Washington, October 07: Steve Jobs – creative ‘genius’, Apple Co-founder and innovative businessman. These are just some terms the grieving public have tagged to Job’s name.
Tecca.com gives you a closer look into Jobs life with these 8 things that you probably did not know about Steve Jobs:
1. Early life and childhood
Steven Paul Jobs was born in San Francisco on February 24, 1955. He was given away at birth by his mother who wanted him to be adopted by college graduates.
He was supposed to be adopted by a lawyer and his wife who decided at the last minuted that the wanted a girl instead. So Jobs was given to a couple named named Clara and Paul Jobs who lived in California.
His adoptive father – a term that Jobs openly objected to – was a machinist for a laser company and his mother worked as an accountant.
Later in life, Jobs discovered the identities of his biological parents. His estranged father, Abdulfattah John Jandali, is a Syrian Muslim immigrant to the US. He left the country when he was 18 and is presently a vice president of a casino in Reno, Nevada.
His birth mother, Joanne Schieble (later Simpson) was an American graduate student of Swiss and German ancestry and later went on to become a speech language pathologist and eventually married.
While Jobs reconnected with his mother in later years, he and his father remained estranged.
2. College dropout
The brain behind the most successful company in the world never graduated from college. Jobs attended Reed College in Portland, Oregon but dropped out after a single semester.
He told a graduating class of Stanford University that he did not see the value of spending all of his working-class parents’ savings on college tution when he had no idea what he wanted to do with his life.
He continued, however to “drop in” on classes that interested him, including a calligraphy class he cited as the reason Macintosh computers were designed with multiple typefaces.
In the famouse 2005 commencement speech to Stanford University, Jobs said of his time at Reed: “It wasn’t all romantic. I didn’t have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends’ rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5 cent deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the seven miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple.”
3. Lied to his Apple co-founder about a job at entertainment software company Atari
Did you know Jobs played an essential role in making the popular and influential video game ‘Breakout’ created by Atari.
When Jobs was an employee of Atari he was tasked with creating a circuit board for the game. He was offered $100 for each chip that was eliminated from the game’s final design.
Since Jobs had little knowledge of or interest in circuit board design he struck a deal with Apple co-founder and friend, Steve Wozniak. They were to split the bonus evenly between the two of the, if Wozniak could minimize the number of chips.
Wozniak reduced it by 50 chips which resulted in a $5,000 bonus. But according to Wozniak’s own autobiography, Jobs told Wozniak that Atari had given them only $700 and that Wozniak’s share was therefore $350.