Stephen Paul Jobs is a man who is one of the generally recognized authorities in the global computer industry, who largely determined the direction of its development. Steve Jobs, as he is known throughout the world, became one of the founders of Apple, Next, Pixar corporations and created one of the most odious smartphones in history - the iPhone, which has remained among the leaders in popularity among mobile gadgets for 6 generations.
The future star of the computer world was born in the small town of Mountain View on February 24, 1955.
Fate sometimes throws out some very funny things. Coincidence or not, this city will become the heart of Silicon Valley in a few years. The newborn's biological parents, Syrian emigrant Steve Abdulfattah and American graduate student Joan Carol Schible, were not officially married and decided to give the boy up for adoption, setting only one condition for the future parents - to give the child a higher education. This is how Steve ended up in the family of Paul and Clara Jobs, nee Akopyan.
Steve's passion for electronics captured him during his school years. It was then that he met Steve Wozniak, who was also a little “obsessed” with the world of technology.
This meeting became somewhat fateful, because it was after it that Steve began to think about his own business in the field of computer technology. The friends implemented their first project when Jobs was only 13 years old. It was a $150 BlueBox device that allowed you to make long-distance calls absolutely free. Wozniak was responsible for the technical side, and Jobs was involved in the sales of finished products. This distribution of responsibilities will continue for many years, but without the risk of being reported to the police for illegal actions.
Jobs graduated from high school in 1972 and attended Reed College in Portland, Oregon. He got bored with his studies very quickly, and he dropped out of college immediately after the first semester, but left the walls completely educational institution I was in no hurry.
For another year and a half, Steve wandered around friends’ rooms, slept on the floor, handed over Coca-Cola bottles and once a week had free lunch at the Hare Krishna temple, which was located nearby.
Still, fate decided to turn its face to Jobs and pushed him to enroll in calligraphy courses, attending which made him think about equipping the Mac OS system with scalable fonts.
A little later, Steve got a job at Atari, where his responsibilities included developing computer games.
Four years would pass, and Wozniak would create his first computer, and Jobs, out of old habit, would handle its sales.
The creative union of talented computer scientists very soon grew into a business strategy. On April 1, 1976, the well-known April Fool's Day, they founded Apple, whose office was located in the garage of Jobs' parents. The history of choosing the company name is interesting. Many people think that there is some very deep meaning behind it. But, unfortunately, such people will be bitterly disappointed.
Jobs suggested the name Apple because it would appear right before Atari in the phone book.
Apple was officially incorporated in early 1977.
The technical side of the work still remained with Wozniak, Jobs was responsible for marketing. Although, in fairness, it must be said that it was Jobs who convinced his partner to finalize the microcomputer circuit, which later served as the beginning of the creation of a new personal computer market.
The first computer model received a completely logical name - Apple I, the sales volume of which in the first year was 200 units at 666 dollars 66 cents each (witty, isn’t it?).
Quite a good result, but the Apple II, released in 1977, was a real breakthrough.
The stunning success of two Apple computer models attracted serious investors to the young company, which helped it take a leading position in the computer market, and made its founders real millionaires. Interesting fact: Microsoft was founded six months later, and it was the company that developed software for Apple. This was the first, but far from the last meeting between Jobs and Gates.
After some time, Apple and Xerox entered into a contract between themselves, which largely determined the future of the development of computer technology. Even then, Xerox's developments could be called revolutionary, but the company's management could not find practical application for them. The alliance with Apple helped solve this problem. Its result was the launch of the Macintosh project, within which a line of personal computers was developed. The entire technological process, from design to sale to the end consumer, was handled by Apple Inc. This project can easily be called the period of the birth of the modern computer interface with its windows and virtual buttons.
The first Macintosh computer, or simply Mac, was released on January 24, 1984. In fact, it was the first personal computer, the main working tool of which was the mouse, which made operating the machine extremely simple and convenient.
Previously, only “initiates” who knew an intricate “machine” language could cope with this task.
Macintosh simply did not have competitors who could even remotely come close in terms of their technological potential and sales volume. For Apple, the release of these computers was a huge success, as a result of which it completely stopped the development and production of the Apple II family.
In the early 80s, Apple turned into a huge corporation, releasing successful new products to the market over and over again. But it was at this time that Jobs began to lose his position in the company's management. Not everyone liked his authoritarian management style, or rather, no one liked him.
An open conflict with the board of directors led to Jobs being fired in 1985, when he was only 30 years old.
Having lost his high position, Jobs did not give up, but, on the contrary, threw himself headlong into developing new projects. The first of these was the NeXT company, which was engaged in the production of complex computers for higher education and business structures. The low capacity of this market segment did not allow significant sales to be achieved. So this project cannot be called super successful.
With the graphics studio The Graphics Group (later renamed Pixar), which Jobs bought from LucasFilm for just $5 million (when its real value was estimated at $10 million), everything was completely different.
During the period of Jobs' management, the company released several full-length animated films, which were extremely successful at the box office. Among them are “Monsters, Inc.” and “Toy Story.” In 2006, Jobs sold Pixar to Walt Disney for $7.5 million and a 7% stake in the Walt Disney company, while the Disney heirs themselves own only 1%.
In 1997, 12 years after his ouster, Steve Jobs returned to Apple as interim CEO. Three years later he became a full-fledged manager. Jobs managed to bring the company to a new level of development, closing several unprofitable areas and completing the development of the new iMac computer with great success.
In the coming years, Apple will become a real trendsetter in the high-tech goods market.
Her developments invariably became bestsellers: the iPhone, iPod, iPad tablet. As a result, the company took third place in the world in terms of capitalization, surpassing even Microsoft.
In October 2003, during a medical examination, doctors gave Jobs a disappointing diagnosis of pancreatic cancer.
The disease, which is fatal in the vast majority of cases, developed in a very rare form for the head of Apple, which can be treated through surgery. But Jobs had his own personal beliefs against interfering with the human body, so he initially refused the operation.
The treatment lasted 9 months, during which none of the Apple investors even suspected the fatal illness of the company's founder. But it did not give any positive results. Therefore, Jobs finally decided to undergo surgery, having previously publicly announced his state of health. The operation took place on July 31, 2004 at the Stanford Medical Center, and was very successful.
But this was not the end of Steve Jobs' health problems. In December 2008, he was diagnosed with a hormonal imbalance. He underwent a liver transplant in the summer of 2009, according to officials at the University of Tennessee Methodist Hospital.
For the generation born in the 2000s, Steve Jobs is the inventor of the iPhone, a phone that, within six months of its appearance on the smartphone market, became the most desirable in the world. Although in reality this man was neither an inventor nor an outstanding programmer. Moreover, he did not even have a special or higher education. However, Jobs always had a vision of what humanity needed and the ability to motivate people. In other words, the success story of Steve Jobs is a chain of numerous attempts to change the world of computer and digital technology. And although most of his projects failed, those that succeeded changed the life of the planet forever.
In February 1955, Joan, a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin, gave birth to a son. The boy's father was a Syrian emigrant, and the lovers were unable to get married. At the insistence of her parents, the young mother was forced to give her son to other people. They turned out to be Clara and Paul Jobs. After the adoption, the Jobs named the boy Steve.
The Jobs managed to become ideal parents for Steve. Over time, the family moved to live in (Mountain View). Here, in his free time, the boy’s father repaired cars and soon attracted his son to this activity. It was in this garage that Steve Jobs gained his first knowledge of electronics in his youth.
At first, the guy did poorly at school. Fortunately, the teacher noticed the boy’s extraordinary mind and found a way to interest him in his studies. Material rewards for good grades worked - toys, sweets, small money. Steve passed the exams so brilliantly that after the fourth grade he was transferred directly to the sixth.
While still at school, young Jobs met Larry Lang, who got the guy interested in computers. Thanks to this acquaintance, the talented schoolboy had the opportunity to attend the Hewlett-Packard club, where many specialists worked on their personal inventions, helping each other. The time spent here had a huge impact on shaping the worldview of the future head of Apple.
However, what truly changed Steve's life was meeting Stephen Wozniak.
Jobs was introduced to Wozniak by his classmate. The young people became friends almost immediately.
At first, the boys simply played pranks at school, organizing pranks and discos. However, a little later they decided to organize their own small business project.
During Steve Jobs' youth (1955-75), everyone used landlines. The subscription fee for local calls was not very high, but to call another city or country, you had to fork out extra cash. Wozniak, as a joke, designed a device that allowed him to “hack” a telephone line and make any calls for free. Jobs started selling these devices, calling them “blue boxes,” for $150 apiece. In total, friends managed to sell more than a hundred of these devices until the police became interested in them.
Steve Jobs in his youth, as well as throughout his life, was a purposeful person. Unfortunately, in order to achieve his goal, he often did not show his best qualities and did not take into account the problems of others.
After graduating from school, he wanted to study at one of the most expensive universities in the United States, and for this his parents had to go into debt. But the guy didn't really care. Moreover, after six months he dropped out of school and, becoming interested in Hinduism, began to desperately seek enlightenment in the company of unreliable friends. Later he got a job at the video game company Atari. After collecting some money, Jobs went to India for several months.
Returning from a trip, the young man became interested in the Homebrew computer club. In this club, engineers and other fans of computer technology (which was just beginning to develop) shared ideas and developments with each other. Over time, the number of club members grew, and its “headquarters” moved from a dusty garage to one of the classrooms at the Linear Accelerator Center at Stanford. It was here that Woz presented his revolutionary development, which allowed characters from the keyboard to be displayed on the monitor. An ordinary, slightly modified TV was used as a monitor.
Like most of the business projects that Steve Jobs launched in his youth, the emergence of Apple was associated with his friend Stephen Wozniak. It was Jobs who suggested that Woz start producing ready-made computer boards.
