Steve Jobs, founder of the Apple Group died on 5 October 2011 at the age of 56. His estate is estimated to be around $17 billion dollars, could he ever have dreamed that he would achieve such success?
Who knows? Anyway, Steve was born in San Francisco as the illegitimate son of an American graduate student, his father was a Muslim immigrant from Syria. His parents were later to marry and have a daughter but Steve was adopted before they did. His adoptive parents were Armenians.
His interest in technology was evident at High School where he went to after school lectures with Hewlett-Packard who gave him and his school buddy Steve Wozniak summer jobs. He later enrolled at Reed College in Oregon but dropped out after the first semester. For a time he was forced to sleep on friends's floors, he got free meals at the local Hare Krishna centre and made some money by selling empty coke bottles. In 1974 he left for California and he and his buddy Wozniak started going to the Homebrew Computer Club. He soon got a job with Atari, the computer game manufacturers, to save money to go to India and he eventually went off there to meet the Neem Karoli Baba with Daniel Kottke who was later to be the first ever Apple employee. Steve returned to the States with his head shaved and wearing traditional Indian clothes, he was now Buddhist. He began to dabble with psychedelic drugs and claimed to have had fantastic experiences using LSD. It was at this time that he stated that only those with his countercultural roots could ever relate to his thinking.
Working at Atari again after his return, Steve was told to create a circuit board for the game Breakout but he had already realised that he had no interest or knowledge of circuit board design.
Any dreams Steve had had were about to materialise when he, Wozniak and another friend Ronald Wayne invented the first PC in a plastic case with coloured graphics in the humble surroundings of a garage in 1976.
The ensuing years have seen him rise to fame, to entreprenuerial global success. In September of this year Apple edged past Exxon Mobile Corp. to become the most valuable company in the US. He reinvented the world's computing, music and mobile phone industries and is being mourned all over the world from Sydney to San Francisco. Steve died a day after the launch of the new iphone 4S model, a final gift from an inspirational genius.
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