As it remains fairly clear and close at hand might we begin to filter the reality of Steve Jobs untimely death. He was in fact a truly remarkable human being.

Might we stop here for a second? I have a need to express my intolerance for pop hero worship, pedestal pushing (Peddle Pushers) and the whole sale resident evil fan maker machinery. The so called US press has had cart blanch at any personage or celebrity to print carefully constructed truisms into lies. They have gone so far as to feed addicted Rockers enough drugs to squeeze out an incident worth printing. Rolling Stone and the “Rock and Roll Public Relations Megalith” are the most egregious offenders running their stars through the hoops of Hill and Dale tied to the tail of a beached Whale currently at rest with in an amply spaced living room. Far better to be stepping over Elephant fecal matter. Whales have a very slow metabolism thus it could be months maybe years before our kindred spirit let it blow. Considering what goes in and out of that hole we may want to re-evaluate our affinity toward a creature we have certain compatibility drawbacks requiring deeper psycho analysis and ultimately humiliation. I do not advocate a wholesale holocaust of these worthy creatures. Live and let live. However live and let live out of range.

I am checking in here because I feel a most relevant kinship to a man I only meet briefly across the room in the foyer of the offices at Macromedia. (Now eaten and merged with Adobe) Later I sat in the front row of the Macromedia Auditorium where Steve captured his audience with the ease of a converted saint and the power of a destiny coming of age. What I saw was a man laying before us our providence, and his kismet. He did so with such comfort that even the most avid nay sayers were evolving without so much as a nervous cough. I am grateful to have had the opportunity to share the planet with the aforementioned people. All of whom have had a direct impact on my life.

I have lived long enough to have experienced the loss of men and women who had the distinction of being bigger than life, who by their by work and their nature impacted this nation and world in ways yet to be understood. My first conscious experience with the loss of a major figure of prominence came with the assignation of John F. Kennedy. It was the beginning of my sophomore  year at Bishop Manogue Catholic High School in Reno Nevada.

The tragedy was unfolding in Dallas Texas on November, the 22nd to be exact, nineteen sixty-three at 12:30 p.m.  The announcement came across the intercom to all disparate rooms holding class.  The result was developing upon a nation muttering and convulsing as the unthinkable was impressing upon us an intolerable reality.  It was all three national networks sputtering out information as it arrived on two of three TV’s operating within the  concrete walls in the encampment of a catholic parochial high school in Reno, Nevada. Kennedy had not been pronounced dead twelve thirty local time as the drama was being played out in Dallas.

I remember the experience as being evocative with a heat that made me uncomfortably warm from the inside out. I felt my nerves squealing and my perceptions had become acute like a world class athlete who was getting ready for an important race. The only valid news was that JFK had been shot. Shooting a president was absurdly surreal.  My first impression was based in denial. I pictured Kennedy being carted off on a Hollywood hospital stretcher, smooth, not a wrinkle as was his constant demeanor. The president’s superficial wounds would be tended to in time for reassurances by the six O'clock news.

The next weeks even months was a constant replay of a bad dream in sustained repetition, The Dallas airport landing, the slow turn onto Daily Plaza, the Zapruder film replaying onto infinity,  Jacqueline Kennedy climbing on the back of the presidential convertible picking up pieces of the victims scull, later the Oswald interviews fading to the “reality show” of Jack Ruby shooting the supposed assassin on prime time TV. The electronic coverage was unprecedented. Not sense Nine Eleven has there been such relentless coverage for a news event. It was the bane that kept on giving.

The years that followed was as if we were living in a third world nation amidst unreasonable political turmoil that had been hiding in our closets for hundreds of years. It was the beginning of the sixties and violent reaction was in the air. The country was prospering economically but was blundering it’s way through international relations by getting mired in a civil war in Vietnam and by our inability to deal logically with Castro and the island of Cuba. Our position in eastern Europe was a spy versus spy calamity and on the home front we were facing racial turmoil that was wrapped sealed and delivered by our practice of nation building using incarcerated slave labor from the indigenous people of Africa. Thanks to the courage of Martin Luther King and the brother of an assassinated president, Bobby Kennedy, we were being reminded that change was the course and racism would no longer be tolerated.   