Soon Wozniak and Jobs registered their own company called Apple Computer. The first Apple computer, based on Woz's new board, was successfully presented at one of the Homebrew computer club meetings, where the owner of a local computer store became interested in it. He ordered fifty of these computers for the guys. Despite many difficulties, Apple fulfilled the order. With the money they earned, the friends collected another 150 computers and sold them at a profit.
In 1977, Apple introduced the world to its new brainchild - the Apple II computer. At that time, it was a revolutionary invention, thanks to which the company turned into a corporation, and its founders became rich.
Since Apple became a corporation, the creative paths of Jobs and Wozniak gradually began to diverge, although they were able to maintain normal relations until the end.
Before his departure from the company in 1985, Steve Jobs oversaw the development of computers such as the Apple III, Apple Lisa and Macintosh. True, not one of them managed to repeat the tremendous success of the Apple II. Moreover, by that time, enormous competition had arisen in the computer equipment market, and the products of Jobs’ company over time began to yield to other companies. As a result of this, as well as numerous long-term complaints from employees at all levels against Steve, he was removed from his position as manager. Feeling betrayed, Jobs quit his job and started a new project, NeXT.
Jobs' new brainchild initially specialized in the production of computers (graphics workstations), adapted to the needs of research laboratories and educational centers.
True, after a while, NeXT retrained into software products, creating OpenStep. Eleven years after its founding, this company was purchased by Apple.
In parallel with his work at NeXT, Steve became interested in graphics. So he bought from the creator Star Wars animation studio Pixar.
At that time, Jobs began to understand the grand prospect of creating cartoons and films using computer programs. In 1995, Pixar produced Disney's first feature-length animated film created using computer graphics. It was called Toy story and not only appealed to children and adults all over the world, but also earned a record amount of money at the box office.
After this success, Pixar released several more successful animated films, six of which received Oscars. Ten years later, Jobs lost his company to Walt Disney Pictures.
In the mid-nineties, Jobs was invited to return to work at Apple. First of all, the “old-new” manager refused to produce a wide variety of products. Instead, he focused on developing four types of computers. This is how professional computers Power Macintosh G3 and PowerBook G3 appeared, as well as iMac and iBook intended for home use.
Introduced to users in 1998, the iMac series of personal all-in-one computers quickly conquered the market and still maintains its position.
In the second half of the nineties, Steve Jobs realized that with the active development of digital technologies it was necessary to expand the line of products. A free program for listening to music on computer devices, iTunes, created under his leadership, gave him the idea to develop a digital player capable of storing and playing hundreds of songs. In 2001, Jobs introduced the now iconic iPod to consumers.
Despite the fantastic popularity that the iPod gained, which brought huge profits to the company, its head was afraid of competition from mobile phones. After all, many of them could already play music back then. Therefore, Steve Jobs organized active work on the creation of his own Apple phone - the IPhone.
The new device, presented in 2007, not only had unique design, as well as a heavy-duty glass screen, but was also incredibly functional. Soon he was appreciated all over the world.
Jobs's next successful project was the iPad (a tablet for using the Internet). The product turned out to be very successful and soon conquered the world market, confidently displacing netbooks.
Back in 2003, Steven Jobs was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. However, he underwent the necessary operation only a year later. It was successful, but time was lost, and the disease managed to spread to the liver. Six years later, Jobs received a liver transplant, but his condition continued to deteriorate. In the summer of 2011, Steve officially retired, and in early October he passed away.
As with all of it professional activity, and with regards to a personal life full of events, a short biography can be written with great difficulty. No one knew everything about Steve Jobs, as he was always self-absorbed. No one could understand what was really going on in his head: neither his loving adoptive family, nor his biological mother, with whom Steve began to communicate as an adult, nor his sister Mona (he also found her when he grew up), nor his wife, nor children.
Shortly before entering university, Steve had a relationship with a hippie girl, Chris Ann Brennan. After some time, she gave birth to his daughter Lisa, with whom Jobs did not want to communicate for many years, but took care of her.
Before his marriage in 1991, Stephen had several serious affairs. However, he married someone he met during one of his lectures. Over twenty years of family life, Lauren gave birth to Jobs three children: son Reed and daughters Eve and Erin.
Jobs's biological mother, giving him up for adoption, forced his adoptive parents to sign an agreement, according to which they pledged to give the boy a higher education in the future. So throughout Steve Jobs’ childhood and early youth, he was forced to save money for his son’s education. Moreover, he wished to study at one of the most prestigious and expensive universities in the country.
Steve Jobs became interested in calligraphy in his youth while studying at university. It is thanks to this hobby that modern computer programs have the ability to change fonts, letter sizes and
The Apple Lisa computer was named by Jobs after his illegitimate daughter Lisa, although he publicly denied this.
Steve's favorite music is the songs of Bob Dylan and The Beatles. Interestingly, the legendary Fab Four founded Apple Corps, a company specializing in music, back in the sixties. The logo was a green apple. And although Jobs claimed that he was inspired to name the company Apple by visiting a friend's apple farm, it seems that he was lying a little.
For most of his life, Jobs adhered to the principles of Zen Buddhism, which greatly influenced the strict and laconic appearance of Apple products.
Films, cartoons and even theatrical productions were dedicated to the Jobs phenomenon. Many books have been written about him. Jobs' example of successful business is described in almost all textbooks or manuals for entrepreneurs. Thus, in 2015, the book “The Secret of Steve Jobs’ Business Youth, or Russian Roulette for Money” was published in Russian. In just a few weeks, it began to actively spread across the Internet. It is interesting that the book gained such popularity thanks to two phrases in the title that attracted readers: “the secret of business youth” and “Steve Jobs.” It is still difficult to find a review of this work, since at the request of the author the book was blocked on most free resources.
Steve Jobs achieved what many can only dream of. Along with Bill Gates, he became a symbol of the computer industry. At the time of Jobs' death, he owned just over ten billion dollars, which he earned through his labor.
Today the subject of our conversation will be Steve Jobs: biography, success story this man who, from scratch, was able to achieve phenomenal success in business, steadfastly withstanding all the blows of fate. I am sure that in the biography and success story of Steve Jobs there are many role models and motivating factors, which is why, in fact, I decided to collect information and write this article.
So, Steve Jobs is a famous entrepreneur and IT engineer originally from the USA, who co-founded the equally famous IT corporation Apple Inc and was its executive director for a long time. Steve Jobs is called the pioneer of the American computer industry, the man who became its founder and determined the path for its further development.
At the age of 25, Steve Jobs became a millionaire, and at that time his fortune was already immediately estimated at over 250 million dollars. By the end of his life, he owned over $2 billion in Apple shares and $4.4 billion in Disney shares. In the year of his death, according to Forbes magazine, he owned $7 billion and was ranked 39th in the ranking of the richest people in the world.
This year the feature film Steve Jobs was released, telling the biography and success story of this brilliant man; its world premiere has already taken place and is showing high ratings and box office receipts. In Russia, this film can be seen from 2016.
Steven Paul Jobs was born in 1955 in San Francisco. Steve was not a wanted child, so his parents immediately abandoned him and gave him up for adoption. So the boy had adoptive parents, from whom he inherited his last name, and who gave him this name - Steven Paul Jobs. This was a family of ordinary workers and employees.
From early childhood, Steve Jobs demonstrated hooligan tendencies and reluctance to study at school. The teachers spoke negatively about him, and only one teacher was able to find an approach to this child. Mrs. Hill (that was her name) began to motivate Steve financially, rewarding him for good academic performance with sweets, toys, and even money. Thanks to this, Steve “came to his senses” and began to study so seriously that he even “jumped” the fifth grade and transferred to high school from elementary school a year earlier. At the same time, the school director suggested that Steve’s parents immediately transfer him to 2 grades higher, but they decided that 1 grade would be enough.
Meanwhile, Steve's adoptive father, who repaired old cars in the garage, tried to instill in his child the profession of an auto mechanic, but he did not like it. However, this is how the future IT leader acquired his first skills in working with electronics.
At the age of 12, an interesting moment occurred in the biography of Steve Jobs. He plucked up the courage to call Hewlett-Packard President Bill Hewlett on his home phone and asked him to help with parts to assemble a device needed for a physics classroom at school. Hewlett then talked on the phone with Jobs for about 20 minutes, as a result he not only sent him the necessary details, but also offered him a part-time job in his company, in which the so-called Silicon Valley.
Steve Jobs agreed. In addition to this work, he began to earn extra money as a newspaper delivery boy, as well as in the warehouse of one of the companies. Thanks to this, at the age of 15, Steve became the owner of a car, bought with his own money with the addition of his father’s funds. And a year later, Steve Jobs exchanged this car with an additional payment for a more expensive one.
At the same time, there were also negative aspects in the biography of Steve Jobs: he made friends with hippies and began using soft drugs.
While working at Hewlett Packard, Steve Jobs became friends with Steve Wozniak, who was also interested in electronics and was 5 years older than him. At the time of their first meeting, Wozniak was already developing a strategy for creating a personal computer. This acquaintance in many ways became fateful for Steve Jobs.
At the age of 16, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak met a famous hacker at the time called Captain Crunch, who helped them create a device that allowed them to make free calls around the world. The basis for this development was the whistles that were included in the “Captain Crunch” oatmeal packages sold at that time (hence the pseudonym). The hacker realized that they produced the right tone of sound, allowing him to connect to switching systems.
Soon, after an unsuccessful attempt, Wozniak managed to make such a device, which was called the “Blue Box”. At first, friends used it as entertainment, tapping into phone lines and playing telephone pranks. But then they came up with the idea of making money from it. They were able to reduce the cost of one “blue box” from the initial 80 dollars to 40, then Wozniak began “mass production”, and Steve Jobs began selling Blue Boxes. Friends sold about 100 of these devices at a price of $150 apiece, made good money on it, but then were forced to stop this business due to unpleasant situations with the police and some buyers.
