“We started to put a computer in the hands of ordinary people and we achieved it beyond our wildest dreams.”
– Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple Computer Inc., 1976.
Steve Jobs was adopted by a family in Mountain View, California. While still in high school, Jobs’s interest in electronics led him to call William Hewlett of Hewlett-Packard to order some parts for a school project. Hewlett provided the parts and then made Jobs an offer to intern at Hewlett-Packard for a summer. There, Jobs puts Steve Wozniak, a talented and knowledgeable engineer five years older than the high school student. Their friendship would eventually be the foundation on which Apple was built.
Jobs dropped out of Reed College after one semester and went to work for Atari designing games. He carefully saved the money he earned while working at Atari so he could take a trip to India and satiate his budding interest in Eastern spiritualism.
After returning home from India, Jobs and Wozniak renewed their friendship. Jobs was shown a small computer that Wozniak had been working on as a hobby, but Jobs immediately saw the potential in it and persuaded Wozniak to do business with him. In 1975, at the age of 20, Jobs went to work in his parents’ garage with Wozniak working on the Apple I prototype.
The Apple I sold modestly, but well enough that I could go to work on the Apple II. In 1977 the new model was put on sale. With a keyboard, color monitors, and easy-to-use software, Apple became a success. The company made $3 million in its first year and topped $200 million in its third.
However, in addition to the Apple III and its successor, the LISA, not selling as well as expected and there being a marked increase in competition in PC sales, by 1980 Apple lost nearly half of its sales to Apple. IBM. Things took a turn for the worse for Jobs in 1983 when a fight with directors caused CEO John Sculley, whom Jobs himself had hired, to kick him off the board.
In 1984, in response to falling sales, Jobs released the Apple Macintosh, which introduced the world to the simplicity of the point-and-click mouse. The Mac’s marketing was poorly managed, and at $2,500 it wasn’t reaching the homes it was designed for. Jobs tried to repackage the Mac as a business computer, but without a hard drive or network capabilities, not to mention just a small amount of memory, corporations weren’t interested. In 1985, without any power in his own company, Jobs sold his shares in Apple and resigned.
Later, in 1985, Jobs founded NeXT Computer Co. with the money he had made from the sale of his shares in Apple. He planned to build a computer to change the way research was done. The NeXT computer, while complete with never-before-seen processing speeds, unmatched graphics, and an optical disk drive, at $9,950 each, sold poorly.
Persistent after the failures of the NeXT company, Jobs began to tinker with the software and began to turn his attention to a company he had bought from George Lucas in 1986, Pixar Animation Studios. Jobs signed a three-picture deal with Disney and began work on the first computer-animated film. Released in the fall of 1995, “Toy Story” was four years in the making. But the work paid off, the film was an incredible success. Pixar went public in 1996, and in one day of trading, 80% of Jobs’ shares became worth $1 billion.
Apple was struggling because it hadn’t been able to design a new Macintosh operating system, and the company only owned 5% of the PC market. Days after Pixar went public, Apple bought NeXT for $400 million and renamed Jobs to the board of directors to advise Gilbert F. Amelio, president and CEO. However, in March 1997, Apple posted a quarterly loss of $708 million, and Amelio resigned a few months later. Jobs was left in charge as interim CEO and it was up to him to maintain the very company he had started and that had kicked him out alive. So he made a deal with Microsoft. With a $150 million investment for a small stake in Apple, Apple and Microsoft would “cooperate on several sales and technology fronts,” and Apple would be assured of a continuation in the PC market.
Jobs also went to work to improve the quality of Apple computers. The introduction of the G3 Power PC microprocessor made Apple faster than computers running on Pentium processors. Apple also focused its energies on producing an inexpensive desktop computer, the iMac, which was another success for the company. With Jobs back at the helm, Apple was able to recover quickly, and by the end of 1998, it was generating $5.9 billion in sales. Jobs had returned to his first love, a little older and a little wiser. He made Apple healthy again and brought it back to a place where he was contributing new and innovative technologies to the world of computing.
