Steve Jobs: a retrospective

(Credit: Apple)

Timewarp

As the 20th century segued into the 21st and we moved ever deeper into the digital age, few individuals have personified and driven the era in the way that Steve Jobs has. Apple, over the course of more than three decades, has defined and redefined personal computing with a startling number of iconic devices, from the Apple 1 and the original Macintosh to the iPod and iPad.

(Credit: James Martin/CNET)

Enter stage left

In recent years, Jobs has regularly taken to the stage at Apple events to reveal the latest fervently awaited gadget or software upgrade from the company. This image shows him at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco on 11 June 2007, where he told software developers what they could expect from the iPhone, which was to go on sale just two weeks after.

(Credit: James Martin/CNET)

Best of friends

At the unveiling of the Apple iPad in January 2010, Jobs reflects for a moment on the birth of his company, known early on as Apple Computer Co and now as just Apple Inc. The black-and-white photo from 1976 shows Jobs (right) with co-founder Steve Wozniak.

For a detailed timeline on Apple from 1976 to 2006, see CNET News.com's Apple turns 30 feature.

(Credit: Computer History Museum)

Apple I operation manual

The image on the cover of the technical manual for Apple's very first computer suggests not circuit boards and CRT monitors, but science, knowledge and inspiration. That's no coincidence. "From almost the beginning at Apple we were, for some incredibly lucky reason, fortunate enough to be at the right place at the right time. The contributions we tried to make embodied values not only of technical excellence and innovation — which I think we did our share of — but innovation of a more humanistic kind," Jobs said in an oral history interview he gave to the Smithsonian Institution in 1995.

"I actually think there's actually very little distinction between an artist and a scientist or engineer of the highest calibre," he continued. "They've just been, to me, people who pursue different paths, but basically kind of headed to the same goal, which is to express something of what they perceive to be the truth around them so that others can benefit by it."

(Credit: Computer History Museum)

Apple II

It was a year later, with the Apple II, that the company really took off. "Unlike the earlier Apple I, for which users had to supply essential parts such as a case and power supply, the Apple II was a fully realised consumer product. Design and marketing emphasised simplicity, an everyday tool for home, work or school," said a write-up by the Computer History Museum.

(Credit: Time)

It's time

In February 1982, Jobs made his debut on the cover of Time Magazine as the face of a group dubbed by the magazine as "America's risk takers" — entrepreneurs who also included Atari co-founder Nolan Bushnell and FedEx founder Frederick Smith. At the time, Apple had more than 20 per cent of the worldwide market for personal computers (tied with Tandy's Radio Shack) and had to reckon with the debut of the IBM PC.

"Overseeing Apple's growth has kept Jobs too busy to spend the millions he earned when the company went public 14 months ago. He took a few days off last year to go backpacking in Yosemite National Park. Except for some Japanese woodprints and a Maxfield Parrish painting ... his unpretentious Tudor-style home in Los Altos Hills is largely bare because he has not decided how to furnish it," Time wrote of the 26-year-old Jobs, whom it described as a "boyish-looking fellow with [a] stringy moustache".

(Credit: Jonathan Skillings/CNET)

Thought bubble

Two days after Apple made advertising history with its landmark "1984" TV ad in January of its namesake year, Jobs went on stage before an enthusiastic crowd to introduce the Macintosh. Clearly relishing his role as impresario, he pulled the computer out of a bag and ran a screen demo that began with the words "Macintosh. Insanely great!" After a brief tour of the computer's capabilities, such as word processing, chess and graphics — seen in the screenshot above — the computer spoke aloud, reciting words that also appear on screen:

"Hello, I'm Macintosh. It sure is great to get out of that bag. Unaccustomed as I am to public speaking, I'd like to share with you a maxim I thought of the first time I met with an IBM mainframe. NEVER TRUST A COMPUTER YOU CAN'T LIFT. Obviously I can talk, but right now I'd like to sit back and listen. So it is with considerable pride that I introduce a man who's been like a father to me ... STEVE JOBS."

