I will be taking you down an exciting lane of people who were crazy to believe they could change the world, and guess what? They DID.
STEVE JOBS (1955- 2011)
Born: February 24, 1955 in San Francisco, California, Steven Jobs was born February 24, 1955, in San Francisco, California, and was adopted by Paul and Clara Jobs. He grew up with one sister, Patty. Paul Jobs was a machinist and fixed cars as a hobby. Jobs remembers his father as being very skilled at working with his hands.
After graduating from high school in 1972, Jobs attended Reed College in Portland, Oregon, for two years. He dropped out after one semester to visit India and study eastern religions in the summer of 1974. In 1975 Jobs joined a group known as the Homebrew Computer Club. One member, a technical whiz named Steve Wozniak (1950–), was trying to build a small computer. Jobs became fascinated with the marketing potential of such a computer. In 1976 he and Wozniak formed their own company. They called it Apple Computer Company, in memory of a happy summer Jobs had spent picking apples. They raised $1,300 in startup money by selling Jobs’s microbus and Wozniak’s calculator.
SO HOW DID STEVE JOBS REALLY CHANGE THE WORLD?
♣ He made PCs before they were PCs.
The first Mac computers were known as PCs, because they were computers designed to be used by individuals in their homes, something that wasn’t really possible before. And the one PCs that managed to do that was Apple II and was the first widely successful PC. Today’s computers may be classified as PC or Mac, but they all evolved from the original PC prototype and that is why we have to thank Steve Jobs for that.
♣ He made computers simple.
Jobs had realized there was a huge gap in the computer market. At that time almost all computers were mainframes. They were so large that one could fill a room, and so costly that individuals could not afford to buy them. Advances in electronics, however, meant that computer components were getting smaller and the power of the computer was increasing.
Main Frame
Jobs and Wozniak redesigned their computer, with the idea of selling it to individual users. The Apple II went to market in 1977, with impressive first year sales of $2.7 million.
The company’s sales grew to $200 million within three years. This was one of the most phenomenal cases of corporate growth in U.S. history. Jobs and Wozniak had opened an entirely new market personal computers. Personal computers began an entirely new way of processing information
♣ He made advertising innovative.
Dare to take risks and think outside the norm. In a famous commercial that ran during the Super Bowl, which costed Steve Jobs a lot of money and was really a risky move, an athlete runs into a room straight out of a dystopian novel and throws a hammer at a projector screen full of propaganda, and then the screen reads, On January 24, Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh. And you’ll see why 1984 won’t be like ‘1984.’ Steve Jobs was known for putting a lot of resources and money in his ads, and that’s why Apple always <!–nextpage–>had the best ads. Guess what? The advert changed Apple forever.
He turned technology into art.
You cant probably compare other products designs to Apple’s products. Simplicity and artistic design has been the watch word for Steve Jobs. Before Steve Jobs showed up, no one had thought to combine so many things computers, music players, phones into the same company. NO one imagined a phone without buttons. Steve did with the master stroke Iphone. And the rest they say is history. Also In 1984 Apple introduced a revolutionary new model, the Macintosh. The on-screen display had small pictures called icons. To use the computer, the user pointed at an icon and clicked a button using a new device called a mouse. This process made the Macintosh very easy to use.
Worthy to note that Jobs said, “The thing that drives me and my colleagues … is that you see something very compelling to you, and you don’t quite know how to get it, but you know, sometimes intuitively, it’s within your grasp. And it’s worth putting in years of your life to make it come into existence.”
The Macintosh, The iPod, the iPhone, the iPad, the iMac all of them had something unique that was ahead of their time.
Jobs worked hard to translate his ideas into exciting and innovative products for businesses and consumers. He was instrumental in launching the age of the personal computer. Steve Jobs is truly a computer industry visionary.
Hope you enjoyed this piece. Kindly share if you did.
The Ezera room 