Steve Jobs dramatically transformed the worlds of personal computing, music and mobile phones, ushering in a new digital era.

Jobs, who died on Wednesday at the age of 56 after a seven-year battle with pancreatic cancer, was also the man behind the stupendous success of the computer animation firm Pixar, makers of Toy Story and Finding Nemo.

Though he himself never designed a computer in his life, it was because of him that the Apple products, while largely providing the same services as those from other companies, are perceived to be different. 



Born on February 24, 1955 to Joanne Carole Schieble and Abdulfattah Jandali, Steven Paul Jobs was adopted by Paul and Clara Jobs. Jandali was a graduate student from Syria who later became a political science professor.

Paul Jobs, who worked in finance and real estate before moving back to his original trade as machinist, moved his family down the San Francisco Peninsula to Mountain View and then to Los Altos in the 1960s.

From an early age, Steve Jobs was interested in electronics. As an eighth grader, after discovering that a crucial part was missing from a frequency counter he was assembling, he telephoned William Hewlett, the co-founder of Hewlett-Packard.  


Hewlett spoke with the boy for 20 minutes, prepared a bag of parts for him to pick up and offered him a job as a summer intern, according to The New York Times.

Jobs met Stephan Wozniak, with whom he co-founded Apple in 1976, while attending Homestead High School in neighbouring Cupertino.

 
After enrolling at Reed College in 1972, Jobs left after one semester, but remained in Portland for another 18 months auditing classes. In a commencement address given at Stanford in 2005, Jobs said he had decided to leave college because it was consuming all of his parents' saving

Jobs returned to Silicon Valley in 1974 and took a job as a technician at Atari, the video game manufacturer. But, he left after several months and travelled to India with a college friend, Daniel Kottke, who would later become an early Apple employee.

Jobs returned to Atari and along with Wozniak, then working as an engineer at HP, began attending meetings of the Homebrew Computer Club, a hobbyist group that met at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center in Menlo Park, California in 1975. 



Personal computing had been pioneered at research laboratories close to Stanford and was spreading. Wozniak designed the original Apple I computer simply to show it off to his friends at the Homebrew.

It was Jobs who had the inspiration that it could be a commercial product. In early 1976, he and Wozniak, using their own money, began Apple in the Jobs family garage in Los Altos with an initial investment of $1,300 before securing the backing of former Intel executive A C Markkula, who lent them $250,000.

Wozniak would be the technical half and Jobs the marketing half of the original Apple I Computer.


Shortly thereafter, they moved the company to a small office in Cupertino. Reacting to Jobs' demise, a Twitter user named Matt Galligan wrote: "R.I.P. Steve Jobs. You touched an ugly world of technology and made it beautiful."

In April 1977, Jobs and Wozniak introduced Apple II at the West Coast Computer Faire in San Francisco, creating a sensation. The company went public in 1981, when its sales touched $600 million from $2 million in 1977.

By 1983, Apple was in the Fortune 500, an achievement for a new firm. In 1981, Jobs joined a small group of Apple engineers pursuing a separate project, a lower-cost system code-named Macintosh, which was introduced in January 1984. 

Jobs recruited John Sculley as Apple's chief executive in 1983. Sculley, a former Pepsi-Cola chief executive, helped Jobs introduce a number of new computer models, including an advanced version of the Apple II and later the Lisa and Macintosh desktop computers.

But, the two men became estranged and a power struggle ensued when the Lisa failed commercially and early Macintosh sales proved disappointing, leading to Jobs losing control of the Lisa project.

The Apple board ultimately removed Jobs from his operational role and 1,200 Apple employees were laid off. Jobs then left Apple in 1985.


"I don't wear the right kind of pants to run this company," he told a small gathering of Apple employees before he left, a member of the original Macintosh development team was quoted as saying by NYT.

He was barefoot as he spoke, and wearing blue jeans. In September that year, he announced a new venture NeXT Inc.

He also established a personal philanthropic foundation after leaving Apple but soon decided, instead, to spend much of his fortune $10 million on acquiring Pixar, a struggling graphics supercomputing firm owned by filmmaker George Lucas.




The purchase, though a significant gamble as there was little market then for computer-animated movies, proved profitable when the company, in 1995, along with Walt Disney Pictures, released 'Toy Story', collecting box-office receipts of $362 million.

When Pixar went public in a record-breaking offering, Jobs became a billionaire.