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                With in this climate the countries youth, who were raised on peanut butter, jelly and animated Disney Justice, was at a cross roads. In Disneyland good always prevailed. The baby boomers were resisting the traditional government and cultural suppression of the truth. The hypocrisies of right wing politics had imposed upon our nation constraints and social conventions that were no longer acceptable. The draft was under duress as our nation had to fill the roles of young men needed to fight a war few supported. This too was unprecedented. Never before or sense have the young men of our nation refused its call to arms. Never before have the youth of our nation refused to bend to.

“The Point Of All This Is Steve Jobs, His Vision And His Kismet.”

In a Siddhattha-esque journey Steve went to India in search of enlightenment.

He came back a Buddhist. He also experimented with psychedelics as a means toward spiritual illumination. Steve would expound, “This was one of the two

or three most important things I had done in my life.”

He later proposed people around him who did not share his countercultural roots could not fully understand his thinking. The rest is a most amazing history. Steve has done more to change the world as we know it, surpassing the influences of such leaders as John and Bobby Kennedy, Martin Luther King and John Lennon. Obviously this is not a foot race. All of these people and many more have impacted these experiences we have partaken in. What is important to note is our presence here on earth has purpose and if we can surrender to the mission great things happen for all of man kind. We are fortunate to have shared the world with the likes of John F. Kennedy, his brother Bobby, and to have been inspired by Martin Luther King, but it has been the profound vision of Steve Jobs and his friend Steve Wozniak who’s development of the personal computer has forever changed how we work and in so doing will forever change who we are, how we see ourselves and how we communicate. For generations to come we’ll be adjusting to what Steve and Steve have wrought.

As with many of the people I have discussed there has been an assassin lurking in a dark corner of Steve’s life. This evil has taken the best and worst of us. It kills to placate it’s insatiable appetite. It lacks humane logical motivations but it is not short on resolve. Once again another is taken.

Steven Paul Jobs
Steven Paul Jobs February 24, 1955 – October 5, 2011) was an American businessman and inventor widely recognized as a charismatic pioneer of the personal computer revolution. He was co-founder, chairman, and chief executive officer of Apple Inc. Jobs was co-founder and previously served as chief executive of Pixar Animation Studios; he became a member of the board of directors of The Walt Disney Company in 2006, following the acquisition of Pixar by Disney.

In the late 1970s, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak engineered one of the first commercially successful lines of personal computers, the Apple II series. Jobs directed its aesthetic design and marketing along with A.C. “Mike” Markkula, Jr. and others.

In the early 1980s, Jobs was among the first to see the commercial potential of Xerox PARC’s mouse-driven graphical user interface, which led to the creation of the Apple Lisa (engineered by Ken Rothmuller and John Couch) and, one year later, of Apple employee Jef Raskin’s Macintosh. After losing a power struggle with the board of directors in 1985, Jobs left Apple and founded NeXT, a computer platform development company specializing in the higher-education and business markets.

In 1986, he acquired the computer graphics division of Lucasfilm Ltd, which was spun off as Pixar Animation Studios. He was credited in Toy Story (1995) as an executive producer. He remained CEO and majority shareholder at 50.1 percent until its acquisition by The Walt Disney Company in 2006, making Jobs Disney’s largest individual shareholder at seven percent and a member of Disney’s Board of Directors. Apple’s 1996 buyout of NeXT brought Jobs back to the company he co-founded, and he served as its interim CEO from 1997, then becoming permanent CEO from 2000, onwards, spearheading the advent of the iMac, iTunes, iPod, iPhone, and iPad. In buying NeXT, Apple also “acquire[d] the operating system that became Mac OS X.” From 2003, Jobs fought an eight-year battle with cancer, and eventually resigned as CEO in August 2011, while on his third medical leave. He was then elected chairman of Apple’s board of directors.

On October 5, 2011, around 3:00 p.m., Jobs died at his home in Palo Alto, California, aged 56, six weeks after resigning as CEO of Apple. A copy of his death certificate indicated respiratory arrest as the immediate cause of death, with “metastatic pancreas neuroendocrine tumor” as the underlying cause. His occupation was listed as “entrepreneur” in the “high tech” business.

