interfaces inspired by tech at Xerox PARC. At one of the meetings at PARC, where they showed Jobs the tech, he reportedly jumped around the room excited saying, "Why aren’t you doing anything with this This is the greatest thing! This is revolutionary!" He also said, to Rolling Stone magazine, " I don’t think rational people could argue that every computer wouldn’t work this way someday."
He bought a house in Los Gatos, and left it mostly undecorated. Only a painting by Maxfield Parrish, a mattresss and some cushions are noted as the major possessions in the home. (The photo above was taken by Diana Walker in 1982.)
Jobs is known for owning a Mercedes coupe and in this year he buys his first (along with a BMW motorcycle.)
Jobs cuts his hair neatly and vows to become more business saavy. And started wearing suits, occassionally.
A word processor called AppleWriter was released. It worked with Apple’s first printer, Silenttype.
He takes a paternity test and it is 94.97% certain that Lisa Nicole is his daughter. He still denies that he is her father and Chris-Ann goes on welfare. A court order forces him to pay child support.
1980
Apple stock goes public, Jobs is worth $217 million dollars. Yet, his friend and travel partner through India, Dan Kottke, received no stock at all, despite being employee #11. It is rumored that Jobs denied him stock because he felt betrayed that Kottke offered Chris-Ann a shoulder to cry on after her split with Jobs. Other early employees received little or no stock. Woz, on the other hand, offered stock to many who Apple did not provide for, giving away 1/3 worth of his shares under his Wozplan.
Jobs was worth $217 million by the end of the first day of trading.
1980′s
Sometime in the ’80s, Jobs had this moustache. Related: Magnum PI aired first in December 1980.
1981
Booted from the Lisa team by management that disagreed with his tactics and doubted his leadership abilities beyond his vision, Jobs gets involved with the Jef Raskin’s Macintosh project, named after the Mcintosh apple, with a typo. It was designed to be a $1000 appliance computer that would turn on and just work. Eventually, Jobs would take the project away from Raskin. At one meeting, Jobs threw a telephone book on the table and insisted it be no longer than that, and vertical standing. He comissioned frogdesign and Hartmut Esslinger to come up with the design language for the Mac, called Snow White.
Unlike Woz’s Apple II, it had no expansion cards. While much of Apple was becoming more straight laced, some credit Burrell Smith, a wildly creative tech who’s talent was being wasted in the service department, for creating a brilliant digital board that the rest of the team could build around. It was also notable, because unlike the Lisa project and others that were usually named after females (wives, girlfriends, daughters) the Mac was purposely named by Raskin to buck the sexist trend. (The project was originally called Annie.) Before much of this, in 1979, Jobs asked Raskin to come up with the specs before the price. And Raskin wrote a list of outrageous features meant to mock the idea. The list would, years later, describe most of the machine, vidicating Jobs’ method.
The Mac team defines the reality distortion field as different from how we describe it today: An engineer would mention an idea to Jobs, who would call it stupid, and weeks later he’d bring it up as his own, knowingly or not.
Jobs describes the case design of the Mac needing to be more like a Porsche than a VW (he drove a Porsche 928 at the time). He spoke design-ese and said this when judging a prototype coming from the car conversation: "It’s way too boxy, it’s got to be more curvaceous. The radius of the first chamfer needs to be bigger, and I don’t like the size of the bezel. But it’s a start."
1981 Part 2
Jobs gives, Bill Gates a demo of the Macintosh, and Gates agrees to develop software for it. Bill Gates and Steve Jobs disagree on the future of the computer, Gates believing in its business utility and Jobs believing in its benefit to common people. In the dramatized movie, Pirates of Silicon Valley, Gates uses this demo to kickstart Windows development, behind Jobs’ back. Apple engineers were to avoid showing Gates the Lisa, though, and were very secretive of the what they demoed. Jobs cuts off Andy Hertzfeld, engineer and presenter by shouting "Shut Up!" when he thought Andy was getting too close to revealing a secret.
