Unknown Steve Jobs Facts
Barely hours after the launch of the newest iPhone, the man behind the break-through device (and scores of other such devices) bid adieu to the world. Master inventor, brilliant innovator, a creative genius and a man par excellence, Steve Jobs passed away on 5th October, 2011 at the age of 56. All his life Steve Jobs, who survived a pancreatic cancer and had a liver transplant, drew inspiration from death. „Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart,“ he had remarked.
The man is widely credited for single-handedly saving the drowing Apple Inc.,revolutionizing the music industry, creating an invincible smartphone and setting up the world’s most successful animation studio, Pixar.
Things at Apple and in the world will never be the same without Jobs not being there. Amidst all the follow-up which is happening all across the world after his demise, we discuss some lesser-known facts about the iGod:
1. Jobs was born to an Arab father, Abdulfattah Jandali and an unmarried American graduate student Joanne Simpson who later became a political science professor. He was later adopted by a middle-class couple, Clara and Paul Jobs, and grew up in California. As an adult, Steve learned that he had a biological sister, novelist Mona Simpson, who had lived in his home state all along.
2. Steve Jobs was slightly dyslexic. He had the company of legendary figures like Albert Einstein, Alexander Graham Bell and Henry Ford in this.
3. Jobs beheld a computer at a young age of 12 and that too back in 1967. Larry Lang, an engineer at Hewlett-Packard, showed him the machine, and he (Jobs) immediately wanted one to just mess around with. He wrote: „I just thought they were neat. I just wanted to mess around with one.“
4. Not many people know that Steve Jobs was a college dropout. In 1972, he graduated from Homestead High School in Cupertino, California and enrolled in Reed College in Oregon. One semester later he dropped out. He can be joined in this league by tycoons like Bill Gates (Microsoft), Richard Branson (Virgin Group), Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook), Michael Dell (Dell Computers), Azim Premji (Wipro), John D. Rockefeller (American oil baron, investor, and philanthropist), Dhirubhai Ambani (Reliance Industries) and many more.
5. Idea behind ‚i‘: First used with iMac in 1998, Jobs said at the launch that ‚i‘ denotes tenets like internet, individual, instruct, inform, inspire.
6. His first job was as a video game designer at Atari, a position he took only in order to save money to travel to India for a spiritual retreat. He finally took the journey in 1974 with a friend from college. Rumour has it that he returned to the U.S. wearing traditional Indian clothing and with a shaved head. In any case, Jobs became a Buddhist.
7. He founded Apple in 1976 with former electronics hacker Stephen Wozniak in a garage in Silicon Valley. Jobs also convinced John Sculley, the then president of PepsiCo, to quit his job and become Apples CEO by saying, “Do you want to sell sugared water all your life, or do you want to change the world?”
8. In 1985, he was ousted from Apple by John Sculley, the same guy he brought over from PepsiCo! There was a disagreement on how to run the company. On his ouster Jobs told the 2005 Stanford graduating class: “It was an awful-tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life’s gonna hit you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith.“ ‚Stay hungry, stay foolish‘ was his closing comment for the address.
9. In 1986, he acquired the computer graphics division of Lucasfilm Ltd which was spun off as Pixar Animation Studios, the most successful animation studio in the world. Pixar is now owned by The Walt Disney Company. He was also on the board of Disney.
10. A decade after being fired he returned to rescue the dwindling Apple. He was the man behind Apple’s countercultural sensibility and a minimalist design ethic which led the company to unveil a series of breakthrough products, even in the face of the late-2000s recession and his own failing health.
11. The Steve Jobs Uniform: St Croix black cashmere/silk turtleneck (polo neck) sweatshirt, blue Levi’s 501 jeans and New Balance 991 sneakers. He owns over a 100 Levi’s jeans.
12. He was a pescetarian, one whose diet includes fish but no other meat. Both he and his wife do not consume any other animal product. His love for apples is partly responsible for the company getting named Apple Inc.
13. Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates is a self-confessed Jobs‘ fan. „In terms of an inspirational leader, Steve Jobs is really the best I have ever met,“ said Gates in January 1998 when asked to name the CEO he most admired. „He’s got a belief in excellence of products. He’s able to communicate that,“ said Gates.
14. His take-home annual salary as the CEO of Apple Inc was $1. However, he owned some 5.5 million shares in the company, which are worth some $1.8 billion at the current price of around $333 a share, a rise of more than 50 per cent on the year. Hisannual income from Disney shares was $48 million.
15. In 2008, a blunder happened and Jobs read his own obituary. Bloomberg, a financial news-aggregating company in the U.S., declared Jobs dead even though he was alive and kicking. The gaffe happened when the agency decided to update its 17-page stock obituary on Steve Jobs, and someone accidentally published it in the process. All hell broke loose and the storm only settled when Bloomberg publicly retracted the news.
Rest in Peace, Steven Paul Jobs, 1955-2011. (Technology, MensXP.com)
Related posts:
The Author
No Comment