“Blue Boxes” created the basis for the future commercial cooperation of Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak: the friends realized that by creating developments in the field of electronics necessary for humanity, they could make good money. After all, Wozniak is able to invent and create a new gadget, and Jobs is able to competently promote it to the market.
At the age of 17, Steve Jobs graduated from high school and went to college, moving to Oregon. However, after the first semester he dropped out, citing too expensive studies, which fell on the shoulders of his parents. After all, Steve then “wasted” the considerable money he earned on his own and spent it on entertainment, incl. and on drugs. Jobs later called the decision to expel from the university “one of best solutions in life".
Having dropped out of university, Steve Jobs was left without money. He couldn’t even pay for a dorm room, so he slept on the floor of his friends. To buy food, Jobs collected Coca-Cola bottles and traded them in for 5 cents apiece, and every Sunday he walked a long way to get to a free meal at the Hare Krishna temple. He lived in this mode for about 1.5 years.
In 1974, Steve Jobs returned to California, where he met his old friend Steve Wozniak. He advised him to get a job at the video game company Atari, and Jobs took this advice.
At the company's expense, Steve Jobs went on business trips to Germany and India, where he successfully completed the tasks assigned to him. In addition, having arrived in India with his new friend Dan, he decided to follow the path of a pilgrim: from the very beginning of the trip, the friends exchanged their belongings for the rags of beggars and set off on foot, using the help of random passers-by. The harsh climate of the country even put their lives at risk several times, but they bravely endured all the trials.
Steve Jobs remembered his trip to India well because there he saw real poverty, completely different from what it was in the USA.
After returning home, Steve Jobs received a task from Atari to minimize the number of chips on the board new development company: video game machine. For each chip removed from the board, he was promised $100. Steve Jobs, in turn, entrusted this work to his friend Steve Wozniak, offering to split the payment equally, and he was able to reduce the circuit by 50 chips. But Steve Jobs deceived his friend, saying that the company paid him $700 for this work, and gave him half of this amount - $350. In fact, he received $5,000 from Atari.
In 1975, Steve Wozniak completed the development of his first portable home personal computer model and demonstrated it to the management of Hewlett Packard. But they showed no interest in Wozniak’s model, since at that time no one even thought about home computers, and the computers themselves were associated with huge cabinets working for the needs of the military or large businesses. Then he approached Atari with the same idea, but even there his development was considered unpromising.
Looking at this, Steve Jobs invited his friend to create his own company that would develop and produce portable home computers, and Wozniak agreed. They also invited a colleague from Atari, Ronald Wayne, to their company, who was developing drawings of electronic circuits.
Thus, on April 1, 1976, Apple Computer Co was founded, the founders of which were business partners Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne. To get money to start his own business, Steve Jobs sold the minibus he had at that time, and Steve Wozniak sold his programmable calculator. For this, all the friends received about $1,300 - with this money the company was created.
The aspiring entrepreneurs decided to locate the production itself in the garage, which was left to them by Steve Jobs' adoptive father. This garage became the first “production workshop” of Apple.
Ronald Wayne designed Apple's first logo, which included an image of Newton with an apple falling on his head. In the future, this logo was significantly simplified.
Soon after the start of its activities, Steve Jobs' Apple received its first order for 50 computers from one of the electronics stores. At that time, the partners did not have enough finances to purchase all the components for such a production batch, but Steve Jobs was able to persuade suppliers to defer payment, and borrowed part of the money from friends. Steve also recruited several of his friends and relatives to work on the order.
Three businessmen, together with hired staff, assembled the order in the evenings after their main work and were able to ensure delivery of the entire ordered batch within a month. They called their first computer Apple I. It was a regular circuit board with parts and didn’t even have a case. The keyboard and monitor had to be connected to this board separately. The cost of such a computer in the store then was $666.66.
Subsequently, Steve Job and Steve Wozniak called this order the most important in their lives. While working on it, Steve Jobs first showed his business qualities, because he took upon himself the leadership of the entire process and the resolution of all emerging issues.
Despite this successful start, Ronald Wayne soon became disillusioned with the job and decided to leave the business. He sold his 10% stake in the company to his partners for $800. So Apple was left with two founders: Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak.
Wozniak constantly worked to improve the computer model and soon developed a prototype of the Apple II, a device that became the first mass-produced PC in the world. The Apple II already had a plastic case, a disk drive, a monitor, a keyboard, and supported color images. Other specialists were brought in to work on the model: designers and electronics engineers.
Despite the fact that the Apple II was a clear breakthrough in the field of electronic technology, the partners could not find investors to finance the mass production of these gadgets: then both Hewlett Packard and Atari again did not consider this promising.
However, soon Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak still managed to find a major investor. It turned out to be Mike Markkula - he invested $92,000 of his personal capital into the development, and also secured the opening of a credit line for another $250,000 in the largest US bank. At the same time, he appointed his own managers to the company.
As a result, the Apple II was put into mass production and was simply a tremendous success: computers were sold in batches of hundreds and thousands of copies, despite the fact that at that time there were no more than 10,000 PCs in the world.
By 1980, Steve Jobs' Apple company had already become a recognized world leader in PC production, it had its own production workshops and a staff of several hundred people. The company's shares constantly grew in price, and a simple guy without education, Steve Jobs, as one of the shareholders, very quickly turned into a dollar millionaire and became one of the richest residents of the United States.
In 1979, Steve Jobs was shown a Xerox development - the Alto computer, which allows the user to control processes by hovering a graphical cursor on the monitor. He was amazed by this technology, and he said that in the future all computers must work according to this principle. Steve Jobs himself also decided to develop and release such a computer in his company.
At that time, Apple was developing the Lisa computer, named after the daughter of Steve Jobs, and Steve decided to implement the innovation he saw in it. However, initially the cost of this model was planned to be no more than $2,000, and taking into account the new technology, it no longer fit into this amount. Then the company's president, Michael Scott, removed Jobs from participation in the Lisa project, while simultaneously promoting him and appointing him chairman of the company's board of directors.
Soon after, Steve Jobs became interested in another development that was being carried out at Apple by engineer Jeff Raskin: he was working on an inexpensive computer, costing about $1,000, which he called Macintosh (from the name of his favorite apple variety, McIntosh). This device was supposed to combine a monitor, a system unit and a keyboard. Steve Jobs got the idea to add a graphical interface and a mouse to this computer and got Apple President Michael Scott to put him in charge of this development.
However, Jobs and Raskin had serious disagreements over the need for a mouse in the device. Their dispute went so far that both disputants were called “on the carpet” to the president of the company, who, after listening to them, nevertheless instructed Steve Jobs to complete the development of the Macintosh to the end, as he saw fit, and sent Raskin on vacation.
Soon after this, project investor Mike Markkula fired Michael Scott and headed Apple for a while. And Steve Jobs completed the Macintosh, creating it the way he wanted - using a mouse and a graphical interface.
Soon, Steve Jobs went on a business trip to Microsoft, where he met with its founders Bill Gates and Paul Allen, inviting them to Apple to inspect the development of the Macintosh. They liked the project, and the parties agreed that Microsoft would develop software for the Macintosh. Thus, the most famous program at that time, Microsoft Excel, soon appeared.
Steve Jobs personally developed a marketing plan to promote the Macintosh PC, which was aimed at selling 500 thousand copies of the product per year. At that time, Steve Wozniak had an accident, after which he was unable to continue working at Apple. Jobs understood that the success of the Macintosh would largely depend on him personally.
Steve Jobs purchased an apartment in Manhattan, where he soon met Pepsi President John Sculley. After talking with him, Steve realized that this man was well versed in business and could become a successful president of Apple. And Steve Jobs decided to lure John Sculley to his company. The phrase that Steve once told John, after which he agreed to move from Pepsi to Apple, became world famous:
Are you going to sell your sugared water all your life or do you want to change the world?
By that time, Microsoft programmers, working literally day and night, still managed to complete the necessary software to run the Macintosh within the given time frame. Steve Jobs personally presented this new product, demonstrating his oratory skills.
At first, Macintosh sales were simply stunning, but soon users began to feel a serious lack of software (then the only software was the Office suite, and Microsoft simply did not have time to develop new programs for the graphical interface). Then sales began to fall. Soon problems with the technical part of the Macintosh were revealed, and they fell even further.
Steve Jobs tried to shift the blame for this to others - in particular, to the new president of Apple, John Sculley, accusing him of failing to fully refocus on the computer business. He began to play various “behind-the-scenes games” with the goal of independently taking the place of president of the company. However, the project investor noticed this and fired Steve from the company.
So Steve Jobs lost his job at Apple, which he himself founded. In anger, he sold his entire stake in the company, leaving only 1 share for himself “as a souvenir.”
After leaving Apple, Steve Jobs decided not to quit the computer business and founded a new IT company called Next. This company was immediately able to receive huge investments from businessman Rosa Perot - he invested $20 million in it. This is despite the fact that Steve Jobs did not even develop any specific one: the investor simply relied on him as an experienced and successful entrepreneur in the IT field.
However, Perot's hopes were not realized. Next's computers were not as successful as Apple's. There were some sales, but they did not bring the investor the desired profit and could not even recoup the investment. A lot of money was spent on promoting the company, but Steve Jobs was unable to “recapture” it. Nevertheless, Jobs did not lose hope and made new attempts.
So, in 1985, he acquired the Pixar company (its seller was George Lucas, the director of “Star Wars”). An interesting fact is that Lucas asked for $30 million for the company, but Steve Jobs negotiated down to $10 million, taking advantage of the moment when Lucas was in a critical situation and needed money. The Pixar company was engaged in computer animation and had at its disposal the most powerful computer systems for that time.
Steve Jobs hired artist John Lasseter, luring him away from Disney, and began producing animated videos demonstrating the capabilities of Pixar's hardware and software. The company subsequently released a short film, which was awarded an Academy Award. For a time, Pixar brought Steve Jobs a small income, but gradually the business became unprofitable.
