Steve Jobs: Life of a Visionary!

Saad Riaz Qazi
Technology Writer, SAM Daily Times

Steve Paul Jobs fought with cancer and other health complications but sadly, in the end, he was unable to overcome his diseases. However he left behind a great legacy of such technology that shifted the course of human advancement in amazing ways. He founded a company, a culture that promised to continue his passionate work to make gadgets that aren’t just intuitive but aspire to be amazingly great.

Steve Jobs who was raised by adopted parents Paul and Clara in Palo Alto attended his high school in a nearby town, Cupertino. He worked at Hewlett Packard as a summer intern. There he was accompanied by Steve Wozniak.

He attended classes in Portland and Oregon’s Reed College. After doing so he travelled, on a spiritual retreat, through India. He then returned to his home, to a place which later became recognized as the Silicon Valley, to work for the video game makers, Atari. Here too he was accompanied by Wozniak.

In an address at Stanford, Jobs described his college experience. He recommended others to follow their intuition and passionately purse personal I interests. There he told the people that the reason, computers of today support advance typography is that he had attended calligraphy classes.

Jobs said "Believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart even when it leads you off the well-worn path. And that will make all the difference."

At the age of 21 jobs started working with Wozniak to incorporate Apple Computers. It was an effort to sell single boarded home computers, designed by Wozniak, to programmers. While Jobs was focused on selling the easy to use computers to the general public, Wozniak kept his focus on the technical details.

After the release of the Apple II system, this had an inbuilt keyboard and supported sound cards and video and disk storage. Apple Inc. started gaining attention as a popular and highly regarded computer maker.

Steve Jobs Got Weaker and Weaker!

Despite being young and lacking formal university education, Jobs started hiring experienced people to help him run the exploding business. Among many, there is the name of Mike Scott who served as the initial chief executive of Apple.

In the dawn of the 1980 Jobs started to look further than just 8 bit text based computers. Xerox, that was exploring the future of technology, neighbored the PARC. Jobs signed an agreement with them which allowed Xerox to invest in Apple Inc. in exchange of Apple’s engineers visiting and collaborating with PARC researchers to bring the Xerox technology to the general public.

Bill Gates and Steve Jobs

Besides Jobs there were other people too who recognized the worth of the work being done at PARC. However it was only Jobs vision that saw the potential application of the graphical desktop metaphors, and while doing so he ignored technical boundaries which made those technologies very expensive for the people at that time, that allowed Apple to get a 10 year head start in launching the computers that supported the graphical interface and that could be used by non-technical as well as professional users.