Steve Jobs, Apple CEO
1. Apple's early and ongoing commitment to design excellence may have its roots in a college course Steve Jobs took decades ago. Jobs audited a calligraphy class at Reed College (having officially dropped out after one semester). He became interested in the importance of attractive lettering, and has later said that if he had never taken the calligraphy class, "the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no personal computer would have them."2. Steve Jobs says he dropped out of Reed College not for academic reasons but because the tuition was too expensive for his working-class parents and he was disinterested with the required courses. Instead, he opted to sit in on courses that stirred a passion within him. He calls dropping out of college one of the best decisions he ever made.
3. Steve Jobs' sister is author Mona Simpson, who wrote the novel Anywhere But Here, which became a film starring Natalie Portman and Susan Sarandon. A later book by Mona Simpson, A Regular Guy, was a fictionalized portrait of her brother. The book reportedly caused a rift in her close relationship with Steve Jobs.
4. A power struggle within Apple led to Steve Jobs' exit in 1985, and he reportedly sold all his Apple stock but one symbolic share. He soon formed NeXT Software Inc. to market high-end networking computer workstations to schools and businesses. Apple sued NeXT to prevent Jobs' insider information at Apple to give NeXT a competitive edge over Apple, but that suit was later dismissed.
5. Though often overlooked, Steve Jobs' vision for and accomplishments at NeXT helped usher in a new era in computing, allowing for complex tasks to be handled by networked computer workstations in educational and corporate settings. While sales were never high, NeXT computers had influential advocates who used them to forever change how we use computers for information and entertainment. Tim Berners-Lee, considered a father of the Wold Wide Web, built the very first web server on a NeXT computer, and id Software founder John Carmack programmed Doom and Wolfenstein 3D on NeXT boxes.
6. Steve Jobs is widely known to hate corporate culture, but he actually put his ideals into practice at NeXT after bureaucratic battles within Apple left him committed to change how his next workplace operated. Instead of employees, NeXT had team members, and a flat salary structure ($75,000 annual pay for first hires, $50,000 for subsequent waves).
7. Despite the multiple lawsuits Apple Records have pursued against Apple Computer, Steve Jobs is a major Beatles fan. Rumors have described Jobs as intimately involved in discussions with Apple Records to bring the Beatles catalog to the iTunes store.
8. Steve Jobs is a pescetarian, meaning he eats fish but no meat.
9. Steve Jobs credits his father and an early neighbor for inspiring his passion for building things and working with electronics. When Jobs was around six years old, his mechanic father cleared one end of his workbench for the young Steve to tinker on his own projects. Shortly after, a Hewlett Packard employee named Larry Lang moved in down the street and got to know the neighbor kids by teaching them about electronics. Jobs was mesmerized and his fascination continued through high school until he got a summer job at HP with friend Steve Wozniak. A few years later, Jobs and Wozniak formed Apple and the rest is history.
10. A scare with cancer (diagnosed with but undergoing successful surgery for pancreatic cancer in 2004), along with a lifelong belief to live every day as if it were his last, has influenced all of Steve Jobs' major decisions. "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."
Sources: #1,2 and #10 - Steve Jobs commencement speech at Stanford University, 2005; #3 - The Second Coming of Steve Jobs by Alan Deutschman; #5 - Steve Jobs and the NeXT Big Thing by Randall Stross; #9 - 1995 Steve Jobs interview with Daniel Morrow, Executive Director, The Computerworld Smithsonian Awards Program; other information: Wikipedia.
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