However, this period became favorable for Steve Jobs's personal life: he met the woman of his dreams, Laurene Powell. Their acquaintance was very romantic, and soon, in 1991, the wedding took place.
At the same time, Steve Jobs signed a contract with the Disney studio, which included the creation and promotion of animated films. By that time, in the eyes of the press and public, Steve already looked practically bankrupt; no one believed that he could make his enterprise profitable. However, this contract was successful and made it possible to compensate for a significant part of the losses.
But in 1992, Steve Jobs realized that his company Next could not continue to exist without additional capital, and was able to persuade one of the largest investors, Canon, for the next tranche of financing - $30 million. Thanks to this, Next sales increased slightly, but in comparison with Apple they were still tens of times less.
In 1993, Steve Jobs made a difficult decision for himself - to gradually curtail PC production and transferred all the company's efforts to software production.
By 1995, Apple also began to experience serious problems: it had already replaced several managers, but turnover was still falling, and its activities became deeply unprofitable. Apple investors wanted to sell the company, for this they negotiated with several major concerns (for example, Philips), but this did not lead to the desired result.
Steve Jobs and his Pixar, meanwhile, released the animated film Toy Story, which became a huge success. And the Next company developed a new operating system, NextStep.
Then the success story of Steve Jobs took an unexpected turn: his second company, Next, was bought by his first company, Apple. She needed the NextStep software itself, which became the basis for Mac OS X, and its team of developers (more than 300 specialists). The transaction amount was $377 million + 1.5 million shares of the company.
However, this acquisition did not immediately lead to the desired result. When it was unable to bring Apple out of losses, the board of directors fired the next president of the company, Gil Amelio. And taking advantage of the situation, his place was taken by... of course, Steve Jobs.
Having taken control of the company into his own hands, he immediately made a lucrative deal with Bill Gates and his Microsoft. Gates' company invested $150 million in Apple in exchange for several developments and the installation of the Microsoft Internet Explorer browser on Mac computers.
Soon, Steve Jobs was again able to bring Apple to breakeven, and then to profit. In 1998, one might say, the revival of this company began. At the same time, his second brainchild Pixar released several highly successful films, including “Monsters, Inc.”
Then Apple worked successfully, with a profit, constantly developing, its shares showed stable growth. In 1998, the company released the first iMac, which was a great success and was put into mass production.
The first dedicated Apple Stores opened in 2001. Today, it is these stores that generate the greatest income per square meter of space in the USA and Europe; they also already have their own Apple Store on the Internet.
This was followed by the release of the iBook and iTunes, and the iTunes Store network of music stores began to develop. The success of iTunes contributed to Steve Jobs' interest in the mp3 player market, and so the first iPod was soon developed and released, then new versions began to appear.
At the same time, the use of the Mac OS X operating system again increased sales of Macintosh computers, at which point they received their rebirth.
Well, a little later, Apple released the first iPhone, which became a real breakthrough in the IT technology market. It was first introduced in 2007. Sales of this gadget brought Apple revenue of 150 billion dollars over 5 years.
And even later, the iPad appeared: Steve Jobs personally presented it in January 2010. Already in March 2011, he presented the iPad-2.
In August 2011, Steve Jobs resigned as president of the company due to health reasons, but remained chairman of the board of directors. The stock market then reacted to this event by falling Apple shares by 5%.
And on October 5, 2011, Steve Jobs died due to respiratory arrest at home, surrounded by his family.
IN last years During his life, Steve Jobs spoke a lot in front of wide audiences; his speeches were always long-awaited and were a great success. And his biography and Interesting Facts Many authors described life in their books.
This is the long story of Steve Jobs' success that I have. I hope that you were interested and were able to form your own opinion about this man, who has made many breakthroughs in the IT field. We have used many of the developments of Steve Jobs and his Apple ourselves and still use them today.
See you again at ! I wish you success in all your endeavors. Stay with us and receive a lot of useful and interesting information that will help you with this.
Material from the Encyclopedia of the Hayazg Foundation
Add information about the person
| Jobs Steve | |
| Steven Paul Jobs | |
| Other names: | Stephen Paul Jobs |
| In English: | Steven Paul Jobs |
| Date of Birth: | 24.02.1955 |
| Place of Birth: | USA |
| Date of death: | 05.10.2011 |
| A place of death: | USA |
| Brief information: American entrepreneur, designer and inventor, pioneer of the personal computing revolution. One of the founders, chairman of the board of directors and CEO of Apple Corporation. One of the founders and CEO of the Pixar film studio |
|
His parents were unmarried students: Syrian native Abdulfatta (John) Jandali and Joan Schible from a Catholic family of German emigrants.
The boy was adopted by Paul Jobs and an Armenian-American woman, Clara Jobs, née Agopyan. The Jobs could not have their own children. They named their adopted son Stephen Paul. Jobs always considered Paul and Clara father and mother, he was very irritated if someone called them adoptive parents: “They are my real parents 100%.”
In the late 1970s, Jobs' friend Steve Wozniak developed one of the first personal computers, which had great commercial potential. The Apple II computer became the first mass product of Apple, created on the initiative of Steve Jobs. Jobs later saw the commercial potential of a mouse-driven graphical interface, leading to the Apple Lisa and, a year later, the Macintosh (Mac) computer.
After losing a power struggle with the board of directors in 1985, Jobs left Apple and founded NeXT, a company that developed a computer platform for universities and businesses. In 1986, he acquired Lucasfilm's computer graphics division, turning it into Pixar Studios. He remained Pixar's CEO and major shareholder until the studio was acquired by The Walt Disney Company in 2006, making Jobs the largest individual shareholder and member of Disney's board of directors.
Difficulties developing a new operating system for the Mac led to Apple purchasing NeXT in 1996 to use NeXTSTEP as the basis for Mac OS X. As part of the deal, Jobs was given the position of advisor to Apple. The deal was planned by Jobs. By 1997, Jobs regained control of Apple, leading the corporation. Under his leadership, the company was saved from bankruptcy and began to make a profit within a year.
Over the next decade, Jobs led the development of the iMac, iTunes, iPod, iPhone, and iPad, as well as the development of the Apple Store, iTunes Store, App Store, and iBookstore. The success of these products and services, which provided several years of stable financial profits, allowed Apple to become the most valuable publicly traded company in the world in 2011. Many commentators call Apple's resurgence one of the greatest accomplishments in business history. At the same time, Jobs was criticized for his authoritarian management style, aggressive actions towards competitors, and the desire for total control over products even after they were sold to the buyer.
Jobs has received public recognition and a number of awards for his impact on the technology and music industries. He is often called a "visionary" and even the "father of the digital revolution." Jobs was a brilliant speaker and took innovative product presentations to the next level, turning them into exciting shows. His easily recognizable figure in a black turtleneck, faded jeans and sneakers is surrounded by a kind of cult.
After eight years of battling the disease, Steve Jobs died of pancreatic cancer in 2011.
The book Steve Jobs: A Biography by Walter Isaacson states that Steve's adoptive mother, Clara Jobs (nee Agopian), is a descendant of Armenians who escaped genocide in the early twentieth century. Her father Louis Hakobyan was born in Malatya in 1894, and her mother Victoria Artinyan was born in Izmir in 1894.
The story of Steve Jobs' visit to Turkey, which took place in 2006, is interesting. Jobs's Turkish guide, Asil Tunçer, spoke about this difficult visit. According to him, the last visit of the late Steve Jobs to Turkey caused great outrage in the country. Tuncher claims Jobs viewed the Turks as enemies and even refused to shake the tour guide's hand before leaving the ship.
“We have begun our journey. Jobs most wanted to see Hagia Sophia. Approaching her, he asked a question about minarets. In turn, I replied that after the capture, the former church was turned into a mosque, and a minaret was added in the southeastern part. After that, a flurry of questions rained down on me,” writes Tuncher.
“What happened to so many Christians? You, millions of Muslims in a non-Muslim environment, what have you done?” - Jobs lamented. Before the guide even opened his mouth, he heard another question: “1.5 million Armenians were subjected to genocide. Tell us how this happened?
After these questions, the Turkish guide began to prove to Jobs that there was no trace of genocide. The tour guide's denials and his stories about the civil war and the betrayal of the Armenians during the First World War angered Steve Jobs even more.
After everything, Steve and his wife Marina met with the owner travel agency and stated their dissatisfaction with the cruise. They expressed a desire to leave the ship earlier than planned. As a result, without saying a word to the Turkish guide, and leaving his hand hanging in the air, Jobs left the ship. The guide also did not receive the promised iPhone.
Parents. Childhood. Preparing for future achievements
Steven Paul Jobs was born on February 24, 1955. His father was 24-year-old Syrian native Abdulfatta (John) Jandali, and his mother was 23-year-old Joan Carol Schieble from a family of German Catholic emigrants. Joan's parents settled in Wisconsin and became farmers. Her father, Arthur Schible, settled in a suburb of Green Bay, where he and his wife owned a mink farm. He also successfully ran businesses in a variety of areas, from real estate to zinc printing. Joan was a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin, and Jandali was a teaching assistant. In general, a typical office romance. However, in those years, the US government had not yet waged such an active fight against this type of relationship. Arthur Schieble adhered to strict Catholic rules and reacted with great disapproval to his daughter’s first love - a certain artist who, moreover, was not a Catholic. Likewise, her parents were against her relationship with a Syrian Arab and a Muslim. Her father, who was dying, even threatened to deprive her of her inheritance.
Steve's biological father, Abdulfattah Jandali, was the youngest of nine children in a wealthy Syrian family. Abdulfattah's father owned oil refineries and many other companies, as well as lands in Damascus and Homs; at one time he even controlled wheat prices in the Homs region. Although Abdulfatta, like his father, was a Muslim, he was brought up in a Jesuit boarding school, and received a bachelor's degree from the American University in Beirut and fully absorbed European culture, and then the American lifestyle. He then entered graduate school at the University of Wisconsin with a degree in political science and got a job there as a teaching assistant.
