“It doesn’t make sense to hire smart people and tell them what to do; we hire smart people so they can tell us what to do.” (Steve Jobs)

Steve Jobs, full name Steven Paul Jobs, was a co-founder of Apple Computer, Inc. (now Apple Inc.) and a charismatic pioneer of the personal computer age. He was born February 24, 1955, in San Francisco, California, and died October 5, 2011, in Palo Alto, California.

The birth of Apple

Jobs was reared in Cupertino, California, by adoptive parents in what is now known as Silicon Valley. Though he was interested in engineering, his youthful interests were diverse. He walked out of Reed College in Portland, Oregon, and obtained work as a video game designer at Atari Corporation in early 1974, saving enough money for a pilgrimage to India to experience Buddhism.

In the autumn of 1974, Jobs returned to Silicon Valley and met with Stephen Wozniak, a longtime high school classmate who was working for the Hewlett-Packard Company. When Wozniak informed Jobs of his progress in designing his own computer logic board, Jobs recommended that they create a partnership, which they did after Hewlett-Packard formally rejected Wozniak’s invention in 1976. The logic board for the Apple I was developed in the Jobses’ family garage with funds raised by the sale of Jobs’ Volkswagen minivan and Wozniak’s programmable calculator.

Jobs was one of the first entrepreneurs to recognize that the personal computer would appeal to a wide range of people, at least if it didn’t look like it belonged in a junior high school science fair. With Jobs’ urging, Wozniak created an improved model, the Apple II, replete with a keyboard, and they arranged for the unit to be housed in a sleek, molded plastic housing.