Caique Silva
History & Structure of The Internet
Steve Jobs
Introduction:
Steve Jobs was born in February 24, 1955 in San Francisco, California and was adopted by Paul and Clara Jobs. Paul Jobs was a machinist and fixed cars as a hobby. In 1961 they moved to Mountain View, California. This area just south of Palo Alto, California was becoming a centre for electronics. Electronics from the basic elements of devices such as radios, television, stereos and computers. At that time people started to refer the area as ''Silicon Valley''. This is because a substance called Silicon is used in the manufacturing of electronics parts.
Jobs joined in the Hewlett-Packard Explorer Club. There he saw engineers demonstrate new products and he saw his first computer at the age of twelve. He was impressed and knew right after that he wanted to work with computers. After graduation from high school in 1972, Jobs attended Red College in Portland, Oregon for two years. He dropped out after one semester. Jobs joined a group known as the Homebrew Computer Club. One member of the group was Steve Wozniak, he was trying to build a small computer. Jobs was fascinated with the marketing potential of his computer. In 1976, Jobs and Wozniak formed their own company. They called the company Apple Computer Company. They raised $1,300 in the start up money by selling Jobs's microbus and Wozniak's calculator. At first they sold circuit boards while they worked on the computer sample.
Discussion:
Wozniak was an electronics lover, he absolutely loved making gadgets and then showing his inventions with anyone who was interested , without concern for profits. It was Jobs who soon saw Wozniak's potential of making a lot of money with his circuit board combined with the microprocessor chips. In 1975 Jobs and Wozniak became partners and Jobs gave their company name ''Apple''. They designed their simple computer in Jobs's bedroom. When they need more space, Jobs's father would clean out the garage where Jobs and Wozniak worked together their combination of a circuit board, a microprocessor, a video screen and a typewriter style keyboard. They called it Apple I.
Jobs found a local electronics store owner who wanted 50 personal computers to sell to college students, who were also electronics lovers. Jobs and Wozniak gave the Apple I computer the price of $666.66 and ended up selling more than 600 of them, making $774,000. The Apple I computer was a hobbyist's machine, a clumsy looking beast of wires and boards that invented Tinkering. In 1977 the former Intel executive Mike Markkula invested in Apple becoming its chairman of the board and bringing outsiders to help govern the company. Jobs persuaded a successful publicist Regis McKenna to join Apple. That year Apple II was introduced. It took only about four hours for a purchaser to set it up and have it running and it could run some business programs reducing to minutes from hours certain accounting tasks with a sales campaign by McKenna and Jobs own personality helping persuade corporate buyers and the Apple II became the first successful mass market personal computer. In December 1980 Apple had its initial public public offering of stock, becoming Apple computer. Shares opened at $22 but it increased to $29 making Apple's value $1.2 billion. Jobs was the company's shareholder with his 15 per cent of the stock, his shares were soon worth $239 million. In 1980 the Apple III was introduced but the first 14,000 units were recalled to be cause of defects. The Apple II remained the preferred by costumers. In 1981 IBM introduced a personal computer. Apple made all their computers proprietary, not allowing anyone to even license the technology, but IBM made their machines an open architecture meaning that outsiders were welcome to write programs for it and build their own variations for it. A striking feature of Jobs work over the next few years was that he had no official corporate authority. In 1982 Apple for the first time grossed $ 1 billion.
In 1983 the Lisa computer was introduced. It had a 32-bit microprocessor as well and an inexpensive mouse. Jobs worked on Lisa obsessively demanding hat it be easy to use, attractive to look at and more powerful than any other personal computer. However Jobs set Lisa's price to high. The computer was too expensive and flopped. Still Jobs and Sculley already had put Apple to work developing machine that would be similar as Lisa, but it would be simpler. In 1984 the computer debuted with a spectacular television commercial during the superbowl showing a beautiful athlete woman defying a monolithic, oppressive government by hitting her hammer into a screen that represented IBM. The first Macintosh was small and beige featuring the style of graphical interface that would become the world's standard. It was sold for $ 2,495 and it was successful. In 1988 after Steve Jobs left Apple, he hired some of his former employees to begin a new company called NeXT. Late 1988 the NeXT computer was introduced at a large fancy event in San Francisco aimed at the education market. The products were very user friendly and had a fast processing speed, excellent graphics displays and an outstanding sound system. However the NeXT machine never caught on. It was too expensive, had a black and white screen screen and could not be linked to other computers or run common software. In December Apple bought NeXT software for $ 400 million. Jobs came back to Apple as a part-time consultant to the CEO. The following year Apple entered into a partnership with their competitor Microsoft. The two companies agreed to cooperate on several sales and technology fronts. In the next six years Apple would introduce lots of new products. In 2000 Jobs revealed Apple's new internet strategy which included a group Macintosh-only strategy based applications. In 2001 Jobs started opening lots of Apple stores where the costumers could try out the computers making multimedia and also playing with the software. It was a brilliant idea to let the people use the Apple's good because they would find the products worth more than the other brands. In 2001 Apple introduced the iPod. The iPod was expensive costing $399 but Apple had $41 million to fall back on. Jobs persuaded all major record company to sell Apple rights to market their songs on the Internet and by 2004 iPod was the world's dominant portable music player.
Conclusion:
Steve Jobs has contributed so much in the electronic world, he helped and probably started the era of personal computers. He is still contributing to this day. In the past few years Steve Jobs has introduced the newest technologies in the world, he introduced the iPod, the iPhone, the Macbook and his lasted invention the iPad which is one of the greatest invention that the world of technology has seen. Steve jobs with no doubt is one of the greatest CEO to ever come along.
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