In the summer of 1954, Joan traveled with Abdulfattah to Syria. They spent two months in Homs, where Abdulfatta's mother and sisters taught Joan how to cook Syrian cuisine. Upon her return, Joan discovered that she was pregnant. Because of her father’s threats to deprive her of her inheritance, she did not dare to marry Jandali, and he himself was in no hurry to tie the knot. It was not possible to have an abortion without any of the Catholic neighbors finding out about it. The girl, raised in strict Catholic rules, could not even imagine such a thing.
In early 1955, Joan left for San Francisco, where she sought the services of a certain doctor who, for a reasonable fee, provided single mothers with shelter, delivered babies, and helped place children for adoption. Joan set only one condition: the child must certainly be raised by parents with higher education. The doctor found a suitable family - a successful lawyer and his wife. But they wanted a girl, but a boy was born, and the original intended adoptive parents changed their minds. We had to urgently look for a couple who would agree to adopt the baby. As a result, Paul Reingold Jobs and an American of Armenian origin, Clara Jobs, née Agopyan, became the adoptive parents.
Paul Jobs grew up in a Calvinist family, but his father was an alcoholic and sometimes beat his son. Born in 1922, Paul spent his childhood on a dairy farm in Germantown, Wisconsin. He was a quiet and kind boy. He dropped out of school without finishing his studies and went to travel around the Midwest, earning a living as a mechanic. At the age of 19, Paul joined the Coast Guard, although he did not even know how to swim. He served on the transport ship General M.K. Megs, delivering American troops into the Mediterranean basin. Paul was a good ship mechanic, but he was guilty of something and remained an ordinary sailor. Having been discharged from the Coast Guard after World War II, Paul Jobs made a bet with his fellow soldiers that within two weeks he would find himself a wife in San Francisco, where he went ashore with a smile. A stately and tattooed motor mechanic, who was popular with the fair sex, completed the task. However, strictly speaking, Jobs’s bet did not work. Clara Agopyan was attracted not so much by Jobs’s appearance as by his car, in which she could go on a picnic with friends.
It doesn’t matter what was the impetus for starting the relationship. One way or another, a bet on the one hand and a desire to show off on the other, led to the beginning of a fast-paced and vibrant romance. Ten days later, in March 1946, they became engaged. Paul won the bet, and Clara got the opportunity to show off not only her boyfriend's car, but also her husband. He and Clara lived happily and did not quarrel.
Let's take a closer look at the biography of Jobs' adoptive mother. Clara Hagopian was born in 1924 in New Jersey, where her parents fled the Ottoman Empire to escape persecution by the Turks. They later moved to San Francisco, where they settled in the Mission District. For Clara, marriage to Paul Jobs was already the second in a row. Her first husband died during World War II.
There wasn't enough money, and Paul and Clara moved to Wisconsin for several years to live with Paul's parents, and then moved to Indiana. Paul's profession allowed the couple to easily travel around the States. A good mechanic easily found work in any city to which fate took him. In Indiana, Jobs got a job as a mechanic at International Harvester, a truck and agricultural equipment company. It was difficult to live on one salary, so Paul prepared used cars for sale as additional income. In 1952, they moved to San Francisco and settled in the Sunset neighborhood, south of Golden Gate Park, on the Pacific coast.
Soon after the wedding, Clara became pregnant. Unfortunately, the pregnancy turned out to be ectopic. When Clara came to her senses after a forced operation, the doctor gave her a disappointing diagnosis - infertility. Aesculapius was very categorical in his diagnosis. He did not give any chance that the girl would ever be able to get pregnant again.
Steve became the first adopted child of the Jobs couple. Meanwhile, Joan, Steve's biological mother, certainly wanted her son's adoptive parents to receive a higher education. Having learned that Clara never graduated from college, and Paul never even graduated from high school, the obstinate girl refused to sign the adoption papers. The situation remained deadlocked for several weeks. Joan allowed Paul and Clara to take Steve with them, but did not want to make a final decision. In the end, Joan finally relented and signed the adoption papers, but with the condition that the adoptive parents give a written commitment to pay for Stephen's college education. Paul and Clara naturally agreed.
The happy parents named their son Stephen Paul. Future founder of Apple always considered Paul and Clara to be his true father and mother and was wildly angry if someone called them adopted. Steve has publicly stated on more than one occasion, “They are 100% my real parents.” According to American adoption rules, the biological parents knew nothing about the whereabouts of their son, and Steve met his birth mother and younger sister only 31 years after his birth.
It later turned out that Joan was delaying signing the adoption documents also because the girl’s father was very ill and was about to die. After his death, Joan hoped to obtain permission from her mother to marry Jandali. She hoped, and told her relatives and family members more than once, sometimes even with tears in her eyes, that as soon as she and Janjali got married, she would take her son back. But Arthur Schible died only in August 1955, when all the formalities with Steve’s adoption had already been settled. After Christmas 1955, Joan and Abdulfatta Jandali were married at the Church of St. Philip the Apostle in Green Bay. And the next year Abdulfatta defended his dissertation on international politics.
In 1986, Jobs' adoptive mother Clara, a heavy smoker, died of lung cancer. Shortly before her death, she told how he was adopted. But back in 1980, Steve hired a detective to find his biological mother. Jobs has always been very burdened by the fact that he was abandoned in infancy and does not know his biological parents. He found a doctor who gave it to Paul and Clara Jobs. The doctor lied, saying that all the documents were lost in a fire. In fact, he put all the adoption documents in an envelope on which he wrote: “Send to Steve Jobs after my death.” Soon the doctor died, and Jobs received the documents. He finally found out the names of his real parents. It also followed from the papers that after him, Joan Schible and Abdulfatta Jandali had a daughter, Mona, and then, a few years later, in 1962, Joan and Abdulfatta separated, Joan married skating instructor George Simpson, and she and her daughter took his last name. After divorcing her second husband in 1970, Joan moved from place to place, never staying anywhere for long. Subsequently, her daughter, writer Mona Simpson, ironically described this vagabond life in the novel “Anywhere But Here.” And she made her famous brother Steve the hero of the novel “An Ordinary Guy.”
Steve considered Paul and Clara to be his true parents, who gave him a start in life, and, in order not to upset them, he asked journalists, if they found out anything about his biological parents, not to publish any information about it.
Back in 1985, Steve called his biological mother in Los Angeles and arranged a meeting. He explained his motives this way: “I believe that a person’s qualities are determined by his environment, and not by heredity. But it’s still interesting to learn about the biological roots. And I wanted to assure Joan that I think she did the right thing. I wanted to meet the birth mother mainly to make sure she was okay and to thank her for not having an abortion. She was only 23 years old and had to go through a lot to give birth to me.” Steve maintained a good relationship with his biological mother. For years, she and Mona would fly to Jobs for Christmas. Joan apologized to him many times for giving him away to another family. One Christmas he told her: “Don’t worry. I had a wonderful childhood. Everything worked out great for me.”
The day Steve walked into his birth mother's home, Joan called Mona, Steve's sister, an aspiring writer. Soon Mona arrived and found out that her brother was one of the creators of the Apple computer. Deciding to find her father, Mona hired a private detective in California and found out that Jandali had gone into the restaurant business and now has his own small restaurant in Sacramento. Not knowing who his son had become, Jandali told Mona that he used to own a Mediterranean restaurant north of San Jose in Silicon Valley: “Even Steve Jobs went there. Yes, he was generous with his tea." Mona barely restrained herself from shouting: “Steve Jobs is your son!” Abdulfatta also told his daughter that he was married a second time, and then he had a longer third marriage, with an elderly rich woman, but he had no more children.
As soon as they said goodbye, Mona called Jobs and agreed to meet at the Expresso Roma cafe in Berkeley. Jobs brought with him his daughter Lisa, who was in elementary school. It was almost ten in the evening. Jobs was shocked by the story about a restaurant near San Jose. He remembered going there, and even remembered meeting a man who turned out to be his biological father. “It was amazing,” he later said. “I ate at that restaurant several times and I remember talking with the owner. He was Syrian. We shook hands." Jobs asked Mona not to tell Jandali about herself. He could not forgive him for leaving his family, his wife and daughter, and did not trust him: “I was rich then - what if he would blackmail me or tell journalists about everything.” Subsequently, Abdulfatta found out that Jobs was his son. He received this information from the Internet. By chance. One blogger noticed that Mona Simpson listed Jandali as her father in the directory, and Abdulfattah guessed that he was also Jobs' father. Jandali, 80, told The Sun in August 2011 that his attempts to contact Jobs had failed. Steve flatly refused to meet his biological father because, according to him, Abdulfatta “treated Mona badly.” Mona and Steve became close friends. The brother and sister kept their relationship secret until 1986. It was only after Clara's death that Mona introduced Steve at the party to celebrate the release of her first book.
Simpson's search for her father became the basis for Simpson's second novel, Lost Father, published in 1992. She also found several members of the Jandali family in Homs, Syria, and in America. Mona was writing a novel about her Syrian roots. At one time, the Syrian ambassador hosted a dinner in her honor in Washington, which was also attended by her cousin and his wife, who flew in from Florida. Mona later married television producer and writer Richard Appel, a lawyer by profession. Writer of the famous "Simpsons" script. Appel named Hector Simpson's mother, mother-in-law Marge, and Abraham Simpson's wife after Mona, Steve Jobs's half-sister. Mona and Richard Appel have two children: son Gabriel and daughter Grace.
Unlike Jobs' sister, his Syrian roots did not bother him at all. When the uprising against President Bashar al-Assad began in Syria in 2011 as part of the Arab Spring, when asked by his official biographer Walter Isaacson whether Obama should take decisive steps to resolve the situation in Egypt, Libya and Syria, a terminally ill Steve, who was left to live a matter of months, replied: “I don’t think anyone really knows what we’re supposed to do there. You will get hit hard both if you intervene and if you don’t.”