(Credit: Scott Ard/CNET)

Computers of 1984

This was the state of the art for personal computing in 1984, on display earlier this year at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California.

From left to right: an IBM PC, an Apple Mac and an Apple Lisa.

(Credit: Playboy)

The man talks to Playboy

A year after the introduction of the Macintosh and on the cusp of his 30th birthday, Jobs was the subject of a long, wide-ranging interview in Playboy. "He is on a mission," the magazine wrote, "preaching the gospel of salvation through the personal computer — preferably one manufactured by Apple. He is an engaging pitchman and never loses an opportunity to sell his products, eloquently describing a time when computers will be as common as kitchen appliances and as revolutionary in their impact as the telephone or the internal-combustion engine."

That vision of a better tomorrow had its roots in a simpler, boyish yearning.

Playboy: What was your introduction to computers?

Steve Jobs: ... The first computer I ever saw was at Hewlett-Packard. They used to invite maybe 10 of us down every Tuesday night and give us lectures and let us work with a computer. I was maybe 12 the first time. I remember the night. They showed us one of their new desktop computers and let us play on it. I wanted one badly.

What was it about it that interested you? Did you have a sense of its potential?

It wasn't anything like that. I just thought they were neat. I just wanted to mess around with one.

(NeXTstation image, by Marcin Wichary, CC2.0)

Next

From this vantage point in history, it may seem as though Jobs and Apple had always been inextricably joined. In 1985, however, Jobs found himself on the wrong end of a corporate power struggle with then CEO John Sculley and soon was out the door in an exile that would last a decade. He quickly moved on. That same year, he started Next Computer and a year later co-founded another company, one that would also go on to do rather well for itself in a different field: Pixar.

It was with Next that Jobs reasserted his place in the high-tech industry, unveiling the company's high-end desktop computer at Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco in October 1988. William J. Hawkins wrote in a January 1989 Popular Science story titled "Steve Jobs' revolutionary new computer":

"To many of us gathered in the hall, Jobs represents American entrepreneurship at its best — he's an incurable romantic nobody wants to see fail."

Funding for Next came from billionaire H. Ross Perot, as well as Stanford and Carnegie Mellon universities. Hawkins recounts that the germ of the initiative came from Jobs' reading on microbiology and a chat with Paul Berg, who'd won a Nobel prize in biochemistry.

"To define the next wave in computers we collaborated with the most adverse and demanding group of computer users in the world," Jobs said in the Davies Hall unveiling, referring to two dozen college professors. "What we learned ... was that people in higher education want a personal mainframe."

(Credit: Ina Fried/CNET)

Hangin' tough

In August 1991, Jobs and Microsoft's Bill Gates shared a Fortune magazine cover as the magazine's editors pondered "The Future of the PC". The copy seen here was on display at the Microsoft Visitor Center museum a few years back.

(Embossed Apple logo image, by Martin Wichary, CC2.0)

Back to the start

Apple stunned the tech world in December 1996 when it acquired Jobs' Next Software, which had evolved out of Next Computer. This move brought Jobs himself back into the fold, serving as an adviser to Apple's CEO at the time, Gil Amelio. The Apple co-founder didn't stay an outsider for very long. By September 1997, he was serving as interim CEO, taking over for Amelio. A few years later, at the Macworld trade show in January 2000, Jobs revealed that he had taken on the CEO job as a full-time gig.

He was also serving as CEO of Pixar Animation Studios and told CNET at Macworld in 2000 that the dual roles were working out just fine.

"I'm hoping that I've been able to prove to the shareholders of Pixar and the shareholders of Apple that I can manage to do both jobs adequately with the great team of people that are at both companies ... so I thought it was reflective of reality" that the interim title be dropped, Jobs told CNET. "I am planning on staying around for a while, so I thought that we've demonstrated this can work pretty well ... It just felt right to me."

(Credit: Time)

I just called to say...

In Jobs' first months back at Apple in 1997, the company was at a low ebb. Apple was struggling to maintain consistent profitability and in July 1997 its shares reached a 10-year low. Oracle's Larry Ellison had even considered buying the company.