When the first IBM pc came out, Apple took out a cocky ad in the Wall Street Journal led with the text "Welcome IBM. Seriously." Jobs was quoted as saying that if IBM were to win, there would be a sort of "computer dark ages for about 20 years". Steve also said, "We’re going to out market IBM. We’ve got our shit together." 20 years later, PCs running Windows would have over 90% market share.
1981 Part 3
Here’s another photo of Jobs saying hello to IBM.
1982
Jobs makes Bill Gates and Microsoft promise to never work on sfotware any business software that would use a mouse unless it was for Apple. The fact that they did not exclude them from developing a competing operating system would allow Gates to develop Windows alongside the Mac software Microsoft was developing.
The Mac team’s building had an alarm that would set itself at 5:30PM, far too early not to go off when programmers would come back to work after dinner. One day it went off and Steve yelled for someone to destroy it. Andy Hertzfeld drove a screwdriver into the alarm and when a security guard showed and yelled at them, Jobs took responsibility for the destroyed machine. Obviously, he didn’t get in trouble.
Jobs is dating singer Joan Baez. Some say Jobs’ fascination with Bob Dylan, a former lover of Baez’s, is part of the attraction.
Jobs buys an apartment in NYC in The Sam Remo building over looking Central Park. He had it renovated by architect I.M. Pei, but would never move in and eventually sells it to U2′s Bono decades later.
1983
Steve Capps of the Macintosh team hoists a pirate flag above their building. The Lisa team steals it, but it is retrieved and stands for over a year.
Early in the year, a Time magazine cover story written by Michael Moritz (today a venture capitalist who was recently on the board of Google) began to reveal the darker side of Jobs to the public. It had quotes by Woz claiming he didn’t design much tech in the Apple II, and lots of snipes by anonymous sources. Jobs cancelled his new years plans and thought about the article.
People could tell when Steve was in the office, because he parked in the handicapped spot out front in his blue Mercedes. People think he did it because he was a dick, but David Bunnell, has been quoted as saying it was because disgruntled Lisa or Apple II employees would come by and scratch it with their keys.
"It’s better to be a pirate than to join the Navy," said Steve. The Mac project stole more and more technology from the Lisa project, especially after Burrell Smith figured out how to get the same processor as the Lisa, the Moto 68000, into the Mac. Jobs refused to make the two machines code compatible, however.
The final Lisa product would be released years later for $10k, 5 times the original project’s cost. It would tank, competing with IBM’s $3k machine.
Jobs hires John Scully to be CEO, from Pepsi, with the line, "Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water or do you want a chance to change the world?" Other’s considered Scully’s lack of tech knowledge a drawback; Jobs saw it as an opportunity to guide the man would would be his boss.
Gates unveils Windows, claiming over 90% of the IBM machines on the market would run the software by the end of 1984.
1984
Jobs meets Lee Clow, creative director at ad agency Chiat/Day. He says, "Am I getting anything I should give a shit about?"
Jobs presents the famous 1984 ad, directed by Ridley Scott (of Blade Runner), to the board. They absolutely hate it and vote to sell the air time during the superbowl (which cost over the commercial’s production costs of $750k). They couldn’t sell the space, and they decided to run the ad, which pictured a dystopian world like that in Orwell’s novel, implicitly run by IBM and shattered by the coming arrival of the new Mac. The Ad went on to win awards. Jobs said, "Luck is a force of nature…Using the 1984 theme was such an obvious idea that I worried that someone else would beat us to it, but nobody did."
The Mac launches on January 24th. Jobs wore a polka dot bow tie and recited Bob Dylan lyrics from The Times They Are a Changing. Then he unveiled the Mac, which began to speak using a voice synthesis program: "Hello, I am Macintosh", finishing with, "So it is with considerable pride that I introduce the man who’s been like a father to me, Steve Jobs."
The Apple III, meant to replace the Apple II, is discontinued on the same day Jobs announces the Apple IIc, a compact version of the II meant to feel more appliance like, to Jobs’ insistence. The celebration, called "apple II forever" was interrupted by a 6.2 richter scale earthquake in San Francisco.
