~ The Biography Of Steve Jobs ~

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Idols



Akio Morita 1921-1999
Akio Morita co-founded Sony Corporation with Masaru Ibuka. He is widely acknowledged as the father of the consumer electronics industry, having brought to market the transistor, color TV, Walkman... Steve Jobs was an immense admirer of Sony and always talked of making Apple "the Sony of computers". Ironically, Apple eventually became much better than Sony not only at computers but also at its core business of consumer electronics. When Morita died in 1999, Steve paid tribute to him at the beginning of an Apple product announcement.

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Idols



Bob Dylan Born in 1941
Steve Jobs was a huge fan of folk singer Bob Dylan all his life. In his youth, he would play his songs all day, collect as many of his bootlegs as he could, and one of his favorite pastimes was actually to rewrite the lyrics of his songs. In the early 1980s, Steve even dated Joan Baez — mostly because she was Dylan's ex-girlfriend. When Apple eventually became a music powerhouse, Steve was thrilled that Dylan accepted to make an iPod commercial for his company.

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Ross Perot Born in 1930
Ross Perot is an American entrepreneur who founded Electronic Data Systems in 1962, which made him a billionaire after he sold it to General Motors in 1984. Looking for ways to invest his wealth, he bought $20 million's worth of shares for a 16% stake and a director's position in Steve Jobs's fledging young company, NeXT, in 1986, after hearing about it on a TV show. Perot left NeXT in 1991 after six uninterrupted years of losing money.

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Andy Grove Born in 1936
Andy Grove helped Gordon Moore and Bob Noyce start Intel in 1967, becoming the company's third employee. He eventually became CEO of Intel in 1987, and remained so until 1998. Steve Jobs met with Grove during his early tenure at Apple in the late 1970s, and held him as a business mentor and a friend. Steve came to him for advice, including in his last years, when he was struggling against cancer — as Grove himself had survived prostate cancer several years earlier.

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Kobun Chino Otogowa 1938-2002
Kobun Chino Otogowa was Steve's zen guru from the Los Altos Zen Center, back in the 1970s. He is credited for telling Steve to start Apple rather than becoming a Zen monk. When Steve Jobs started NeXT in 1986, he was prompt to name Kobun 'spiritual advisor' to the company; and five years later, although he was not the best at speaking English, Chino conducted Steve's wedding ceremony with Laurene Powell. Kobun Chino died trying to save his daughter from drowning in 2002.

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John Sculley Born in 1939
Steve Jobs hired PepsiCo CEO John Sculley with the famous phrase: "do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life, or do you want to come with me and change the world?" Sculley became Apple's CEO in 1983, and started a business honeymoon with Steve that lasted about two years. However, because of increasing tension in the company due to disappointing Macintosh sales, Sculley and Jobs eventually had a fall-out, that lead to Steve's resignation in September 1985. Steve never forgave Sculley for betraying him, and called him 'corrupt' publicly on several occasions.

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Regis McKenna Born in 1939
Regis McKenna was the marketing guru of Silicon Valley in the 1970s and 1980s. Steve heard he managed the Intel account, and tried desperately to have him 'manage' the two-people operation that was Apple back in 1977. McKenna eventually accepted and was even instrumental in bringing investor Mike Markkula in. Steve was always nice to McKenna, from whom he often sought advice. One if his favorite quotes was "the best kind of marketing is education." Rumor has it that the jobs title on McKenna's business card was "himself".

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Pat Crecine 1939-2008
Pat Crecine was one of Carnegie-Mellon's administrators, and a good friend of Steve Jobs. When Steve started NeXT in 1986, Crecine joined the board of the company early on, to give advice on the company's primary market, higher ed (the other members were Ross Perot and Jobs himself). Carnegie-Mellon was at the time one of the world's leading-edge universities in computing.

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John Warnock Born in 1940
John Warnock is a Xerox PARC alumnus, the brilliant inventor of the Postscript language and co-founder of Adobe Systems Inc. This soft-spoken, academic type was a tremendous source of inspiration to Steve in his approach to graphics on computers. Steve held Warnock as a mentor and played an instrumental role in the founding of Adobe, via a massive early investment by Apple. They remained in good terms, even though Apple and Adobe increasingly antagonized one another because of the issue of Flash on iOS devices.

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Alan Kay Born in 1940
Alan Kay was a researcher at Xerox PARC when Steve met him in the late 1970s. He is considered one of the fathers of the graphical user interface and object-oriented programming (i.e. he is exceptionally brilliant). He was both a friend and a mentor to Steve, and certainly made a big impression on his views on technology, as Apple popularized GUIs and NeXT, object-oriented software. Kay also introduced Jobs to George Lucas, who wanted to get rid of a small team of computer animation scientists — who eventually became the Pixar founders.

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Mike Markkula Born in 1942
A millionaire retiree from Intel, Mike Markkula was an angel investor in Apple, actually the first investor in the company, who put $250k on the table in 1977. Markkula believed in Steve Jobs's and Woz's idea of a personal computer even before they did — he claimed Apple would be a Fortune 500 company in two years. After a 2-year interim as CEO, Mike stayed on Apple's board, and approved of Steve's departure in 1985. He left when Steve asked him to resign along with the rest of the board in 1997.

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Nolan Bushnell Born in 1943
Nolan Bushnell is the founder of Atari and Steve's first employer (apart from his internship at HP at age 13). He is widely regarded as the father of the video game industry. According to Woz, he was an inspiration to Steve Jobs to start Apple — the man eventually co-founded over 15 companies. When Steve left Apple in 1985, he was one of the few businessmen who voiced their concern. He said to Time magazine "Where is Apple's inspiration going to come from? Is Apple going to have all the romance of a new brand of Pepsi?"

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Close Ones



Paul Jobs 1922-1993
Paul Jobs was born and raised in Wisconsin, and served in the Coast Guard during World War II. After the war, he settled in San Francisco and married with Clara Hagopian in 1946. The couple adopted baby Steve nine years later. Paul, who never graduated from high school even, became a car machinist — he fixed broken cars and sold them for a profit. He taught his son Steve the importance of craftsmanship, and how to get parts for a low price from dealers. That would prove useful in Apple's early years. Steve had the greatest respect for his father.

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Close Ones



Mona Simpson Born in 1957
After Steve Jobs's biological parents Abdulfattah Jandali and Joanne Schieble abandoned him in 1955, Abdulfattah's father died, and the couple eventually got married (for a short period of time). They had a baby, Mona, Steve's biological sister. Mona was already an accomplished writer when she met with Steve in 1986 (she wrote the popular book Anywhere But Here). From that day, Steve considered her family, and a close friend. Ten years later, Mona wrote A Regular Guy, a novel that tells the story of Jobs, barely disguised.

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Key People

Close Ones



Tina Redse Born in 1959
Little is known of Christina Redse, Steve Jobs' girlfriend from 1985 to 1989. What is known is that they had a very passionate relationship, and at the same time a very tumultuous one. It peaked when Jobs proposed to her, and she refused, twice. Although Steve happily married with Laurene Powell in 1991, he often brought back the subject of how he missed Tina and wished he could have made their relationship work. (Note: the picture is likely to be one of Tina but this is unconfirmed)