Then an unexpected helping hand reached out: Microsoft. In August 1997, while Apple was mulling its options to replace Amelio as CEO, Bill Gates announced that his company would invest US$150 million in Apple and would develop versions of its Microsoft Office software suite, Internet Explorer browser and other software for the Macintosh. The two long-time antagonists also said they would work to settle a dispute over whether Microsoft's Windows operating system infringed on any Apple patents.

And thus came Jobs' second appearance on the cover of Time magazine, which wrote of his comeback under the headline "Steve's Job: Restart Apple".

"Understand," wrote Time, "the idea of Jobs returning to Apple is something akin to that of Luke Skywalker returning to fight what, until last week, cultists regarded as the evil empire. Gates, by comparison, was perceived as a dweeb Darth Vader, the billionaire bad guy who usurped the idea of the Macintosh's friendly point-and-click operating system for his now dominant Microsoft Windows."

And why did Jobs go back? "I wouldn't be honest if some days I didn't question whether I made the right decision in getting involved," Jobs told Time. "But I believe life is an intelligent thing — that things aren't random."

(Credit: Apple)

iMac says hello

Clearly revelling in the moment, Jobs unveils the original iMac all-in-one design in 1998, arguably the most significant computer that Apple introduced in the 1990s.

(Credit: Time)

A pretty flower

The iMac G4, which debuted in January 2002, was one of Apple's most striking designs. "At best, people thought it was rather odd," Apple design guru Jonathan Ive told CNET at the time. "I actually think this is less shocking than the [original] iMac was."

According to Time Magazine's account of the development the new machine and Jobs' discussions with Ive, Jobs said, "It should look like a sunflower."

(Credit: credit)

Nemo found

In the past decade and a half, Pixar Animation Studios has built a reputation for exceptional film making. It grew out of Jobs' US$10 million purchase in 1986 of the computer graphics division of Lucasfilm.

Here we see Jobs at the May 2003 premiere of Finding Nemo at the El Capitan theatre in Hollywood, along with (from left to right) Pixar's John Lasseter and Disney's Richard Cook and David Stainton. Pixar said Finding Nemo took in US$70.2 million that opening weekend, setting a record for the US debut of an animated feature. The movie would go on to win the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature Film.

In January 2006, Disney announced that it was going to buy Pixar for US$7.4 billion, with Jobs becoming Disney's largest shareholder.

(Credit: CNET)

Heading to the PC

Apple's iTunes Music Store came on the scene in April 2003 with a library of 200,000 tunes, including exclusives from 20 artists, including Bob Dylan and U2. "We were able to negotiate landmark deals with all of the major labels," Jobs said at the launch. "There is no legal alternative that's worth beans."

At the time, iTunes songs were available only for Macs running the OS X operating system and for iPods. In October of that year, Apple introduced the Windows version of the iTunes software with the store — iTunes was released in 2001 on the Mac — in a foray into the Microsoft Windows environment that Jobs commemorated with the phrase "Hell froze over".

(Credit: Rolling Stone)

Steve Jobs at Apple: a retrospective

In an interview with Rolling Stone that appeared in December 2003, Jobs offered what CNET's Greg Sandoval calls a "lucid and careful contemplation of the music industry".

Said Jobs in the Rolling Stone interview: "Apple has a core set of talents, and those talents are: we do, I think, very good hardware design; we do very good industrial design; and we write very good system and application software. And we're really good at packaging that all together into a product ... We're the only people left in the computer industry [who] do that. And we're really the only people in the consumer electronics industry [who] go deep in software in consumer products. So those talents can be used to make personal computers and they can also be used to make things like iPods."

Asked if he had wrung his hands over the decision to bring iTunes to Windows, Jobs told the music magazine, "I don't know what hand-wringing is."

(Credit: Ina Fried/CNET)

Video killed the radio star

Jobs strides purposefully in front of an audience in San Jose, California, in October 2005 as he introduces a version of the iPod that can play video as well as music.