1984 Part 2
The Mac initially sells well, but starts to falter in sales because of word of its bugginess and lack of competitive functionality. Programmers joke about the need to continuously swap disks for programs and saving files; they called it the disk swap olympics or the resulting injury Disk Swapper’s elbow. Microsoft’s three programs, Paint, Word and Write, were some of the rare applications available. People start to blame Jobs for not doing any market testing beyond what he would want.
Jobs gains control of the Lisa team again and berates them as having "Fucked up" in front of the newly combined Mac/Lisa team.
Jobs’ Mac development team starts to discover that they, slaving under the motto of "working 90 hours a week and loving it" were grossly underpaid compared to the Lisa team’s staff, and even compared to the junior engineers on the Mac team. Many feel betrayed by Jobs. Bonuses helped alleviate morale problems, but then the profitable Apple II team became resentful of the Mac team’s privileges.
Jobs stars as President Roosevelt in a war-themed 1984 ad parody called 1944, where Macs waged war on IBM computers. It costs $50k to develop and is shown off to the international sales team at the annual meeting in Waikiki, HI. "IBM wants to wipe us off the face of the earth", said Jobs, to Fortune magazine.
Vietnam Vet memorial artist Maya Lin is Steve’s most recent flame.
Jobs buys Jackling House, a 1926 Woodside CA mansion, built for mining and metallurgical engineer Daniel Cowam Jackling in 1926 by famouse architect George Washington Smith. Jobs lived in the 17,000 square foot house for another 10 years, hardly furnishing it. He rented it out for a time after that.
1985
Jobs and Woz receive the first National Medal of Technology from Ronald Reagan.
Around this time, either before or after it, Jobs discovers that Woz has resigned. Woz would eventually going back to college under an alias, Rocky Clark. He earned a CS/EE bachelors from UC Berkeley.
Ella Fitzgerald sings at his 30th birthday party at the St Francis hotel in San Francisco, a black tie dinner dance.
Jobs visits nerd and supermodel Bo Derek to convert her to a Mac user. She was unimpressed with both Jobs and the Mac.
Jobs says in a Playboy magazine interview that he was not happy that he learned, from a video tape he was not supposed to see, that every US nuke operated out of Europe was being aimed using an Apple II.
Apple executives start blaming him for the miscalculated forecasting of Mac sales and start to build up resentment of his management style. Mike Murray, Jobs’ lieutenant in marketing, writes a memo summarizing the problems that Apple has, laying much blame on Steve Jobs. He shows it to Steve first and his reality distortion field begins to deflate. The board and Scully strip Jobs of his control of the Mac group and the Lisa product line is killed.
Scully is tipped off by a VP that Jobs will try to unseat him while Scully attends a a trip to China. When confronted, Jobs says, "I think you’re bad for Apple and I think you’re the wrong person to run this company." Scully calls an emergency meeting for the next morning. "I’m running this company, Steve and I want you out for good. Now!" Scully made each man in the room pledge their alliance to Jobs or Scully. Jobs is quiet the entire time. Jobs goes to assure Scully again that he’d respect his leadership, but Jobs is plotting a final coup attempt behind his back. Tuesday evening, May 28th 1985, Jobs is stripped of all duties, but remains the chairman of the board. Friends worry he’ll kill himself.
1985 Part 2
Jobs wanders for a bit; he tries to get NASA to let him ride the space shuttle, thinks about entering politics and learns about biotechnology. And then he recognizes that he loves creating innovative products and begins plotting a new venture. He informs Apple of his new venture, and his willingness to resign from the board. Apple considers keeping him on and investing in the new company, but realize that he’s taking key Apple technologists with him and Jobs ends up resigning entirely from the company. He does it at sunset, by handing a letter to Mike Murray on his front lawn, with press in attendance. Dramatically, he told the press, "If Apple becomes a place where computers are a commodity item, where the romance is gone, and where people forget that computers are the most incredible invention that man has ever invented, I’ll feel I have lost Apple." "But if I’m a million miles away, and all those people still feel those things…then I will feel that my genes are still there."