Early Life And Education

Steven Paul Jobs was born in San Francisco on 24 February 1955, to two university students, Joanne Carole Schieble and Syrian born Abdulfattah “John” Jandali, whom were both unmarried at the time. Adopted at birth by Paul Reinhold Jobs (1922–1993) and Clara Jobs (1924–1986). Clara’s maiden name was Hagopian. When asked about his “adoptive parents,” Jobs replied emphatically that Paul and Clara Jobs “were my parents.” He later stated in his authorized biography that they “were my parents 1,000%.”

The Jobs family moved from San Francisco to Mountain View, California when Steve was five years old. Paul and Clara later adopted a daughter, Patti. Paul Jobs, a machinist for a company that made lasers, taught his son rudimentary electronics and how to work with his hands. Clara was an accountant, who taught him to read before he went to school. Clara Jobs had been a payroll clerk for Varian Associates, one of the first high-tech firms in what became known as Silicon Valley. Asked in a 1995 interview what he wanted to pass on to his children, Jobs replied, “Just to try to be as good a father to them as my father was to me. I think about that every day of my life.”

Jobs attended Monta Loma Elementary, Mountain View, Cupertino Junior High and Homestead High School in Cupertino, California. He frequented after-school lectures at the Hewlett-Packard Company in Palo Alto, California, and was later hired there, working with Steve Wozniak as a summer employee. Following high school graduation in 1972, Jobs enrolled at Reed College in Portland, Oregon. Although he dropped out after only one semester, he continued auditing classes at Reed, while sleeping on the floor in friends’ rooms, returning Coke bottles for food money, and getting weekly free meals at the local Hare Krishna temple. Jobs later said, “If I had never dropped in on that single calligraphy course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts.”

Early Career

In 1974, Jobs took a job as a technician at Atari, Inc. in Los Gatos, California. He traveled to India in the summer of 1974 to visit Neem Karoli Baba at his Kainchi Ashram with a Reed College friend (and, later, an early Apple employee), Daniel Kottke, in search of spiritual enlightenment. However, when they got to the Neem Karoli ashram, it was basically deserted after Neem Karoli had died earlier in the year. Then they made a long trek up a huge dry riverbed to an ashram of Hariakhan Baba. In India, they spent a lot of time on endless bus rides from Delhi to Uttar Pradesh and back, then up to Himachal Pradesh and back.

Jobs left India after staying for seven months and returned to the US ahead of Daniel Kottke, with his head shaved and wearing traditional Indian clothing. During this time, Jobs experimented with psychedelics, calling his LSD experiences “one of the two or three most important things [he had] done in [his] life”. He later said that people around him who did not share his countercultural roots could not fully relate to his thinking.

Jobs returned to Atari and was assigned to create a circuit board for the game Breakout. According to Atari co-founder Nolan Bushnell, Atari offered $100 for each chip that was eliminated in the machine. Jobs had little interest in or knowledge of circuit board design and made a deal with Wozniak to split the fee evenly between them if Wozniak could minimize the number of chips. Much to the amazement of Atari, Wozniak reduced the number of chips by 50, a design so tight that it was impossible to reproduce on an assembly line. According to Wozniak, Jobs told Wozniak that Atari gave them only $700 (instead of the offered $5,000) and that Wozniak’s share was thus $350. Wozniak didn’t learn about the bonus until about ten years later, but said that had Jobs told him about it and said he needed the money, Wozniak would have given it to him.

Jobs began attending meetings of the Homebrew Computer Club with Wozniak in 1975. He greatly admired Edwin H. Land, the inventor of instant photography and founder of Polaroid Corporation, and explicitly modeled his career after him.

It was the home of Paul and Clara Jobs, on Crist Drive in Los Altos, California. Steve Jobs formed Apple Computer in its garage with Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne in 1976. Wayne stayed only a short time, leaving Jobs and Wozniak as the primary co-founders of the company. Jobs and Steve Wozniak met in 1971, when their mutual friend, Bill Fernandez, introduced 21-year-old Wozniak to 16-year-old Jobs. In 1976, Wozniak invented the Apple I computer. Jobs, Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne founded Apple computer in the garage of Jobs’s parents in order to sell it.

