“We started to put a computer in the hands of ordinary people and we did 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 that he could take a trip to India and quench 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 saw the potential in it immediately 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.
I sold the Apple I modestly, but well enough to be able to 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 surpassed $200 million in its third.
However, in addition to the fact that the Apple III and its successor, the LISA, did not sell as well as expected and a marked increase in competition in the sale of PCs, in 1980 Apple lost almost half of its sales to IBM. . Things took a turn for the worse for Jobs in 1983 when a fight with directors led to CEO John Sculley, whom Jobs himself had hired, toss him off the board.
In 1984, in response to declining sales, Jobs released the Apple Macintosh, which introduced the world to the simplicity of the point-and-click mouse. Marketing for the Mac was poorly managed, and at $2,500, it didn’t reach 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 little bit 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 the NeXT Computer Co. with the money he had earned from selling his shares in Apple. He planned to build a computer to change the way research was done. The NeXT computer, though complete with never-before-seen processing speeds, unmatched graphics, and an optical disc drive, at $9,950 each, sold poorly.
Persistent after the failures of the NeXT company, Jobs began tinkering with the software and began turning 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 feature. Released in the fall of 1995, “Toy Story” took four years to make. 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 of not being 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, Chairman 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 keep the very company he had started and that had driven 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 various technology and sales fronts,” and Apple would be assured of its 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 in command, Apple was able to quickly recover, 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 returned it to a place where he was contributing new and innovative technologies to the world of computing.