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An Unwanted Baby, Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs is a man who has great courage and dares to take risks. He may not be perfect but he pulled together the most fantastic act by overcoming Microsoft, the movie industry and the music business. Jobs followed his dream and led a revolution in the computing world.

Steve Jobs was born on February 24, 1955, in San Francisco, California. His biological mother was an unwed graduate student named Joanne Simpson and decided to put him up for adoption. Joanne had a college education, and she insisted that the future parents of her boy be just as well educated. Unfortunately, the candidates, Paul and Clara Jobs, did not meet her expectations: Clara didn't graduate from college and Paul only attended high school. When she found out that both his future parents had never graduated from college, she refused to sign the adoption papers. She only relented a few months later and agreed to have her baby adopted by them, under the firm condition that they would send him to college.

Steve Jobs went to college but decided to drop out because it was too expensive. Recalling his time there he said, "I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5 cents deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple."

At 20, Steve Jobs and a friend (Steve Wozniak) started a company in a garage on April 1, 1976. Later that year, they debuted the Apple I and a local store offered to buy 50 machines. To finance the production, they had to sell their most expensive possessions. Jobs sold his Volkswagen van while Wozniak sold his Hewlett-Packard scientific calculator. Steve Jobs named their company Apple, in memory of a happy summer he had spent as an orchard worker in Oregon.

By 1982, however, his company sales sagged in the face of competition from IBM's new PC. Not wanting to dwell on successive failures, they worked on a new machine called the Macintosh. By 1986, the Mac, which Steve Jobs promised to be "insanely great," was a huge success. After 10 years, starting from 2 kids working in a garage, Apple computer had grown into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees.

At 30, Steve Jobs, however, was fired from the company he cofounded with Steve Wozniak. He left the company after losing a bitter battle over control with Apple's CEO John Sculley, whom Jobs had recruited from Pepsi Cola. When Steve Jobs heard of the message he said, "You've probably had somebody punch you in the stomach and it knocks the wind out of you and you cannot breathe. The harder you try to breathe, the more you cannot breathe. And you know that the only thing you can do is just relax so you can start breathing again."

Steve Jobs sold over $20 million of his Apple stock, spent days bicycling along the beach, feeling sad and lost, toured Paris, and journeyed on to Italy. Recalling this publicly heartbreaking episode, Jobs said, "I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. 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."

During the next five years he started two companies - NeXT and Pixar. NeXT didn't do as well as Jobs had dreamed for, but Pixar was a success story. Jobs became an instant billionaire. Meanwhile, his old company Apple was under immense pressure from its rival Microsoft and in 1996 posted billions of dollars in losses.

In December 1996, Steve Jobs convinced Apple to buy NeXT and make its software the foundation of the next-generation Mac OS. The technology he developed at NeXT became the catalyst of Apple's comeback. Initially appointed as Apple's adviser, Steve Jobs was named Apple's interim CEO in 1997.

He had made Apple healthy again and returned it to a place where it was contributing new and innovative technologies to the computer world. Under his leadership, Apple returned to profitability and introduced innovations.

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一个被亲生父母抛弃的孩子，史蒂夫·乔布斯

史蒂夫·乔布斯是一个极富伟大勇气的人，他敢于冒险。他可能并不是一个最完美无缺的人，但是他却完成了一个不可思议的伟大之举，那就是攻克了微软、电影产业以及音乐市场。乔布斯追随他的梦想，并引领了计算机行业的大变革。

史蒂夫·乔布斯1955年2月24日生于加利福尼亚州的旧金山。他的生母名叫乔安妮·辛普森，是一位未婚的大学生，因此她决定让别人收养他。乔安妮接受过大学教育，她坚持给他的儿子找的未来的父母也必须受过艮好教育。但是不幸的是，候选的收养者，保罗和克拉拉·乔布斯夫妻，并没有符合她的期望:克拉拉没上过大学，而保罗只上到高中。当乔安妮发现她儿子的未来的父母都不是大学毕业的时候，她拒绝签收养合同。几个月以后，她才勉强同意让他们收养孩子，条件是养父母答应她一定要让他上大学。

史帝夫·乔布斯上了大学，但是由于学费太贵了他决定退学。回想起那段时光，他说道：“我没有了宿舍，所以我只能在朋友房间的地板上睡觉，我去捡可以换5美分的可乐罐，仅为了买些食物来填饱肚子。在星期天的晚晩上,我需要走七英里的路程，穿过这个城市到 Hare Krishna 神庙(注：位于纽约 Brooklyn 中心）,只是为了能吃上顿好饭。”

20 岁时，史蒂夫·乔布斯和他的一个朋友(史蒂夫·沃兹尼亚克）于1976年4月1日在一间车库里开创了他们的公司。同年，他们的新产品“苹果I号”面世，一位当地的经销商订购了 50 台机器。为筹集批量生产的资金，他们不得不卖掉自己的贵重的物品。史蒂夫·乔布斯卖掉揀了自己的大众牌小汽车，同时沃兹尼亚克也卖掉了他的惠普科学计算器。史蒂夫·乔布斯将他们的公司命名为苹果公司，以此来纪念在俄勒冈州当果园工人的那个愉快的夏天。

然而，1982年，面对IBM 新型个人电脑的激烈竞争，他的公司的销售额减少了。不想要接连的失败，他们致力于新机器Macintosh 的开发工作。1986年，正如史蒂夫·乔布斯许诺的“非常伟大”的Mac计得了巨大的成功。10 年之后，这个由2个孩子在一间车库里创建的苹果公司,发展成为了一个拥有超过4000多名员工且资产达 20 亿美元的大公司。

30 岁时，史蒂夫·乔布斯被由他和斯蒂夫·沃兹尼亚克共同创建的公司解雇了。他与约翰～斯库利，这位他从百事可乐公司招聘来做苹果公司的CEO(首席执行官），就控制权问题发生了激烈而不愉快的争论之后，他离开了苹果公司。当史蒂夫·乔布斯看到这条新闻时他说，“你可能被某人打了你肚子一拳，力道很大以至于你不能呼吸。你越努力试着呼吸，你就越不能呼吸。然后你才明白你唯一能做的事情就是休息放松一下再重新呼吸。”

史蒂夫·乔布斯卖出了苹果公司 2000万美元股份，一连好几天都在沿着海滩骑自行车，感受悲伤和失落，他去了巴黎，然后又到意大利旅行。这段令人心碎的往事广为人知。回忆起这段经历，乔布斯说：“我当时并没有意识到，但结果表明，被苹果公司开除，是我遇到的最好的事情。成功者的重压被作为创业者的轻装上阵所重新替代，一切都不是定数。这让我感觉如此自由,并进入我人生中最有创造力的一个阶段。”

在接下来的五年时间里他又创立了两家公司——NeXT 公司以及 Pixar公司(皮克斯电脑动画工作室)NeXT 并没有如乔布斯所希望的那样运营良好，但是皮克斯却获得了成功。乔布斯很快成为亿万富豪。与此同时，他原来的苹果公司却承受着来自对手微软公司的巨大压力，并在1996年宣告亏损了几十亿美元。

1996 年12月,史蒂夫·乔布斯说服苹果公司收购了 NeXT公司,它的软件成为了新一代 Mac OS 系统的基础。他在 NeXT 发展的技术成为苹果公司得以复兴的催化剂。史蒂夫·乔布斯最初担任苹果公司的顾问，1997年他被任命为暂时的 CEO(首席执行官）。

他使苹果公司重返正规，让它成为一个为计算机行业贡献新技术的地方。在他的领导下，苹果公司重新恢复了盈利能力，并引入了创新。