In 2006, the Walt Disney Company agreed to purchase Pixar for $7.4 billion, making Jobs its largest single shareholder, with about 7 per cent of the firm's stock.

Meanwhile, Apple, after unsuccessful efforts to develop next-generation operating systems in 1996 with Gilbert Amelio in command, acquired NeXT for $430 million.

The next year, Jobs returned to Apple as an adviser and became its chief executive again in 2000.

With his rise, Jobs personal life also became more public. He had a number of well-publicised romantic relationships, including one with folk singer Joan Baez before he married Laurene Powell. Jobs and Laurene had three children -- two daughters Eve Jobs and Erin Sienna Jobs and a son, Reed.

Jobs had one more daughter, Lisa Brennan-Jobs, from a relationship with Chrisann Brennan.


Steve Jobs, the legendary Apple co-founder turned his company into one of the most successful technology companies in the world, is dead. He was 56.
In a somber statement on Wednesday, the Apple board of directors said: "We are deeply saddened to announce that Steve Jobs passed away today. Steve's brilliance, passion and energy were the source of countless innovations that enrich and improve all of our lives. The world is immeasurably better because of Steve."
Apple announced his death but did not give any specific cause for it.
"His greatest love was for his wife, Laurene, and his family. Our hearts go out to them and to all who were touched by his extraordinary gifts," the statement added.
The company said: "Apple has lost a visionary and creative genius, and the world has lost an amazing human being."
 Jobs had battled cancer in 2004 and underwent a liver transplant in 2009.
Jobs, 55, submitted his resignation to Apple's board of directors on August 25, 2011 and 'strongly recommended' that the board implement its succession plan and name Tim Cook, 50, as CEO.
To understand the man who revolutionized the information technology industry, let us have a look at
 some of his famous quotes.

source: http://www.rediff.com/
for more info  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Jobs

" In life we don’t get what we want, we get in life what we are. If we want more we have to be able to be more, in order to be more you have to face rejection. "Farrah Gray

Age: 20

Representing: Chicago, IL/Las Vegas, NV

Why you should fear him: For starters, he probably makes more money than you. At age 14, this young entrepreneur was a millionaire.

Gray's entrepreneurial journey began at age six when he went door to door selling body lotion for $1.50. Always starting economic empowerment clubs at school, Gray got the idea to do a radio show. At age 9, Gray co-hosted a radio show called "Backstage Live" which eventually reached 12 million listeners.

Feeling lazy yet? It gets better.

By middle school, Gray had a nationwide speaking career, commanding $5,000-$10,000 per appearance. Puberty hits. While most young men were off discovering the opposite sex, Mr. Gray started his own specialty food company, "Farr-Out Foods", which he marketed to young people and sold for $1.5 million by his 14th birthday. He started the company with a make-shift "we're too poor to buy syrup" recipe from his grandmother.

Now at age 20, Gray has his hands in multiple projects including the acquisition of "Inner City Magazine", his charitable foundation, "The Farrah Gray Foundation", which helps empower young inner city kids to think economically, and lastly, real estate investing. January 1st of this year, Gray released his first book, "Reallionaire: Nine Steps to Becoming Rich from the Inside Out", which lists the practical lessons that took him from public assistance to being a multi-millionaire. The book was published by "Health Communications Inc.) and is available at bookstores nationwide.

Most impressive about Gray is the fact that as the youngest of five children, in a single parent household, he was never handed anything. The media has packaged him as a "self-made millionaire", but Gray is quick to give the credit to God's grace and mercy.

His formal bio goes as such: "Farrah Gray was a card-carrying businessman at age six. At eight, he formed a business club that financed his neighborhood ventures. By age 14, he had an office on Wall Street and was a millionaire. He also served as the youngest member of the United Way Board of

Directors. Gray's foundation provides seed money to young entrepreneurs. Now 20 years old, he’s the author of Reallionaire, which shares the lessons that took him from public assistance in Chicago’s inner city to millionaire row."

If Farrah were giving lessons, I'd line up.
Status: No college. Has opted to hold off on school, although he's stated in the past that he'd like an MBA. At this point, Wharton would probably grant him honorary letters just to have their name associated with Gray.

Press/Interviews: Farrah Gray's Official Website, NPR: Interview with Tavis Smiley, Good Morning America Interview, Teen Capitalist

source: nykola.com