Steve Jobs, a modern-day Christopher Wren

Steve Jobs, the visionary founder of Apple, has died aged 56.

Steve Jobs was often thought of as a modern day Benjamin Franklin or Thomas Edison during his life, an archetypal American inventor of the most revolutionary kind who was able to not only create new products that changed people's lives, but to also market them with equal zest.
There's no doubt that Jobs deserves a front-row seat in the pantheon of great inventors and entrepreneurs in history. In the 35 years since he founded Apple, he created the Apple II, the iMac, iPod, iPhone and most recently, the iPad – five products that transformed the technological, music, film, TV, gaming and publishing industries. Few could claim to have even developed a single such product.
But there's another person whom we could compare Steve Jobs to who's a little closer to home: Sir Christopher Wren. One of the greatest architects in history, Wren was responsible for building St. Paul's Cathedral as well as dozens of other churches, libraries, palaces, and hospitals across the country. Like Wren, who had interests in astronomy, biology, and physics, Steve Jobs was not 'only' a computer engineer or a programmer, but he had a deep love and appreciation of the importance of design and the humanities when it came to making objects that real people had to use.
The easiest way to see Jobs' instincts at work is to simply watch Apple's TV commercials; not the just iconic 1984 Macintosh announcement, but a couple showing off the iPad 2 entitled We Believe and Learn. In stark contrast to other electronic companies' efforts which typically highlight processor speed and screen size with incomprehensible acronyms, Apple – and Steve Jobs – prefers to stress focus on what people can do with their products. We see children learning how to write Chinese by drawing on the screen, or flying around a 3D solar system, or playing a piano on the screen.
It's not that you can't do these things on other tablets or computers, because you can – it's that Jobs understood that these very human activities were the singular purpose for why his products were important and why people would want to buy them, and he made absolutely sure that they were designed with humans in mind. No interface could be too simple, no icon too lovely. If he was going to sell a computer that would be used by a hundred million people, he wanted it to be more like an exquisitely balanced pen or paintbrush rather than a brutish, functional hammer. How could he not, given his grounding in art and design?
Job also co-founded Pixar Animation Studios. Originally, he imagined the company would build computer hardware and software for other film studios, but Pixar consistently lost money for several years despite many groundbreaking creative and technical advances in computer animation. Jobs frequently found his co-founders' insistent desire to make their own movies more than a little frustrating, but the company eventually signed a deal with Disney to produce three computer-animated films, with the first being Toy Story.
Other businessmen might have cut their losses far earlier than Jobs, either selling or liquidating Pixar in favour of risky bets, but he clearly had enough confidence in the technical and artistic abilities of his employees to keep on going. It's safe to say that whatever you think of Apple's products, you'd need a heart of stone to not be impressed or moved by any of Pixar's movies like Up or Wall-E or Ratatouille.
I came to Apple comparatively late in my life; we were a PC household and Macs had no place there. But when the iPod was first announced, I rushed to immediately buy one straight from the US. Portable MP3 players had already existed for years, and the iPod not only didn't have a radio or recording capabilities like the others, but it had far less storage space. The only two things going for it were that it was far smaller – the size of a pack of cards – and that it was far easier and more fun to use. It turned out that these two things were enough to effectively demolish every single competitor. Once again, Jobs had proved that technical specifications alone were not enough, that you needed to focus on the human experience to succeed.
Everywhere you look, you can see people playing games and talking on their iPhones, reading books on their iPads, and browsing the web on their MacBooks. But Jobs didn't want to make devices that were only fit for consuming content, he wanted to help people make it. What we can't see are the countless books, artworks, movies, websites, apps, and songs that were made on Apple products and have enriched the world. He combined technology and the liberal arts.
Sir Christopher Wren's epitaph at St. Paul's Cathedral was si momumentum requiris circumspice: if you seek his monument, look around you. Steve Jobs more than earned those same words to describe his legacy.