One of the few reasons for disagreement between brother and sister was Mona's clothing. She dressed rather poorly, since at the beginning of their acquaintance she was just an aspiring writer who did not receive large fees. Jobs reproached her for not wanting to look attractive. Angry, Mona wrote him a letter: “I am a young writer, this is my life, and I am not going to be a fashion model.” Jobs did not answer, but he sent his sister a package from Issey Miyake’s store, whose models he valued for their strict and technological style. “He went to buy me clothes,” Mona later said, “and he chose wonderful things, exactly my size and very suitable colors.” Jobs really liked one pantsuit, and he sent his sister three identical ones. “I still remember those first suits that I sent to Mona,” Steve recalled. “They were linen, a grayish-green color that matched her reddish hair perfectly.”
Anyway, let's get back to Steve's biological parents. Joan Schieble chose the profession of speech therapist. And Abdulfatta Jandali taught political science at the University of Nevada in the 1960s, a few years later he went into the restaurant business, and in 2006 he became vice president of a casino in Reno (Nevada). In December 1955, ten months after giving up their child, Abdulfatta and Joan finally married, as Joan's father had died and the main obstacle to marriage had been removed. On June 14, 1957, their daughter Mona was born. As they say, you can’t build happiness on someone else’s misfortune. This union was doomed from the very beginning. In 1962, Abdulfatta left his wife and lost contact with his daughter, which Steve could never forgive him for.
Jobs maintained a friendly relationship with Joan Simpson, who still lives in a nursing home in Los Angeles. And Mona, the author of six novels, also teaches English at Los Angeles University. Speaking about his biological parents, Jobs stated: “To me, these people are sperm and egg donors. I don’t want to offend anyone, I’m just stating a fact.”
When Steve was two years old, the Jobs adopted a girl, Patty, and three years later the family moved from San Francisco to Mountain View, a small town in Santa Clara County, California. As it later turned out, this decision of the parents became fateful for Steve. Mountain View is located in the famous Silicon Valley - the American and global center of high technology. However, teenager Steve Jobs was of little interest in this. In those years, he was infinitely far from the world of information technology. Steve grew up in the valley of apricot orchards. He recalled: “Silicon Valley at that time was largely occupied by orchards– apricot and plum – it was a real paradise. I remember the crystal purity of the air, when from one end of the valley you could see the other.” The region had already begun to turn into a global center for the development of computer and other advanced technologies - into Silicon Valley. And it really rose thanks to military orders. The US armed forces needed advanced technologies, including computers. Local engineers filled their garages with mountains of various electronic equipment. This was a common occurrence here. From such garages, world-famous companies were later born. Apple was one of them too. Steve recalled: “I saw a computer terminal for the first time in my life when my dad took me to downtown Ames. That's when I fell in love with computers." The Ames Research Center, which worked for the Pentagon, was located in Sunnyvale, not far from the city where the Jobs lived. According to Steve, "all of these military plants were equipped with last word technicians and produced mysterious new products. So it was very interesting to live there.”
Steve Jobs knew that he was adopted from childhood. According to him, “my parents did not hide from me that I was an adopted child.” When he was six or seven years old, he was sitting on the lawn near the house with a girl his age from the house opposite. For some unknown reason, the boy suddenly opened up and told the girl that he was adopted.
“So your real parents don’t need you?” – the girl asked sadly.
Steve recalled: “What happened here! It was like an electric shock hit me. I jumped up and ran home in tears. And my parents looked at me seriously and said: “No, you don’t understand.” We chose you specifically." They said this several times. And so strongly that I realized: it’s true.” This strengthened Steve's confidence in his own chosenness.
Del Yocum, who worked with Jobs for many years, believed that Steve's eternal desire to control everything he does was due not only to his difficult character, but also to the significant fact that his parents abandoned him: “He strives to control everything that he does.” surrounds him. The product of labor for him serves as a continuation of his own personality.”
Greg Calhoun, with whom Jobs became friends after college, states: “Steve talked a lot about how his real parents abandoned him. He admitted that it hurt him. But this taught him not to depend on anyone. He always did things his way. Stood out from the crowd. Because from birth I lived in another, my own world.”
Andy Hertzfeld, one of Jobs's closest allies for many years, believed: “To understand Steve, you first need to understand why he sometimes can't help himself and can be cruel and vindictive. The thing is that his mother abandoned him immediately after his birth. This is where the root of all the problems in Steve's life lies."
Jobs himself categorically denied all these versions: “Some people believe that I worked so hard and got rich because my parents abandoned me. Therefore, they say, I went out of my way to make them understand how wonderful I am and regret that they abandoned me. This is complete nonsense. I knew I was adopted and felt more independent, but never abandoned. I always believed that I was special. And my parents supported this belief in me.”
Steve's adoptive father, shortly after his adoption, got a job as a car mechanic at the financial company CIT Group (Commercial Investment Trust). He was engaged in confiscating cars from defaulters. Such joyless official duties did not add joy to the life of the Jobs couple. In the family garage, Paul continued to repair used cars for sale. Soon the hobby began to bring in more money than his main job. Finally, Steve's father could not stand it and left the company. Soon after this, he began selling used cars himself, opening a small company. This made it possible to earn money for Steve's education and fulfill his obligations to Joan. Steve recalled: “Dad would buy a Ford Falcon or some other junk car that wasn’t running for $50, spend a few weeks polishing it up, and then sell it for $250—without any taxes, of course. That’s how he earned money for me to go to college.”
Paul tried to instill in Steve a love for the profession of an auto mechanic and make him continue his business. He even set up a workbench for the boy in the garage, saying: “Here, Steve, this is now your workspace.”
Jobs admired his father, his hands and head. “Dad had an engineering streak,” Steve said. “He could make anything.” If we needed a closet, he made a closet. I remember my dad was building a fence and gave me a hammer to help him... He liked to do everything well. Even things that no one will ever see.”
However, Steve did not have a heart for working as a mechanic, although he inherited his father’s love of cars. The walls of Paul's garage were covered with photographs of his favorite cars. He drew his son's attention to their design - both the general outline and color, and interior decoration salon Paul recalled: “I was hoping to give him some mechanical skills, but Steve didn’t really want to get his hands dirty. He never liked to tinker with the engine." Steve said the same thing: “I didn’t like fixing cars, but I enjoyed talking to my dad.” He became more and more attached to his father. At the age of eight, Steve found a photo of Paul from his time in the Coast Guard and marveled: “It shows Dad in the engine room, shirtless. Very similar to James Dean (popular American actor of the 50s, who tragically died in 1955 in a car accident at the age of 25. – B.S.). The photo shocked me. “Wow,” I thought, “but my parents were once young and beautiful!”
And yet Paul’s efforts were not in vain. Along with the design of the car, Paul introduced Steve to the basics of electronics, and this became the area where Jobs Jr. found his calling. Together with his father, they disassembled and assembled radios and televisions, and soon Steve became seriously interested in electronics. According to him, “Dad didn’t really understand electronics, but he often came across it when he repaired cars and other equipment. He explained the very basics to me, and I was very interested in it.” Jobs Jr. also really liked to go shopping for spare parts with his father: “Every weekend we went to a junkyard for old cars - either for a generator, or for a carburetor, or for some other thing.” Moreover, the father knew how to bargain very well, and this skill was passed on to his adopted son. Steve recalled: “He was good at it because he knew better than the salesman how much a particular part should cost.”
The company where Paul worked transferred him to a branch in Palo Alto, but Jobs Sr. could not afford to live there, so he moved to a division located nearby - in Mountain View, where life was cheaper.
The Jobs lived at 286 Diablo Avenue. This was one of many standard houses, built by architect Joseph Eichler for middle-income families. Homes with floor-to-ceiling windows, open floor plans, concrete floors and lots of sliding doors glass doors. Steve really liked this spacious and bright house, and he admired Eichler.
One day, Paul couldn't resist the temptation to get rich quick. Steve recalled: “There was a realtor across the street from us. He didn’t catch stars from the sky, but at the same time he earned a lot of money. And my father thought: “Am I any worse?” Dad tried his best. I took night classes, passed the exam, got my license, and went into real estate. And then the market crashed.” It's time for the Jobs hard times. Steve was in elementary school at the time. The family had to remortgage the house. When Steve was in fourth grade, his teacher asked him, “What don’t you understand about the Universe?” “I don’t understand why my dad is suddenly left with nothing,” Jobs responded. But he liked that his father never learned the skills of a successful realtor: “To sell real estate, you need to flatter and fawn; my father never succeeded in doing this because it was contrary to his nature. And I always liked that about him.” Steve never knew how to flatter and fawn, even when business interests required it. From the risky, although promising big profits, job of a realtor, Paul Jobs again returned to the less prestigious and profitable, but more reliable job of a mechanic. Nevertheless, Steve always admired his father's intelligence and ingenuity. “He cannot be called a highly educated person, but I always thought that dad was very smart. He read little, but could do a lot with his own hands. There was no mechanism that my father could not figure out.”
Paul was calm, kind and determined. Steve took over only the last quality from him. To illustrate his father’s determination, he recalled this incident: “The engineer next door to us lived who worked on photovoltaics for Westinghouse. Looked like a beatnik. Idle. He had a girl. Sometimes my parents asked her to look after me in their absence. My parents worked, and after school I went to the neighbors for a couple of hours. The engineer would get drunk and beat his girlfriend. One day she came running to us in the middle of the night, scared to death. Her friend came for her, completely drunk. The father came out and harshly explained to him: yes, we have your girlfriend, but I won’t let you into the house. In general, I drove him away, and that was all. They like to portray the fifties in an idyllic light. But our engineer neighbor was one of those poor fellows who was completely confused in life.” Steve himself believed that he would still be able to find his way in life. For some reason his neighbor's example frightened him.
