Steve Jobs & Steve Wozniak
Steve Jobs groundbreaking idea of a personel computer took him into revolutionizing the computer hardware and software industry. When Jobs was 21, he and a friend, Wozniak, assembled a personel computer called the Apple. The Apple transformed people's idea of a computer from a huge and mysterious stack of vacuum tubes only utilized by big business and the government to a little box used by average people. No company has done more to democratize the computer and create it user-friendly than Apple Computer Inc. Jobs software development for the Macintosh re-introduced the windows interface and computer mouse technology which determined a standard for all applications interface in software.
Steven Paul, was an orphan adopted by Paul and Clara Jobs of Mountain View, California in February 1955. Jobs wasn't content at school in Mountain View so the family moved to Los Altos, California, where Steven went to Homestead High School. Once, he wrote to William Hewlett, co-founder of Hewlett-Packard, and requested some parts be sent to him. Hewlett replied by granting Jobs a summer job in a Hewlett-Packard factory. Wozniak was already employed there as an up-and-coming engineer.
In 1972 Jobs went to Reed College, in Portland, Oregon, quitting after one semester. He hung about the school for close to another year, before putting in a résumé that greatly exaggerated his electronics experience to Atari, an innovator in video gaming. For part of 1974 he worked as a game designer, helping create Breakout and reforming his friendship with Steve Wozniak. After setting aside enough money to pay his way, he left Atari and traveled with friends to India seeking enlightenment. He soon departed India thinking that Thomas Edison had served more for the improvement of mankind than all the gurus in the world. In 1975 he fell in with the "Homebrew Computer Club", which included Wozniak among its members. Wozniak had learned that a toy in Cap'n Crunch cereal boxes made the identical tones that telephone companies employed for long-distance switching. Before long, with Jobs's help, he was building small blue boxes that could be used with telephones to sidestep the safeguards of phone companies and make free long-distance phone calls. It was Jobs who converted this into a business venture by selling the boxes to college students.
Working from the Job's family garage, they made their first "fortune" when the Byte Shop in Mountain View purchased their first 50 fully assembled Apple computers. On this foundation the Apple Corporation was established. Through the early 1980's Jobs commanded the business side of the corporation, successively hiring presidents who'd drive the organization to a higher level. With the layoffs of 1985 Jobs lost a power struggle with John Sculley, and following a short hiatus re-emerged with new financing to create the NeXT corporation.
Steve Jobs is also Chairman and CEO of Pixar, the Academy-Award-winning computer animation studios which he co-founded in 1986. As the Chairman and CEO, for the second time, of Apple Computer, he pays himself a yearly salary of $1. He introduced the iPod in 2003 and subsequently came up with iTunes, which was a digital jukebox. A million and a half iPods later, the music industry still doesn't know whether this innovation will preserve it or destroy it.
Jobs's history in business has added greatly to the myths of the unconventional, individualistic Silicon Valley entrepreneur, stressing the importance of design while realizing the essential role aesthetics play in public appeal. His body of work advancing the development of products that are both useable and graceful has garnered him a devoted following.
Steve Wozniak
Known as the Wizard of Woz, Stephen Wozniak grew up in suburban Santa Clara Valley, California (the area today known as Silicon Valley), where his father was an engineer for Lockheed and his mother the president of a Republican women's club. He built many homemade devices from kits and from scratch, including a voltmeter, ham radio, calculator, and games. He was exceedingly bright, but school bored him. He attended the University of Colorado and flunked out. Wozniak returned to school at the University of California in 1971, but quit and went back to Hewlett-Packard where he had worked summers.
Back at home he met Steve Jobs by a mutual friend and through the "Homebrew Computing club". Jobs was another computer hobbyist, uninterested in school but obsessed by electronics. After the "blue box" industry had run it's course Wozniak began work on the Apple I. Wozniak then resigned from Hewlett-Packard and became vice-president in charge of research and development of this new company called Apple Computers.
Although Wozniak became very wealthy, he stayed primarily involved in the technical facets of the business. In 1981 an airplane he was piloting crashed on the runway. He sustained injuries and suffered from amnesia, and his recuperation lasted two years. He went back to Apple in 1983, but concluded his full time employment with Apple permanently on February 6, 1987.
Wozniak received the National Medal of Technology in 1985 from Ronald Reagan, in 1989 he received an honorary Doctor of Engineering degree from the University of Colorado, and in September 2000, Wozniak was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame. Wozniak also started teaching and sponsoring charitable activities in the area of education.
Steve Wozniak helped launch an industry that's come to impact the lives of virtually everyone in some manner. His innovations have laid the framework for others to come and his Apple II set the standard for the industry.
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