  

They received funding from a then-semi-retired Intel product-marketing manager and engineer A.C. “Mike” Markkula, Jr. As Apple continued to expand with Wozniak’s next version, the Apple II, the company began looking for an experienced executive to help manage its expansion.

In 1978, Apple recruited Mike Scott from National Semiconductor to serve as CEO for what turned out to be several turbulent years. In 1983, Jobs lured John Sculley away from Pepsi-Cola to serve as Apple’s CEO, asking, “Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life, or do you want to come with me and change the world?” Apple president Mike Markkula also wanted to retire and believed that Jobs lacked the discipline and temperament needed to run Apple on a daily basis and that Sculley’s conventional business background and recent successes would give a more favorable image.

In the early 1980s, Jobs was among the first to see the commercial potential of Xerox PARC’s mouse-driven graphical user interface, which led to the creation of the Apple Lisa. One year later, Apple employee Jef Raskin invented the Macintosh.

The following year, Apple aired a Super Bowl television commercial titled “1984”. At Apple’s annual shareholders meeting on January 24, 1984, an emotional Jobs introduced the Macintosh to a wildly enthusiastic audience; Andy Hertzfeld described the scene as “pandemonium”. The Macintosh became the first commercially successful small computer with a graphical user interface.

While Jobs was a persuasive and charismatic director for Apple, some of his employees from that time described him as an erratic and temperamental manager. An industry-wide sales slump towards the end of 1984 caused a deterioration in Jobs’s working relationship with Sculley, as well as layoffs and disappointing sales performance. An internal power struggle developed between Jobs and Sculley. Jobs kept meetings running past midnight, sent out lengthy faxes, then called new meetings at 7:00 am.

The Apple board of directors instructed Sculley to “contain” Jobs and limit his ability to launch expensive forays into untested products.[citation needed] Sculley learned that Jobs—believing Sculley to be “bad for Apple” and the wrong person to lead the company—had been attempting to organize a boardroom coup, and on May 24, 1985, he called a board meeting to resolve the matter. Apple’s board of directors sided with Sculley and removed Jobs from his managerial duties as head of the Macintosh division. Jobs resigned from Apple five months later and founded NeXT Inc. the same year.

In a speech Jobs gave at Stanford University in 2005, he said being fired from Apple was the best thing that could have happened to him; “The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.” And he added, “I’m pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn’t been fired from Apple. It was awful-tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it.”

NeXT Computer

After leaving Apple, Jobs founded NeXT Computer in 1985, with $7 million. A year later, Jobs was running out of money, and with no product on the horizon, he appealed for venture capital. Eventually, he attracted the attention of billionaire Ross Perot who invested heavily in the company. NeXT workstations were first released in 1990, priced at $9,999. Like the Apple Lisa, the NeXT workstation was technologically advanced, but was largely dismissed as cost-prohibitive by the educational sector for which it was designed. The NeXT workstation was known for its technical strengths, chief among them its object-oriented software development system. Jobs marketed NeXT products to the financial, scientific, and academic community, highlighting its innovative, experimental new technologies, such as the Mach kernel, the digital signal processor chip, and the built-in Ethernet port. Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web on a NeXT computer at CERN.

Therevised, second-generation NeXTcube was released in 1990, also. Jobs touted it as the first “interpersonal” computer that would replace the personal computer. With its innovative NeXTMail multimedia email system, NeXTcube could share voice, image, graphics, and video in email for the first time. “Interpersonal computing is going to revolutionise human communications and groupwork”, Jobs told reporters. Jobs ran NeXT with an obsession for aesthetic perfection, as evidenced by the development of and attention to NeXTcube’s magnesium case. This put considerable strain on NeXT’s hardware division, and in 1993, after having sold only 50,000 machines, NeXT transitioned fully to software development with the release of NeXTSTEP/Intel. The company reported its first profit of $1.03 million in 1994. In 1996, NeXT Software, Inc. released WebObjects, a framework for Web application development. After NeXT was acquired by Apple Inc. in 1997, WebObjects was used to build and run the Apple Store, MobileMe services, and the iTunes Store.

