How Steve Jobs changed computing

Two hundred Apple 1 boards were sold, some in wooden cases commissioned by the Byte Shop from a local cabinet maker. the profits, combined with an investment of $250,000 from Mike Markkula, Apple’s first chairman of the board, helped to finance the development of the Apple II, a complete computer with its own custom-made injection molded plastic case. with a colour display and a version of Basic included as standard, and a wide range of software from companies including Microsoft, the Apple II was a huge hit immediately with home computer users. from its launch in May 1977 to the preparation of Apple’s preliminary offering on the stock market in September of the same year, sales of the II brought in more than three quarters of a million dollars.

Stock market documents from that period contain, under the heading of ‘risk factors,’ a warning that Apple’s management team is ‘young and relatively inexperienced in the high volume consumer electronics business.’ Nevertheless, Apple went public in 1980, shortly after the release of the Apple III, a less successful machine intended for the business market.

At this time Jobs held the title of Vice President Operations and oversaw the development of new models. In 1979 he negotiated the right to visit Xerox’s Parc development facility for him and other Apple engineers and designers in exchange for shares in the company. the principles of a graphic-led interface being developed at Parc, as well as hardware such as the mouse, informed the Apple Lisa – which was not a success, largely due to its retail price which approached the ten thousand dollars that Wozniak had been so keen to avoid with his design for the Apple I – and later the Macintosh.

New management at Apple forced Jobs off the Lisa project, so he turned his attention entirely onto the Macintosh. back working on a consumer-led project, his well-known attention to detail and sometimes abrasive management style inspired designer Jef Raskin and his team to come up with a product that set the template for mass-market personal computers.

The year after the Macintosh’s release, Jobs’s arguments with Apple’s board of directors increased until he resigned to form NeXT, where he developed graphical user interfaces further. NeXT computers did not sell in very large numbers, they were powerful but expensive, but they did have some devoted users. Tim Berners-Lee used a NeXT computer to write the software that underpinned the world wide web, and used one as the first web server.

As a side project Jobs bought and ran Pixar, the computer film company that span out of George Lucas’s Lucasfilm’s animation division. After a string of huge hits, Pixar is now part of Disney. Jobs was Disney’s largest single shareholder as a result of the acquisition.

Without Jobs, Apple slowly lost popularity until he persuaded board members to buy NeXT in 1996. He was appointed CEO in 1997, a position he held until very recently.

Steve Jobs’s prowess was not in engineering or design. He relied on Steve Wozniak in the very early days of Apple, then Jef Raskin for the Macintosh and later Jonathon Ive for the iPod, iPhone and later versions of Apple’s computers. What he did possess was a superbly keen eye for the needs and desires of consumers, the ability to attract talent to work with him and the leadership to bring out their best work.