(Credit: Ina Fried/CNET)

I see

This playful series of self-portraits comes from that same October 2005 event, at which Apple also unveiled the iMac G5. Jobs uses his own visage to show off the capabilities of Apple's iSight software running on the new iMac.

(Credit: Marguerite Reardon/CNET)

Apple Store

The Apple Store chain has become a fixture of the retail landscape since the first stores opened in May 2001 in McLean, Virginia, and in Glendale, California.

"Why these two?" Jobs mused. "They were the first two that were ready."

Perhaps the most striking feature of the stores, which now number in the hundreds, is the flagship venue on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan with its distinctive glass cube entrance. Jobs is seen here in May 2006 at the grand opening of the Fifth Avenue store, which he helped to design.

(Credit: Declan McCullagh/CNET)

Transformation

The Apple iPhone, officially unveiled at the Macworld trade show on 9 January 2007, was arguably the single most anticipated gadget in the history of the high-tech and consumer electronics industries. Jobs had the rhetoric to match that: "Today Apple is going to reinvent the phone and here it is." And it was more than just a phone: "iPhone is like having your life in your pocket," Jobs told the Macworld crowd, calling it "the ultimate digital device".

Jobs also revealed that after three decades, Apple Computer no longer thought of itself as merely a computer company.

"Today," he said, "we've added to the Mac and the iPod; we've added Apple TV and now iPhone. And the Mac is the only one you think of as a computer ... [Therefore] we are announcing today that we are dropping the 'Computer' from our name and we will be known as Apple Inc."

(Credit: Dan Farber/ZDNet)

BFF

For almost as long as there's been a personal computing industry, there's been an epic clash between Apple and Microsoft. The company's leaders were no strangers to throwing barbs at the other side. But in May 2007, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates got together for a rare and amicable joint appearance at the D5 technology conference.

Among the kind words exchanged, Jobs said he admired Microsoft's ability to partner with other companies and compared that with Apple's approach.

"Because Woz [Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak] and I started the company based on doing the whole banana, we weren't so good at partnering with people," Jobs said. "I think if Apple could have had a little more of that in its DNA, it would have served it extremely well ... I don't think Apple learned that until ... a few decades later."

(Credit: James Martin/CNET)

Animate this

At Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference in June 2007, Jobs sits down on stage to do a hands-on demo of the Core Animation feature in the Leopard version of Mac OS X, the sixth major release of the operating system.

(Credit: James Martin/CNET)

Sitting down

The Apple iPad has set off yet another sea change for the computer industry. Here, at its January 2010 introduction, Jobs shows off the tablet in a cosy tableau.

(Credit: Pete Souza/White House)

Knights of the rectangular table

In February 2011, Jobs was among a select group of technology executives who met for dinner with President Obama to discuss the state of education and the economy in the United States. In this picture, he's in the black shirt with his back to the camera, to the left of the president.

Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg is to the president's right. Among the others at the dinner were Google's Eric Schmidt, Cisco Systems' John Chambers, Oracle's Larry Ellison and Yahoo's Carol Bartz.

(Credit: James Martin/CNET)

Leave from leave

Although he has officially been on medical leave since January 2011, Jobs made sure that he was on hand for the unveiling of the iPad 2 two months later in early March.

In concluding the event, he revisited a theme that stretched back to the early days of Apple. "It's in Apple's DNA that technology alone is not enough. It's technology married with liberal arts, humanities that yields us the result that makes our heart sing. And nowhere is that more true than in these post-PC devices."

Here, Jobs mingles with friends and colleagues after the iPad 2 event.

(Credit: James Martin/CNET)

Paradise lost?

Steve Jobs at Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference in June 2008.

From his 1995 oral history interview with the Smithsonian Institution: "I grew up in Silicon Valley. My parents moved from San Francisco to Mountain View when I was five. My dad got transferred and that was right in the heart of Silicon Valley, so there were engineers all around. Silicon Valley for the most part at that time was still orchards — apricot orchards and prune orchards — and it was really paradise. I remember the air being crystal clear, where you could see from one end of the valley to the other ... It was really the most wonderful place in the world to grow up."

Via CNET