Pixar And Disney

Disney would co-finance and distribute. The first film produced by the partnership, Toy Story, with Jobs credited as executive producer, brought fame and critical acclaim to the studio when it was released in 1995. Over the next 15 years, under Pixar’s creative chief John Lasseter, the company produced box-office hits A Bug’s Life (1998); Toy Story 2 (1999); Monsters, Inc. (2001); Finding Nemo (2003); The Incredibles (2004); Cars (2006); Ratatouille (2007); WALL-E (2008); Up (2009); and Toy Story 3 (2010). Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, Ratatouille, WALL-E, Up and Toy Story 3 each received the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, an award introduced in 2001.

Steve sat on the board of Disney Inc.

Monsters inc. star Billy Crystal played

a one eyed Michael "Mike" Wazowski. 

In the years 2003 and 2004, as Pixar’s contract with Disney was running out, Jobs and Disney chief executive Michael Eisner tried but failed to negotiate a new partnership, and in early 2004, Jobs announced that Pixar would seek a new partner to distribute its films after its contract with Disney expired.

In October 2005, Bob Iger replaced Eisner at Disney, and Iger quickly worked to patch up relations with Jobs and Pixar. On January 24, 2006, Jobs and Iger announced that Disney had agreed to purchase Pixar in an all-stock transaction worth $7.4 billion. When the deal closed, Jobs became The Walt Disney Company’s largest single shareholder with approximately seven percent of the company’s stock. Jobs’s holdings in Disney far exceeded those of Eisner, who holds 1.7 percent, and of Disney family member Roy E. Disney, who until his 2009 death held about one percent of the company’s stock and whose criticisms of Eisner — especially that he soured Disney’s relationship with Pixar — accelerated Eisner’s ousting. Jobs joined the company’s board of directors upon completion of the merger and also helped oversee Disney and Pixar’s combined animation businesses with a seat on a special six-person steering committee.

Return To Apple

In 1996, Apple announced that it would buy NeXT for $429 million. The deal was finalized in late 1996, bringing Jobs back to the company he co-founded. Jobs became de facto chief after then-CEO Gil Amelio was ousted in July 1997.

The company subsequently branched out, introducing and improving upon other digital appliances. With the introduction of the iPod portable music player, iTunes digital music software, and the iTunes Store, the company made forays into consumer electronics and music distribution. On June 29, 2007, Apple entered the cellular phone business with the introduction of the iPhone, a multi-touch display cell phone, which also included the features of an iPod and, with its own mobile browser, revolutionized the mobile browsing scene. While stimulating innovation, Jobs also reminded his employees that “real artists ship”

Resignation

In August 2011, Jobs resigned as CEO of Apple, but remained with the company as chairman of the company’s board. Hours after the announcement, Apple Inc. (AAPL) shares dropped five percent in after-hours trading. This relatively small drop, when considering the importance of Jobs to Apple, was associated with the fact that his health had been in the news for several years, and he had been on medical leave since January 2011. It was believed, according to Forbes, that the impact would be felt in a negative way beyond Apple, including at The Walt Disney Company where Jobs served as director. In after-hours trading on the day of the announcement, Walt Disney Co. (DIS) shares dropped 1.5 percent.

Management Style

Jobs was a demanding perfectionist who always aspired to position his businesses and their products at the forefront of the information technology industry by foreseeing and setting trends, at least in innovation and style.

He summed up that self-concept at the end of his keynote speech at the Macworld Conference and Expo in January 2007, by quoting ice hockey player Wayne Gretzky:

   

Steve Jobs was not only a masterful motivator. In spite of the tales of being a demanding perfectionist and difficult to work with, he was one of the most trusted CEO’s this country has ever experienced.There’s an old Wayne Gretzky quote that I love. “I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.” And we’ve always tried to do that at Apple. Since the very very beginning. And we always will.