Jobs sells almost all his Apple stock, over 4 million shares ($11m) citing a lack of confidence in Apple’s managment. He retains one. Some say for sentimental reasons, some say so he still receives quarterly reports.
Apple sues Jobs for using company research to launch a new company. Jobs responds, "It’s hard to think that a $2 billion company with 4,300 plus people couldn’t compete with six people in blue jeans." The suit was dismissed before it could go to court.
Microsoft launches Windows 1.0, aping the look and feel of early Mac OS GUIs (which aped Xerox GUIs).
Scully allows Gates to use Mac tech in Windows if Microsoft would hold off on selling a Windows version of Excel, allowing Apple to get a foothold in the business market.
He names his company NeXT. Their first project would be a workstation for higher education, inspired by his interest in biotech, that would be cheap enough for students, but powerful enough to run wet lab simulations. Businessweek cover story at the time featured a quote by Andrea Cunningham, an ex publicist for NeXT, ‘Part of Steve wanted to prove to others and to himself that Apple wasn’t just luck,” ”He wanted to prove that Sculley should never have let him go.”
Sometime during this year, Apple discontinues the Lisa.
1986
Jobs spends $100k to have designer Paul Rand, creator of the IBM logo, among others, to create a brand identity for NeXT, including a logo.
Around this time, Jobs has begun to build his relationship with his daughter, Lisa, who is about 7.
Jobs finishes selling all of his shares in Apple, but one. It is speculated that Jobs kept one for symbolic reasons, or so that he could attend shareholder meetings and receive annual reports.
Jobs buys Pixar out of Lucasfilm’s computer graphics group for a discount price of $10m, $5m of which will be used for operations. He bought it from George Lucas at a discount so that Lucas could finance his divorce without selling his star wars stock. He is quoted as saying, "If I knew in 1986 how much it was going to cost to keep Pixar going, I doubt I would have bought the company."
1987
Ross Perot saw Jobs on TV, called him, and offered to be an investor. Jobs waited a week to play it cool. Perot gained 16% share of the company by investing $20m.
Jobs’ birth sister, Mona Simpson brings Jobs to a book party for her new novel, Anywhere but Here, revealing their relationship as siblings to those who attended the party. Some believe Jobs was the base from which Mona created her main character in a later book, "A Regular Guy". Mona Simpson’s husband, Richard Appel, was a writer for The Simpsons, and he named Marge’s mother after his wife. His interactions with her, and upon learning how similiar they were, impacted Steve Jobs. Steve Lohr wrote for the NY Times, "The effect of all this on Jobs seems to be a certain sense of calming fatalism — less urgency to control his immediate environment and a greater trust that life’s outcomes are, to a certain degree, wired in the genes." Just years earlier, Jobs was firm on most of his character having been formed from his experiences, not his birth parents or genetics.
Jobs, sometime in his thirties, learned of his and Mona’s birth parents: Joanne Carole Schieble, a speech therapist, and Abdulfattah Jandali, a Syrian political science professor.
NeXT’s robotic factory opens in Fremont, not to control labor costs but to use lasers to more accurately solder circuits for improved quality.
1988
Windows starts looking uncannily like Mac OS. Apple sues Microsoft for copying their GUI, claiming the earlier agreement to use Mac tech in Windows only extended itself only to Windows 1.0.
Jobs sells the King of Spain a NeXT computer at a party, before its even been released.
In October, the NeXT computer, nicknamed the Cube, was unveiled in a symphony hall, to show off the machine’s stereo sound processing. The magnesium cased machine had an ethernet port and inline graphics and audio in email (rare at the time) and a 17-inch black and white monitor. Most universities preferred color screens for workstations by this time. It also had a magnetic-optical disc that was a bit too slow and expensive. frogdesign’s Esslinger works on the ID, but only on the terms that he has free reign.
The PR machine tells the press that Steve’s mellowed out a bit, and gained some self awareness. One ex employee told an opposing story that, ”everyone would put in their one vote. Then Steve would put in his 70 votes.”
