Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs

Entrepreneur

February 24, 1955 – October 5, 2011

INDUCTED IN THE CLASS OF 2000

Notable accomplishments:

  • Helped build, with Steve Wozniak, the circuit board for the arcade game Breakout for Atari (1976)
  • Co-founded, with Wozniak, Apple Computer Company (1976)
  • Led development, with Wozniak, of the Apple II (1977)
  • Authorized development of the Lisa and Macintosh computers, bringing the desktop GUI to the personal computer (1978)
  • Founded NeXT Inc. (1985)
  • Purchased Pixar from George Lucas (1985)
  • Sold NeXT to Apple and returned to Apple as an advisor (1997)
  • Named Apple’s CEO (1997)
  • Oversaw release of the iMac (1998)
  • Supervised the launch of iTunes (2000)
  • Launched the first Apple Store (2001)
  • Oversaw release of the iPod digital music player (2001)
  • Launched the iPhone (2007)
  • Launched the iPad tablet computer (2010)
  • Launched the iCloud online storage service (2011)

Quotes
“If I look at myself and ask, ‘What am I best at and what do I enjoy most doing?’ I think what I’m best at is creating sort of new innovative products. That’s what I enjoy doing. I enjoy, and I’m best working with, a small team of talented people. That’s what I did with the Apple II, and that’s what I did with the Macintosh.” (Newsweek, Sep 29, 1985)

“I was very influenced by Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard. I used to go there to Hewlett-Packard every Tuesday night when I was a freshman and sophomore in high school. They would invite about 20 of us in, students that were really interested in electronics, and they would have an expert there give a lecture on something they just invented. I think it is fair to say there wouldn’t have been an Apple if there hadn’t been a Hewlett-Packard.” (Newsweek, Sep 29, 1985)

“There was a time-sharing company in Mountain View that we could get free time on. But we needed a terminal, and we couldn’t afford one, so we designed and built one. And that was the first thing we ever did. We built this terminal. And so, what an Apple I was, was really an extension of this terminal putting a microprocessor on the back end. That’s what it was. So first we built the terminal, and then we built the Apple I. And we really built it for ourselves because we couldn’t afford to buy anything.” (Triumph of the Nerds, PBS, 1995)

“I think everybody in this country should learn how to program a computer, should learn a computer language, because it teaches you how to think. It’s like going to law school. I don’t think anybody should be a lawyer, but I think going to law school would actually be useful ‘cause it teaches you how to think in a certain way. In the same way that computer programing teaches you, in a slightly different way, how to think. And so, I view computer science as a liberal art. It should be something that everybody learns.” (Triumph of the Nerds, PBS, 1995)

“I had three to four people who kept bugging me that I ought to get my rear over to Xerox PARC and see what they were doing, and so I finally did. … And they were very kind, and they showed me what they were working on …, One of the things they showed me was object-oriented programing. They showed me that, but I didn’t even see that. The other one they showed me was, really, a network computer system. They had over 100 Alto computers, all networked, using email, etc., etc. I didn’t even see that. I was so blinded by the first thing they showed me, which was the graphical user interface. I thought it was the best thing I’d ever seen in my life. Now, remember, it was very flawed. What we saw was incomplete. They’d done a bunch of things wrong, but we didn’t know that at the time. But still, though, the germ of the idea was there and they’d done it very well. And within 10 minutes, it was obvious to me that all computers would work like this someday. It was obvious. You could argue about how many years it would take, you could argue about who the winners and losers might be, but you couldn’t argue about the inevitability.” (Triumph of the Nerds, PBS, 1995)

“The Web is incredibly exciting because it is the fulfilment of a lot of our dreams that the computer would ultimately not be primarily a device for computation but metamorphosize into a device for communication. And with the Web, that’s finally happening. … So I think that the Web is going to be profound in what it does to our society. As you know, about 15% of the goods and services in the US are sold via catalogs or over the television. All that is gonna go on the Web and more. Billions and billions. Soon tens of billions of dollars’ worth of goods and services are gonna be sold on the Web.” (Triumph of the Nerds, PBS, 1995)

“I think part of what made the Macintosh great was that the people working on it were musicians and poets and artists and zoologists and historians who also happened to be the best computer scientists in the world. But if it hadn’t been for computer science, these people would have all been doing amazing things in life in other fields. And they brought with them, we all bought to this effort, a very liberal arts air, a very liberal arts attitude that we wanted to pull in the best that we saw in these other fields into this field. And I don’t think you get that if you’re very narrow.” (Triumph of the Nerds, PBS, 1995)

“We don’t strive to appear cool. We just try to make the best products we can. And if they are cool, well, that’s great.” (Newsweek, Oct. 16, 2006)

“We never hire consultants, per se. We just want to make great products. When we created the iTunes Music Store, we did that because we thought it would be great to be able to buy music electronically, not because we had plans to redefine the music industry.” (Fortune, March 7, 2008)

Suggested Reading:
“Accidental Empires” by Robert X. Cringely (1992)

“iWoz” by Steve Wozniak (2006)

“Steve Jobs” by Walter Isaacson (2011)

“Steve Jobs: The Man Who Thought Different” by Karen Blumenthal (2012)

Learn more:
All About Steve Jobs fan site