1972: Dropout
Dropping out of Reed College led Steve to take a calligraphy class, which gave him the idea to use multiple type fonts, and proportionally spaced formats – which was to become commonplace in computers.
With co-founder Steve Wozniak and Mike Markkula, Steve Jobs started selling the first commercially successful personal computer in the form of the Apple II series. Did it double as a sledge?
The mighty Macintosh computer was launched with the first personal graphical user interface, which included a mouse – cutting-edge stuff.
This is the year Steve was fired from Apple. That didn’t even slow him as that same year he founded NeXT Computer, which featured a built-in Ethernet port and NeXTMail that incorporated images and audio in emails to make them useable by the mainstream – once they got internet access that is.
Jobs knows how to spot a deal and in this year snapped up Pixar (then called The Graphics Group) from Lucasfilm for a tidy US$10 million. Disney bought Pixar in 2007 for US$7.4 billion.
Money kept rolling in as NeXT Computer was bought by Apple for US$429 million and along with it went Steve who became interim CEO of Apple in 1997. This put him back in the throne which became his full-time in 2000.
Jobs rightly killed off a few failing projects including Newton (PDA), Cyberdog (internet suite), and OpenDoc (for multi-format documents). Thanks to his pruning, the current kit we know and love is in our pockets and on our desks today.
This is when the iMac was introduced along with its revolutionary USB port and all-in-one body available in various colours. The lack of floppy drive was a controversial decision that boosted external ZIP drive popularity for a bit, but ultimately gave way to USB memory sticks.
The iPod was introduced to do away with disc-loading music players and put everyone’s music in one place – iTunes. In the wake of Napster falling that was a very clever move from Steve.
Steve’s old OS – NeXTSTEP – from his startup company, was developed into a new form. This was the birth of Mac OS X.
A small, portable and powerful laptop that worked well, was the plan. MacBook launched and Starbucks has been crammed full of the things ever since.
The mighty iPhone was unveiled, but was initially pricey and slow to catch on. Then the insane demand for apps sparked a fire of popularity that’s still burning as Apple ships about 20 million handsets in three months.
It pioneered the middle ground between laptops and smartphones and is still doing so. The iPad got off to a rocky start, and still isn’t really needed by many, but it’s just so pretty that the iPad 2 is still the go-to tablet the world over.