Steve did change, though. One example is of the unusual pay scheme at NeXT. Up til the early 90′s, there were only two tiers of pay, $50k and $75k, based on how early you started in the company. Pay day came once a month and the check was for the upcoming 4 weeks. Seniors who joined with Apple were given 2% in company stock. The even handedness stood in stark contrast with the chaotic pay and reward schemes found early at Apple.
At a dinner with important representatives from Universities, the major target buyers of NeXT machines, the staff neglected to prepare a vegetarian dish for Jobs. He cancelled the entire entree portion of the meal for the room, leaving a room full of potential customers hungry.
1989
Apple Sued by the Beatles’s Apple corp. Steve’s a big Beatles fan, once even saying his model for business is the same as that the Beatles have, the sum of the parts being greater than the individuals involved.
Apple Sued by Xerox for the GUI.
The NeXT cube starts shipping to customers. When asked about the ship date’s delay, Jobs responds that the computer is still 5 years ahead of its time, regardless.
In 1989, the last 2700 Lisa computers would be quietly dumped in a landfill in Logan, Utah, so Apple could collect a tax writeoff.
Mac Portable comes out.
1990
About this time, Jobs meets Laurene Powell, when he speaks at a class at Stanford business school. They exchanged numbers and Jobs had a business dinner that night. ”I was in the parking lot, with the key in the car, and I thought to myself, If this is my last night on earth, would I rather spend it at a business meeting or with this woman? I ran across the parking lot, asked her if she’d have dinner with me. She said yes, we walked into town and we’ve been together ever since.”
1991-1992
Steven Jobs and Laurene Powell are married at the Ahwahnee Hotel in Yosemite National Park, on March 18th in a ceromony held by Buddhist monk Kobin Chino. Their first child, Reed Paul Smith is born later that year, named after Reed college and Jobs’ father.
Around this time, daughter Lisa starts living with Jobs and continues to through her teenage years.
1993
The Newton Message Pad comes out.
The Macintosh TV comes out.
After selling only 50,000 of their machines, NeXT exits the hardware game, focusing solely on software. They work on porting the NeXTSTEP OS to 486 intel processors.
1994
PowerMac 6100/60 come out
QuickTake Camera come out
1995
Jobs and his best friend Larry Ellison, of Oracle, are on vacation in Hawaii and they discuss the possibility of a hostile takeover of Apple while walking on the beach. They’d arranged for $3m in financing and to have Jobs take the helm. "We came very, very close to doing it,” Ellison says to the NYTimes, ”Steve is the one who decided against it.” ”I decided I’m not a hostile-takeover kind of guy,” Jobs says. ”If they had asked me to come back, it might have been different.”
Pixar releases Toy Story, Job’s 80% stake in Pixar is worth $600m.
Mac clones live.
Erin Seinna, second child to Steve and Laurene Powell, is born.
The Microsoft/Apple cases are finally settled; Apple loses.
1996
"I am saddened by the fact…that microft…makes really third rate products", said Jobs in and interview this year.
To Fortune magazine, Jobs says, "You know, I’ve got a plan that could rescue Apple. I can’t say any more than that its the perfect product and the perfect strategy for Apple. But no body there will listen to me.
Apple’s aging OS needs replacement. Apple considers buying BeOS, or even licensing Windows NT from Microsoft. But instead, they look to NeXT and the NeXTSTEP OS, which directly influenced Apple’s modern OS X UI, architecture and multitasking abilities, which is used in the iPhone and all Macs today.
Apple announces intent to purchase of NeXT for $430 million to pay back investors, and 1.5m in Apple share to Jobs. Jobs would also re enter the company as an advisor, bringing "”a lot of experience and scar tissue". He’s also recognized as having mellowed out in his management. A Pixar employee described the before and after for Jobs as so: ‘After the first three words out of your mouth, he’d interrupt you and say, ‘O.K., here’s how I see things.’ It isn’t like that anymore. He listens a lot more, and he’s more relaxed, more mature.” Jobs attributed the change to an increased faith in people: "’I trust people more.”
