Introduction:

In 1955 Steve Jobs was born in San Francisco, California and shortly after, his unwed biological parents put him up for adoption. Paul and Clara Jobs, a middle class couple who raised him in Santa Clara County, better known as Silicon Valley, adopted him. As a result, Steve Jobs grew up in a neighborhood where he was surrounded by engineers, innovation, and exposure to the cutting edge of various electronic advancements.

As a young child Jobs began to express interest in electronics and technology. After a brief stint in college and a few months in a hippy commune, he started his first job at a video game company called Atari. The chief engineer, Al Alcorn, hired him. Jobs became “one of the first fifty employees at Atari, working as a technician for $5 and hour. ‘In retrospect it was weird to hire a dropout from Reed [College],’ Alcorn recalled. ‘But I saw something in him. He was very intelligent, enthusiastic and excited about tech.’” (Isaacson Pg. 43)

In 1976, the intelligent and motivated, Steve Jobs took the knowledge he had acquired at Atari and teamed up with his good friend Steve Wozniak and started Apple as a desktop computer company. For about 10 years the two Steve’s worked together, but in the mid 1980’s tension began to rise between the business partners and Jobs left the company. From 1985 to 1995 Steve Jobs worked on various projects and at various companies such as NeXt and Pixar, but in 1996 Jobs went back to Apple and in 1997 he became Apple’s CEO.

In the mid 1990’s, business was not booming for Apple. When Steve Jobs came on as CEO he cleaned house. He hired a new board of directors, and began working on a new product. The iMac was Apple’s first innovative product in years and it was a hit. Steve Jobs had a feeling that a sleek, simple, innovative design with fun colors would rejuvenate the tired company, and he was