To pay off her debts, Clara Jobs had to go to work as an accountant at Varian Associates, one of the first high-tech companies in the world to manufacture instruments for scientific laboratories. It was his mother who taught Steve to read before he even went to school. The educational institution of the future genius of the computer industry was disappointing. There it was necessary to acquire only a prescribed and formalized amount of knowledge. The teachers left no room for true creativity.
But the surrounding world, populated by engineers, provided such opportunities in abundance. Steve recalled: “Most of the fathers of the families who lived in the neighborhood made all sorts of ingenious devices: devices for transforming solar energy, batteries, radars. I was very interested in all this, and I constantly pestered adults with questions about how things worked.” Larry Lang, one of the top engineers at Hewlett-Packard, one of the leading providers of hardware and software in the information technology industry, lived seven doors down from the Jobs' home and became friends with Steve. He recalled: “In my mind, this was the ideal of an HP employee: an amateur radio operator, an excellent electronics engineer. He brought me parts that I played with." Lang later gave him a carbon microphone, which Steve was absolutely delighted with.
Teachers at Mona Loma Elementary School, located four blocks from the Jobs' house, spoke of the future creator of Apple as a completely obnoxious child, a prankster and a bully. Steve explained his behavior this way: “The first few years I was so bored at school that I constantly got into all sorts of things... At school I was faced with something that I had never encountered before: the need to obey. They put pressure on me with authority. And they almost discouraged me from studying.” Jobs had a high school friend, Rick Ferrentino, and together they played pranks with gusto. So, one day they put up notices saying “Tomorrow everyone must bring a pet to school.” Naturally, this guaranteed the disruption of lessons. Who will learn when dogs chase cats and cats chase birds? Rick and Steve also found out the codes for their bicycle locks from their classmates, and then swapped all the locks. And no one was able to pick up their bike until the evening, because it was impossible to figure out which was whose. And in the third grade there was a life-threatening prank. Steve recalled: “Once we placed a bomb under the chair of the teacher, Mrs. Thurman. The poor guy almost became a stutterer.”
During his first three years of school, Steve was expelled from school several times. Paul, naturally, as befits a good father, blamed everything on the teachers who could not interest the child. My parents, Steve said, “believed that the teachers were wrong for making me memorize crap instead of encouraging curiosity.” Neither Paul nor Clara raised a hand to him even once, although the teachers secretly hoped so. They tried with all their might to calm down an inveterate hooligan with an ego that was exorbitant for his age.
Only one teacher, Mrs. Imogen Hill, who taught in the fourth, advanced grade (Rick was not taken there out of harm's way, sent to the non-advanced one), saw extraordinary abilities in Steve and found an approach to him. The secret turned out to be simple: it’s all about motivation, understandable and specific, and not about vague stories about the expected future. For good studies, the woman gave him gifts in the form of sweets, money and do-it-yourself construction kits, with the help of which one could, for example, polish a lens or assemble a camera. So the naughty boy was encouraged to study hard. Steve recalled: “One day after school, she handed me a book of math problems and told me to solve every single one at home. I thought she was crazy. Then Mrs. Hill took out a huge lollipop and promised that when I was done, I would get it and five dollars to boot. Two days later I gave her a notebook with completed assignments.” And soon he began to study diligently and without any financial incentive, because, as he said, he “wanted to study and please the teacher with his success.” Jobs remained grateful to Imogen Hill throughout his life: “I learned more from her than from any other teacher... If it weren’t for her, I would definitely end up behind bars. In our class, she singled out only me. Apparently she saw something in me.” In order to decide to do something new, you need to at least believe in yourself. And for this it is very important that at least one more person believes in you.
Mrs. Hill told everyone, as she showed everyone the photo from Hawaii Day, how Steve, who came to school in the wrong shirt, managed to persuade one of the children to switch, so that he was in the front row in the photo and in a Hawaiian shirt. This ability to persuade and convince was later very useful to him for making presentations, and for running a business in general.
Steve Jobs passed the final exams for the fourth grade so brilliantly and showed such deep knowledge, far beyond the scope of the school course, that the director suggested transferring him from the fourth grade directly to the seventh. According to Steve, he passed the exams with the result of a tenth grader, which, of course, was a poetic exaggeration. But the parents, quite rightly, decided that such a long jump, through two classes at once, would be harmful to the child’s psyche. As a result, Steve was transferred only to the sixth grade. At the new school, Steve faced new challenges. Jobs didn’t get along easily with his peers, but now he found himself in the company of unfamiliar kids a year older. He was confused, if not scared.
It was already high school. It was located in Crittenden, a few blocks from Mona Loma. A completely different area that had a bad reputation. There were many teenagers from disadvantaged families here, and the local punks literally did not give Steve a pass. It was full of warring ethnic gangs. There were fights almost every day at school, and stabbings were common. Steve was especially unlucky, as the youngest. Soon, several schoolchildren were jailed for gang rape, and others burned a nearby school's bus in retaliation for its team beating Crittenden's team in a wrestling competition. The bullies did not give Steve a pass, and a year later he, in his characteristic ultimatum form, demanded that his parents transfer to another school. According to Jobs, since the family was sorely short of money, “my parents persisted, but I threatened that if I had to go to Crittenden, I would simply drop out. Then they began to look for better options, saving every cent, but in the end they bought a house in a nicer area for 21 thousand dollars.” The Jobs doted on their son and were ready to change their lives to better meet the needs of a talented but very wayward child. They also believed in his exclusivity. Like all good parents, by the way. According to Steve, “Mom and Dad loved me very much. And when they realized that I was special, they felt their responsibility. They tried to buy me everything I needed, to arrange for me the best school. Basically, help me unlock my potential.” With their last savings, the family bought a house in a more prestigious area, in southern Los Altos, after which there were no free funds left. But Jobs continued his studies at high school in the town of Cupertino, Santa Clara County. My father got a job as a mechanic in the district center - the town of Santa Clara, located in the very center of the future Silicon Valley. He now worked for Spectra-Physics, a company that made lasers for electronic and medical equipment. Paul made models of products that engineers came up with. Steve admired him: “Lasers require special precision. The most complex ones are for aviation or medical needs. For example, they told my dad: “This is what we need, and from one sheet of metal, so that the expansion coefficients are the same everywhere.” And he was wondering how to do it.” My father had to come up with not only parts, but also make the tools and dies necessary for their production. Steve really liked it, but that was all. He recalled: “It would be great if dad taught me how to work on a milling and lathes. But, unfortunately, I didn’t go to his work because I was more interested in electronics.”
The new home was in the Cupertino-Sunnyvale school district, one of the best in the Valley. The family moved to a former apricot orchard in southern Los Altos, which had become a model housing area. The Jobs lived at 2066 Crist Drive. It was cottage with three bedrooms and, which was important for Steve's future career, with a street-facing garage with roller gates. There, Paul was still working on cars, and Steve was still tinkering with the radio equipment. Jobs recalled: “When we moved here, there were still gardens nearby. A neighbor who lived there taught me how to compost. He grew absolutely amazing vegetables and fruits. I have never eaten anything tastier in my life. That’s when I fell in love with natural products.”
The parents wanted to raise their son in the values of their religion and on Sundays they took him with them to the Lutheran church. But when he reached the age of thirteen, he stopped going there. This was preceded by the shock he experienced. On the cover of the July 1968 issue of Life, Steve saw a photograph of starving children from Biafra (a territory then attempting to secede from Nigeria, sparking a civil war). He brought the magazine to Sunday school and asked the pastor:
– If I lift my finger, will God know which finger I want to lift before I do it?
The pastor replied:
- Naturally, God knows everything.
Then Jobs showed a photo of the starving people:
– Does God know that these children are starving?
“Steve, I understand that this is hard for you to believe, but the Lord knows about this too.
Jobs never went to church again. Subsequently, he said that religion should be engaged in the search for truth, and not in the propagation of dogmas. Children dying of hunger for him turned out to be incompatible with divine truth. Jobs stated: “When Christianity focuses on principles of faith, instead of trying to live like Jesus, to see the world as Jesus saw it, it instantly loses its essence. It seems to me that all religions are just different doors to the same house. Sometimes I believe this house exists, sometimes I don't. This is a great mystery."
When Paul and Steve visited the family dairy farm in Wisconsin, the boy didn't particularly like rural life. But he was shocked by the scene of the birth of a calf. Steve was surprised that within a few minutes the newborn baby was up on his feet and walking. Jobs decided: “He didn’t learn this: it was like it was programmed into him. A child can't do that. No one shared my delight, but it seemed incredible to me. It's as if some organ in the animal's body and some area in its brain were designed to work together so the calf didn't have to learn to walk."
Everything ends someday. Secondary school is over. After eighth grade, Jobs moved to Homestead High School. He suddenly loved walking and easily walked the fifteen blocks to school.
Larry Lang brought Steve to the Hewlett-Packard research club. There were about fifteen people in the club; they met on Tuesdays in the company cafeteria. As Jobs recalled, “an engineer from some laboratory was invited to a class, he would come and tell me what he was working on.” It was then that Steve saw the 9100A personal computer for the first time and fell in love with computers for the rest of his life. He recalled: “He was huge, weighed about twenty kilograms, but it seemed to me the height of perfection. I just fell in love with him."
Jobs recalled: “My friends were smart. I was interested in mathematics, exact sciences, electronics. They too. But on top of that, they experimented with LSD and other counterculture stuff.” One day Steve installed speakers throughout the house. They also served as a microphone. In his room, in the closet, Steve set up a control room and listened to what was happening in other rooms of the house. One evening, Steve sat with headphones on and listened to what was happening in his parents' bedroom. Then his father suddenly entered his room, understood everything, became very angry and demanded that all listening devices be removed immediately.
