Dead, Steven Paul Jobs on October 5, 2011, he was an American businessman.
Jobs is widely recognized as a pioneer of the microcomputer revolution of the 1970s, along with Apple 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.”
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) Wozniak and his countercultural girlfriend, the artistically inclined Homestead High junior Chrisann Brennan.
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 (GUI).
This led to development of the failed Apple Lisa in 1983, followed by the successful Macintosh in 1984.
In addition to being the first mass-produced computer with a GUI, the Macintosh 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.
Jobs’s biological father, Abdulfattah “John” Jandali (b. 1931), was born into a Muslim household and grew up in Homs, Syria.
Jandali is the son of a self-made millionaire who did not go to college and a mother who was a traditional housewife.
While an undergraduate at the American University of Beirut, he was a student activist and spent time in jail for his political activities.
Although Jandali initially wanted to study law, he eventually decided to study economics and political science.
He pursued a PhD in the latter subject at the University of Wisconsin, where he met Joanne Carole Schieble, a Catholic of German descent who grew up on a farm in Wisconsin.
As a doctoral candidate, Jandali was Schieble’s teaching assistant although both were the same age.
Mona Simpson (Jobs’s biological sister), notes that her maternal grandparents were not happy that their daughter was dating Jandali: “it wasn’t that he was Middle-Eastern so much as that he was a Muslim.
But there are a lot of Arabs in Michigan and Wisconsin.
In mid-1972, Jobs moved back to the San Francisco Bay Area and was renting his own apartment.
Brennan states by this point that their “relationship was complicated.
I couldn’t break the connection and I couldn’t commit.
Steve couldn’t either.” Jobs hitchhiked and worked around the West Coast and Brennan would occasionally join him.
At the same time, Brennan notes, “little by little, Steve and I separated.
But we were never able to fully let go.
We never talked about breaking up or going our separate ways and we didn’t have that conversation where one person says it’s over.”
They continued to grow apart, but Jobs would still seek her out, and visit her while she was working in a health food store or as a live-in babysitter.
They remained involved with each other while continuing to see other people.
Inspired by a trip to Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), engineers from Apple began working on a commercial application for the graphical interface ideas they had seen there.
The resulting machine, Lisa, was expensive and never achieved any level of commercial success, but in 1984 another Apple computer, using the same WIMP (Windows, Icons, Menus, Pointer) interface concept, was launched.
In 2003, Jobs was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and underwent surgery in 2004.
Despite the success of this operation he became increasingly ill and received a liver transplant in 2009.
He returned to work after a six month break but eventually resigned his position in August 2011 after another period of medical leave which began in January 2011.