When the final biographies are written Jobs may be remembered as much for

When the final biographies are written, Jobs may be remembered as much for introducing the world to a new way of listening to music – and taking us beyond the CD – as for his pioneering of the personal computer.. Wall Street was wary, but Jobs moved quickly to energise Apple’s products, with the introduction of iMac desktops with translucent bodies in different colours By 1998, Apple was back in profit. Prosperity has returned to the Cupertino campus.Jobs reveals little about his private life He eschews society events and politics. Ask Apple’s press people about him and they will politely demur from helping Ask us about the products, they respond, not about Jobs. At 23, he became a father to a daughter, Lisa, with a woman he did not marry. He has three more children with his wife, Laurene, whom he married in 1991 Both are vegetarians.

In contrast to his fellow computer king Gates, we know almost nothing about any philanthropic activities; however, his fortune is said to exceed $1bn.We do know what he has achieved in business, however. In 1995, Pixar released Toy Story establishing it as a Hollywood powerhouse. A year later, a stumbling Apple contacted him about coming back By early 1997, he was once more in control. In 1989, Jobs tried to do it all over again, forming a new computer company called NextStep NextStep was ultimately to be a disappointment.

But he had also used some of his fortune to buy Pixar from the Star Wars director, George Lucas.The second coming of Jobs began nearly 10 years ago. John Sculley, whom he had hired from Pepsi-Cola to be Apple’s president, engineered his ousting in 1985, claiming the company no longer had any use for him. Indeed, Jobs – Wozniak had already departed by this time – was being described as an oppressive figure in the company, prone to bullying and violent temper tantrums. At last, computers were friendly to the average user, who no longer had to type in obscure commands to carry out tasks Screen icons were born. (Microsoft sold its first Windows 1.0 system in 1985.) Jobs, always a master of marketing, propelled sales with a TV campaign featuring an athlete being chased by storm troopers past throngs of vacant-eyed workers and hurling a sledgehammer at a menacing face staring out of a screen The message was that 1984 would not be Orwell’s but Apple’s. The Apple and the PC were not compatible and market share began to slide.The greatest landmark in the company’s history came 20 years ago last month, with the launch of the Macintosh, with built-in screen and, most importantly, a mouse-and-click user interface.

Jobs once remarked: “We started out to get a computer in the hands of everyday people, and we succeeded beyond our wildest dreams.”But Jobs was about to be cast into the wilderness. An Apple II surfaced one year later and over three years amassed earnings of $139m. By the early 1980s, however, Apple had an uphill struggle competing with IBM, which had muscled into the market with the PC. To finance building them, Jobs sold his Volkswagen bus and Wozniak his prized Hewlett-Packard calculator. They called the machine Apple.The company grew quickly, decamping to a cluster of buildings in Cupertino, California, where it is still headquartered today. Soon afterwards Jobs persuaded Wozniak to join him in building a personal computer. Working out of Jobs’s garage, they got their break when a local electronics retailer ordered 25 of the rudimentary machines.