Much was made of Jobs’s aggressive and demanding personality. Fortune wrote that he was “considered one of Silicon Valley’s leading egomaniacs”. Commentaries on his temperamental style can be found in Michael Moritz’s The Little Kingdom, The Second Coming of Steve Jobs, by Alan Deutschman; and iCon: Steve Jobs, by Jeffrey S. Young & William L. Simon. In 1993, Jobs made Fortune’s list of America’s Toughest Bosses in regard to his leadership of NeXT. NeXT Cofounder Dan’l Lewin was quoted in Fortune as saying of that period, “The highs were unbelievable … But the lows were unimaginable”, to which Jobs’s office replied that his personality had changed since then.

In 2005, Jobs banned all books published by John Wiley & Sons from Apple Stores in response to their publishing an unauthorized biography, iCon: Steve Jobs. In its 2010 annual earnings report, Wiley said it had “closed a deal … to make its titles available for the iPad.” Jef Raskin, a former colleague, once said that Jobs “would have made an excellent king of France”, alluding to Jobs’s compelling and larger-than-life persona. Floyd Norman said that at Pixar, Jobs was a “mature, mellow individual” and never interfered with the creative process of the filmmakers.

Jobs had a public war of words with Dell Computer CEO Michael Dell, starting when Jobs first criticized Dell for making “un-innovative beige boxes”. On October 6, 1997, in a Gartner Symposium, when Michael Dell was asked what he would do if he owned then-troubled Apple Computer, he said “I’d shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders.” In 2006, Jobs sent an email to all employees when Apple’s market capitalization rose above Dell’s. The email read: Team, it turned out that Michael Dell wasn’t perfect at predicting the future. Based on today’s stock market close, Apple is worth more than Dell. Stocks go up and down, and things may be different tomorrow, but I thought it was worth a moment of reflection today. Steve.

Personal Life

Jobs’s birth parents met at the University of Wisconsin. Abdulfattah “John” Jandali, a Syrian Muslim, taught there. Joanne Carole Schieble was his student; however, they were the same age because Jandali had “gotten his PhD really young.”  Schieble had a career as a speech language pathologist. Jandali taught political science at the University of Nevada in the 1960s, and then made his career

In her Eulogy Steve’s Sister spoke from the heart. “As a feminist, my whole life I’d been waiting for a man to love, who could love me. For decades, I’d thought that man would be my father. When I was 25, I met that man. He was my brother.

Mona Simpson in the food and beverage industry, and since 2006, has been a vice president at a casino in Reno, Nevada. In December 1955, ten months after giving up their baby boy, Schieble and Jandali married. In 1957, they had a daughter Mona together. They divorced in 1962, and Jandali lost touch with his daughter. Her mother remarried and had Mona take the surname of her stepfather, so she became known as Mona Simpson. In the 1980s, Jobs found his birth mother, Joanne Schieble Simpson, who told him he had a biological sister, Mona Simpson. They met for the first time in 1985 and became close friends. The siblings kept their relationship secret until 1986, when Mona introduced him at a party for her first book.

After deciding to search for their father, Simpson found Jandali managing a coffee shop. Without knowing who his son had become, Jandali told Mona that he had previously managed a popular restaurant in the Silicon Valley where “Even Steve Jobs used to eat there. Yeah, he was a great tipper.” In a taped interview with his biographer Walter Isaacson, aired on 60 Minutes, Jobs said: “When I was looking for my biological mother, obviously, you know, I was looking for my biological father at the same time, and I learned a little bit about him and I didn’t like what I learned. I asked her to not tell him that we ever met…not tell him anything about me.” Jobs was in occasional touch with his mother Joanne Simpson, who lives in a nursing home in Los Angeles. When speaking about his biological parents, Jobs stated: “They were my sperm and egg bank. That’s not harsh, it’s just the way it was, a sperm bank thing, nothing more.” Jandali stated in an interview with the The Sun in August 2011, that his efforts to contact Jobs were unsuccessful. Jandali mailed in his medical history after Jobs’s pancreatic disorder was made public that year.

In her eulogy to Jobs at his memorial service, Mona Simpson stated: I grew up as an only child, with a single mother. Because we were poor and because I knew my father had emigrated from Syria, I imagined he looked like Omar Sharif. I hoped he would be rich and kind and would come into our lives (and our not yet furnished apartment) and help us. Later, after I’d met my father, I tried to believe he’d changed his number and left no forwarding address because he was an idealistic revolutionary, plotting a new world for the Arab people. Even as a feminist, my whole life I’d been waiting for a man to love, who could love me. For decades, I’d thought that man would be my father. When I was 25, I met that man and he was my brother.