By Adrian Hon Computing Last updated: October 6th, 2011, posted by Daves Solomon

Steve Jobs: adopted child who never met his biological father

Steve Jobs, who died yesterday (5th Oct 2011), was the product of an unmarried interracial couple in the Midwestern United States in the mid-1950s.

Earlier this year, Steve Jobs took sick leave for the third time having survived pancreatic cancer in 2004 Photo: Reuters

4:00PM BST 06 Oct 2011

 

His biological parents met as 23-year-old students at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

They were unmarried when his biological mother, Joanne Schieble, fell pregnant in 1954.

His biological father, Abdulfattah Jandali, was a Syrian Muslim immigrant who later married Ms Schieble. He has said they did not want to put their baby up for adoption, but his girlfriend’s parents would not initially allow her to marry an Arab.

Under pressure from her parents and fearing scandal, Ms Schieble travelled to San Francisco to have the baby. Steven Paul, as his adoptive parents named him, was born on February 24, 1955.

“Without telling me, Joanne upped and left to move to San Francisco to have the baby without anyone knowing, including me," Mr Jandali, who never met his son, said in August. He described Ms Schieble’s father as a “tyrant”.

His adoptive parents, Paul and Clara Jobs, were Armenian and unable to have children. Steve was later joined in the family by his adopted sister Patti Jobs, born in 1958. The couple divorced in 1962.
Though Steve did not know until much later, Abdulfattah Jandali later married Joanne Schieble and had another child, Mona, in 1957, whom they kept. Steve Jobs discovered he had a biological sister, the successful novelist Mona Simpson, at the age of 27.
In 1997 he described Ms Simpson as “one of my best friends in the world”.
Nevertheless, he was dismissive of his biological parents. ''They were my parents,'' he said, referring to Paul and Clara Jobs.

Paul Jobs was a machinist for a firm that made lasers in what became Silicon Valley, in Northern California. Steve described him as a “genius with his hands” and said the only he wanted to pass on to his own children was “to try to be as good a father to them as my father was to me”.
But he was also estranged from a child he fathered early in life. In 1978, his high school girlfriend, Chris Ann Brennan, had a daughter. Steve denied he was her father for two years, at one point swearing to a court that he was infertile. He eventually acknowledged Lisa Brennan-Jobs was his daughter, however, and she lived with him as a teenager.
Steve met his wife Laurene Powell while speaking at Stanford University. They married in 1991 in a Buddhist ceremony in Yosemite National Park and had three children. 

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Steven Paul "Steve" Jobs ( Who was Steve Jobs-1955-2011)

Steven Paul "Steve" Jobs (February 24, 1955 – October 5, 2011 was an American computer entrepreneur and inventor. He was co-founder chairman, and chief executive officer of Apple Inc. Jobs also previously served as chief executive of Pixar Animation Studios; he became a member of the board of directors of The Walt Disney Company in 2006, following the acquisition of Pixar by Disney. He was credited in Toy Story (1995) as an executive producer.
In the late 1970s, Jobs — along with Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, Mike Markkula and others — designed, developed, and marketed one of the first commercially successful lines of personal computers, the Apple II series. In the early 1980s, Jobs was among the first to see the commercial potential of Xerox PARC's mouse-driven graphical user interface, which led to the creation of the Macintosh. After losing a power struggle with the board of directors in 1985, Jobs resigned from Apple and founded NeXT, a computer platform development company specializing in the higher-education and business markets. Apple's subsequent 1996 buyout of NeXT brought Jobs back to the company he co-founded, and he served as its CEO from 1997 until 2011.
In 1986, he acquired the computer graphics division of Lucasfilm Ltd which was spun off as Pixar Animation Studios. He remained CEO and majority shareholder at 50.1 percent until its acquisition by The Walt Disney Company in 2006.Consequently Jobs became Disney's largest individual shareholder at 7 percent and a member of Disney's Board of Directors. On August 24, 2011, Jobs announced his resignation from his role as Apple's CEO.
On October 5, 2011, Jobs died in California at age 56 of pancreatic cancer