Jobs steps on the Apple campus, wildly changed since he’d last been there, for the first time since 1985.
1997
"Steve is going to fuck Gil so hard his eardrums will pop," says an anonymous ex Apple employee in regards to Jobs returning to Apple, to New Yorker magazine. Sure enough, Steve Jobs is swiftly installed as interim CEO after ousting Gil Amelio.
Jobs: "The cure for Apple is not cost-cutting. The cure for Apple is to innovate its way out of its current predicament."
Jobs calls Dell computers boring beige boxes; Michael Dell says if he ran Apple, he’d give the share holders back their money.
Jon Ive is hired, beginning a new era of Apple design.
The 20th Anniversary Mac, with a dvd player and TV tuner comes out as Ive’s first piece of work. It has a special coating and
1998
Jobs shuts down many projects, focusing on computers at Apple.
Eve Jobs born.
The first iMac is born
1999
Macbook comes out.
Pirates of Silicon Valley, the movie, comes out. Noah Wyle plays Steve Jobs and Anthony Michael Hall plays Bill Gates. The film opens on the set of the 1984 superbowl Ad for the Mac.
2000
Jobs is the permanent CEO of Apple again
PowerMac Cube comes out
Jobs stops maintaining the Jackling House mansion he bought in 1984
2001
First Apple retail store in Maclean, Virginia
iPod comes out
OS X 10.0 comes out
2003
Mac Pro comes out
Jobs discovers malignant tumor in his pancreas. It’s a rare form of pancreatic cancer that can be cured. He tries 9 months of alternative medicine, unsuccessfully curing the cancer.
2004
Steve has a surgery to remove a tumor in July and takes a month off to recover. In a letter to Apple employees, he wrote from the hospital on a 17-inch Powerbook, "I have some personal news that I need to share with you, and I wanted you to hear it directly from me." "This weekend I underwent a successful surgery to remove a cancerous tumor from my pancreas."
Jobs receives permission to demolish the Jackling House and rebuild a smaller home on the land. Local preservationists vetoed the decision.
2005
Apple announces Intel inside of Macs, long culminating project "Star Trek", which was about running OS X on x86 Intel hardware. PCs and Macs are the same, essentially, component wise. Only software and design are their differences; Jobs’ awareness of design, emphasized early on in his days at Apple, and the importance of software over hardware learned at NeXT, would help guide Apple through the coming years.
Jef Raskin, father of the Mac, dies of pancreatic cancer in his home in Pacifica, CA.
Jobs turns 50
iPod Nano, Video iPod, iPod Shuffle Comes out
Jobs gives the commencement speech at Stanford, telling three stories, one about intuition and how he went to college and what he learned from it despite dropping out. One was about his love for Apple and losing the company. And the last was about death and his experience with cancer. The video and transcript are widely available online and the most personal look we have at his life during his second era at Apple.
2007
The iPhone is announced in January, then launched in June.
Apple TV comes out
Al Gore joins Apple’s Board
2008
Macbook Air comes out. Rumors abound about Steve looking too thin to be healthy.
Psystar announces a $400 mac clone, using Hackintosh work arounds to get OS X on a clone PC.
Jobs beings to give keynotes by sharing the stage with other Apple executives.
Gizmodo runs a rumor that Steve is sick and will step down in the Spring; the mainstream press denies it, particularly CNBC bureau chief Jim Goldman and some WSJ reporters, until January.
2009
Steve Jobs takes a health related leave of absence in January, until June. Tim Cook takes over day to day responsibilities while Jobs retains the CEO title.
Jobs receives permission to tear down Jackling house and build a smaller home on the property.
Steve Jobs receives a liver transplant in Tennessee. The NYTimes raises the question of how he received a transplant so quickly and the hospital releases a statement, with Jobs’ permission, that he received it quickly because he was the most sick on the list of recipients.
Steve Jobs returns to Apple in June 2009, quietly, by appearing on campus, and by being quoted in a press release.
The rest has yet to be lived, or written. We will be updating, in real time.
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