Steven Jobs was born in San Francisco on February 24, 1955. He was orphaned and later adopted by Paul and Clara Jobs. Paul was a machinist at Spectra-Physics, where Jobs got his first taste of mechanical and electronic things.
When Jobs was in high school, he was very unhappy at his school in Mountain View, so the family moved to Los Altos, CA. It was during his high school years in Los Altos that Jobs would attend Hewlett-Packard electonics lectures. This led to his first summer job at Hewlett-Packard, where he saw his first computer. At the age of 16, he met Stephen Wozniak, who also worked for Hewlett-Packard. The two of them became fast friends and joined to become high school entrepreneurs, building "blue boxes" to get free long distance phone calls and fixing stereo systems. After graduated from high school, Jobs went to Reed College in Portland, Oregon. Though he continued taking classes, Jobs dropped out after his first semester. He stayed at Reed for year studying philosophy, physics, literature, and poetry.
In 1974 Jobs took a job at Atari, Inc. where he began designing games for the company. In the fall he started going to meetings of his friend Steve Wozniak for the Homebrew Computer Club. It was here that Jobs and Wozniak began brainstorming on inventing a computer for personal use.
Working in Steve Jobs' garage, Wozniak and Jobs created the Apple I and thus started the true personal computer industry in 1977. This first Apple home computer was a grey box with a green and black monitor. Jobs and Wozniak introduced the second Apple computer (Apple II) in 1979 which is faster and more efficient than the Apple I. Together Jobs and Wozniak had revolutionized what we now today consider as a computer from the big old, noisy machines, to things a child can manipulate and work with, without a knowledge of binary and anything electronic.
Bibliography:
Biographical Caddes, Carolyn. 1986. Portraits of Success: Impressions of Silicon Valley Pioneers, Tioga Publishing Co., Palo Alto, CA.
Angelelli, Lee. 1994. Steve Paul Jobs,. Blacksburg, VA
Clatterbuck, Leslie (1995, September 17) [WWW document]. URL http://ei.cs.vt.edu/~cs3604/fall.95/Assignment.1/Clatterbuck.html
Craft, Beckie (1996, January 24) [WWW document]. URL http://www.kzoo.edu/~abrady/CS400/bioW96/craft.html
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