Jobs’s first child, Lisa Brennan-Jobs, was born in 1978, the daughter of his longtime partner Chris Ann Brennan, a Bay Area painter. For two years, she raised their daughter on welfare while Jobs denied paternity by claiming he was sterile; he later acknowledged Lisa as his daughter. Jobs later married Laurene Powell on March 18, 1991, in a ceremony at the Ahwahnee Hotel in Yosemite National Park. Presiding over the wedding was Kobun Chino Otogawa, a Zen Buddhist monk. Their son, Reed, was born September 1991, followed by daughters Erin in August 1995, and Eve in 1998. The family lives in Palo Alto, California.

In the unauthorized biography, The Second Coming of Steve Jobs, author Alan Deutschman reports that Jobs once dated Joan Baez. Deutschman quotes Elizabeth Holmes, a friend of Jobs from his time at Reed College, as saying she “believed that Steve became the lover of Joan Baez in large measure because Baez had been the lover of Bob Dylan” (Dylan was the Apple icon’s favorite musician). In another unauthorized biography, iCon: Steve Jobs by Jeffrey S. Young & William L. Simon, the authors suggest that Jobs might have married Baez, but her age at the time (41) meant it was unlikely the couple could have children.

Jobs was also a fan of The Beatles. He referred to them on multiple occasions at Keynotes and also was interviewed on a showing of a Paul McCartney concert. When asked about his business model on 60 Minutes, he replied: My model for business is The Beatles: They were four guys that kept each other’s negative tendencies in check; they balanced each other. And the total was greater than the sum of the parts. Great things in business are never done by one person, they are done by a team of people.

Health Issues

In October 2003, Jobs was diagnosed with cancer, and in mid-2004, he announced to his employees that he had a cancerous tumor in his pancreas. The prognosis for pancreatic cancer is usually very poor; Jobs stated that he had a rare, far less aggressive type

           

Magazine Cover

A Great Man’s Passing

Memorial candles and iPads to Steve Jobs outside the Apple Store in Palo Alto California shortly after his death Jobs died at his California home around 3 p.m. on October 5, 2011, due to complications from relapse of his previously treated islet-cell neuroendocrine pancreatic cancer, resulting in respiratory arrest. He had lost consciousness the day before, and died with his wife, children and sister at his side.

His death was announced by Apple in a statement which read: 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.

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. Jobs is survived by Laurene, his wife of 20 years, their three children, and Lisa Brennan-Jobs, his daughter from a previous relationship. His family released a statement saying that he “died peacefully”.

According to Simpson, Jobs “looked at his sister Patty, then for a long time at his children, then at his life’s partner, Laurene, and then over their shoulders past them”. His last words, spoken hours before his death, were:

“OH WOW. OH WOW. OH WOW.” (These words were capitalized in The New York Times presentation of his eulogy.)

Honors And Public Recognition

After Apple’s founding, Jobs became a symbol of his company and industry. When Time named the computer as the 1982 “Machine of the Year”, the magazine published a long profile of Jobs as “the most famous maestro of the micro”.

Jobs was awarded the National Medal of Technology by President Ronald Reagan in 1984, with Steve Wozniak (among the first people to ever receive the honor), and a Jefferson Award for Public Service in the category “Greatest Public Service by an Individual 35 Years or Under” (also known as the Samuel S. Beard Award) in 1987. On November 27, 2007, Jobs was named the most powerful person in business by Fortune magazine. On December 5, 2007, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and First Lady Maria Shriver inducted Jobs into the California Hall of Fame, located at The California Museum for History, Women and the Arts.

In August 2009, Jobs was selected as the most admired entrepreneur among teenagers in a survey by Junior Achievement, having previously been named Entrepreneur of the Decade 20 years earlier in 1989, by Inc. magazine. On November 5, 2009, Jobs was named the CEO of the decade by Fortune magazine.