The club members were working on their own science projects, and Steve, who was only 13 years old at the time, decided to build a digital frequency meter that determined the number of pulses of an electronic signal per second. To implement it, he needed parts produced by Hewlett-Packard, and Jobs, without thinking twice, called home the head of the company, Bill Hewlett. As a result, he not only got the parts he needed, but also a job on the assembly line at HP after his first year at Homestead. Hewlett himself invited him. Jobs recalled: “People didn’t keep their phone numbers secret back then. I opened the directory, found Bill Hewlett from Palo Alto and called him at home. He responded, talked to me for twenty minutes, sent me the necessary parts and offered me a job at a factory where digital frequency meters were made.” His father drove him to work and took him home in the evening. Steve's peers were jealous. Steve, however, could not understand why exactly. The exhausting and monotonous work at the factory, in his opinion, was in no way suitable as a reason for envy. Jobs tried to communicate not with workers, but with engineers. There was a lot to learn from them. As he recalled, “every morning at 10 o’clock they had coffee and donuts. I went up to talk to them.”
In general, Steve did not shy away from any work. I delivered newspapers, and the next year I got a job in the warehouse at the Haltek electronics store. “Behind the store, not far from the bay, there was a fenced area where you could find, for example, parts of the Polaris submarine, which was dismantled and scrapped,” Jobs recalled. – There were control units, all kinds of buttons. They were painted in the usual military colors, green and gray, but there were red and yellow lampshades and switches - such big old switches: when you click it, it looks like Chicago was blown up.”
Steve bought switches, resistors, capacitors, and sometimes the latest memory chips for his projects. Jobs Sr. was good at driving down prices on car parts, since he knew better than the sellers how much a particular part should cost. Steve followed his example. He carefully studied all the electronic parts, and he knew how to bargain as well as his father. He traveled to electronics flea markets. For example, in San Jose, he bargained for a used circuit board, which included some valuable parts or microcircuits, and sold it to his director at Haltek.
At the age of fifteen, Steve purchased his first car, a two-tone Nash Metropolitan. Steve has always loved fast cars. The lion's share of the money for the car was given to him by his father, who also acted as a consultant when choosing a car, but Steve also took part in the purchase, thereby destroying all his savings. Paul Jobs installed an engine from the British MG into the car. Steve admitted: “Now, many years later, the Nash Metropolitan seems like an incredibly cool car. And at that time she seemed like complete crap to me. But it was still a car, which in itself was great.” A year later, Steve, having saved some more money, was able to trade the Nash Metropolitan for a red Fiat 85 °Coup?. Jobs recalled: “My father helped me buy and test the car. I remember I was happy that I managed to earn it on my own.”
Just after buying my first car, the difficulties of adolescence began. Steve fell into the company of hippies and began listening to Bob Dylan and The Beatles, which in itself did not create problems. But smoking marijuana and using LSD caused misunderstanding among Steve's parents, and for some time he and his father had a tense relationship. Later, Steve said almost with bravado: “Yes, I smoked marijuana and tried LSD. And I have nothing to be ashamed about this.”
Indeed, between his second and third years at Homestead, Jobs tried marijuana for the first time. He admitted: “That was the first time I got high. I was fifteen. From then on I started smoking weed all the time.” One day, Steve's father found a weed cigarette in his car. “What is this?” - he asked. “Marijuana,” Jobs replied calmly. At this point Paul lost his temper. According to Steve, that was the only time in their lives that they quarreled with their father. But eventually Paul relented, although his son refused to promise never to smoke marijuana again. By his fourth year of study, Steve had tried LSD and hashish and experimented with sleep deprivation. He said: “I began to get high more often. From time to time we would drop acid (LSD), usually somewhere in a field or in a car.”
Steve did well in his last two years at Homestead. He was attracted both to electronics and computers, and to literature. He stated: “I listened to music with pleasure and read many books that were not related to science and technology, for example Shakespeare, Plato. I really liked King Lear.” Steve also loved “Moby Dick” by Herman Melville and the poems of the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas.
Jobs remained a big fan of Bob Dylan and The Beatles throughout his life. Steve often played Dylan songs at home with his guitar in his youth. He repeatedly referenced The Beatles in his speeches, and once gave an interview to accompany the broadcast of a Paul McCartney concert. The day when The Beatles recorded, after resolving an almost 30-year conflict over trademark Apple and Apple Corps, owned by The Beatles, appeared on the iTunes Store, Jobs considered one of the main things in his life.
Steve took an electronics class taught by John McCollum, a former naval aviation pilot. He knew how to arouse the curiosity of his students. McCollum's cramped closet, to which he only gave the key to his favorites, was crammed with transistors and other parts. He could explain any rule and demonstrate its application. They studied in McCollum's office, which was located in a barn-like building on the edge of campus, near the parking lot. The retired military pilot demanded discipline from his students. And Jobs hated it. He did not hide his aversion to coercion of any kind, he behaved openly, and did not recognize anyone's authority. McCollum recalled: “In class, he was usually doing his own thing in the corner and did not try to communicate with me or his classmates.”
One day, Steve needed a part that McCollum didn't have. Then Jobs called Burroughs Corporation, located in Detroit, and made the call at its expense. The boy said that he was developing a new product and wanted to test the spare part. A few days later his order arrived by airmail. McCollum asked where Jobs got the part, and he admitted, not without pride, that it was straight from Burroughs. McCollum became angry and exclaimed, “My students shouldn’t act like that!” Jobs calmly replied: “It was too expensive to call them at your own expense. But the corporation doesn’t have a lot of money.”
Steve studied with McCollum for only a year, although the course was designed for three years. The teacher and student were too dissimilar in character. Jobs was much more interested in experimenting with lasers, which he learned about from his father. Even then, Steve and his friends staged musical light shows at parties: laser beams were reflected from the mirrors on the stereo speakers.
From the book Just for fun. The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary author Torvalds Linus From the book by Alexander Griboyedov. His life and literary activity author Skabichevsky Alexander MikhailovichChapter I Ancestors and parents of A. S. Griboyedov. – The environment in which he grew up. – The influence of society and family on his character. – Griboyedov’s home education and stay at Moscow University. – The influence of Professor Boulet. – First literary experiments Parents
PARENTS CHILDHOOD Alas, this has been the case since ancient times - parents are remembered later than others, sometimes too late. It is well known that parents are obliged and must, they are required. What I wanted, my parents could not give me, and for a long time it was unclear what I wanted. But why all
From the book FSB Admiral (Hero of Russia German Ugryumov) author Morozov Vyacheslav ValentinovichChapter 1 Parents. May God give you childhood to drink, feed, and put on a horse. Russian proverb From a personal profile: Date of birth: October 10, 1948 Place of birth: Astrakhan. Nationality Russian. Alexandra Alekseevna Ugryumova, mother: I was born in Astrakhan on August 5, 1927.
From the book Bessemer [with illustrations] author Lesnikov Mikhail PavlovichAncestors, parents, childhood, youth Modern woodcut by artist A. Soloveichik A thin, not devoid of energy, somewhat arrogant face, bordered by a wig with curls and a pigtail, looks at us from an ancient miniature. This is Henry Bessemer's father - Anton
From the book by Leonid Leonov. "His game was huge" author Prilepin ZakharChapter one PARENTS. CHARGE. CHILDHOOD When he was nine years old, he had a dream: he was walking through a flower meadow, the Lord began to bless him and stopped the movement... Sometimes it seems that the biography of Leonid Leonov should not begin with the day of his birth, the story should not begin with
From the book Unknown Shakespeare. Who, if not he [= Shakespeare. Life and works] by Brandes GeorgChapter 2. Stratford. - Parents. - Childhood William Shakespeare was the child of the village. He was born in Stratford-upon-Avon, a small town of 1400 or 1500 inhabitants, occupying a delightful position in a hilly country, with many green meadows, luxuriant bushes and trees.
From the book At the Beginning of Life (pages of memories); Articles. Performances. Notes. Memories; Prose from different years. author Marshak Samuil Yakovlevich From the book by Marlene Dietrich author Nadezhdin Nikolay Yakovlevich30. Between the past and the future She was lucky in that she safely passed the era of silent films and in Hollywood began acting immediately in sound films. Her silent films remained in her youth - there, in Germany, in a time of fruitless labors, failures and disappointments. Her success was
From the book Accomplice of the Epoch: Leonid Leonov author Prilepin ZakharChapter One Parents. Zaryadye. Childhood When he was nine years old, he had a dream: he was walking through a flower meadow, the Lord began to bless him and stopped the movement... Sometimes it seems that the biography of Leonid Leonov should not begin with the day of his birth, the story should not begin with
From Meretskov's book author Velikanov Nikolay TimofeevichMeeting with the future General Secretary The headquarters of the Southwestern Front was located in Kharkov. Get to Kharkov by railway(even from Moscow) was a problem at that time. The trains ran mainly freight - platforms with cannons, military equipment, covered wagons with horses and
From the book Unknown Lavochkin author Yakubovich Nikolay VasilievichBetween past and future An alternative to liquid rocket engines could be ramjet engines (ramjet engines). Unlike the first ones, they did not require an on-board supply of oxidizer. Considering that these liquids (with the exception of liquid oxygen) are very aggressive and toxic, then
From the book Admiral of the FSB. Documentary novel author Morozov VyacheslavChapter 1 PARENTS. CHILDHOOD May God give you water, feed you, and put you on a horse. Russian proverb From a personal profile: Date of birth: October 10, 1948 Place of birth: Astrakhan Nationality: Russian Alexandra Alekseevna Ugryumova, mother: I was born in Astrakhan on August 5, 1927. The most
From the book to Neptune on the altar author Ovsyannikova Lyubov BorisovnaPart 1. Meeting with the future There were no boys named Yura in our class, just as there were none among the younger children and among the older schoolchildren. I had never seen it before, and it seemed mysteriously beautiful, alien, unsolved to me. And when unexpectedly
