Steve Jobs: Education, Innovation, and the Shaping of a Tech Icon
Steven Paul Jobs was an American businessman, co-inventor, and investor. He is widely considered a visionary and a genius, he oversaw the launch of such revolutionary products as the iPod and the iPhone. One thing about Jobs' life that gets folks wondering is his schooling. People often ask if he went to college and how that shaped his career. This article explores the educational journey of Steve Jobs, from his early interests and brief college stint to the experiences that shaped his innovative spirit and ultimately contributed to his monumental success.
Early Life and Influences
Steven Paul Jobs was born on February 24, 1955, in San Francisco, California. His unwed biological parents, Joanne Schieble and Abdulfattah Jandali, put him up for adoption. His adoptive parents, Clara and Paul Jobs, lived in Mountain View. The Santa Clara county, south of the Bay Area, became known as Silicon Valley in the early 1950s after the sprouting of myriads of semi-conductor companies in the area. As a result, young Steve Jobs grew up in a neighborhood filled with engineers working on electronics and other gizmos in their garages on weekends. This shaped his interest in the field as he grew up. Jobs and his father would work on electronics in the family garage, and as a teen, Jobs spent his free time at Hewlett-Packard, where he befriended computer club guru Steve Wozniak.
Reed College: A Brief Encounter
Five years later, when Steve Jobs reached college age, he told his parents he wanted to enroll in Reed College - an expensive liberal arts college up in Oregon. Even though the tuition fees were astronomical for the poor couple, they had promised their son's biological parents he would get a college education, so they relented. In 1972, he attended Reed College in Portland, Oregon, which was more than 500 miles away from the Bay Area . Steve had attended Reed College since it was the only college he really liked. After a visit, he decided to only want to attend that college. Now, Reed was no joke-it had a rep for a well-rounded education and a smart bunch of folks. Jobs' parents footed the bill despite it being a stretch, hoping it'd set him up for big things.
However, after just one semester, Jobs dropped out of Reed College without telling his parents. He later explained this was because he did not want to spend his parents' money on an education that seemed meaningless to him. He recalled that "I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure that out." But here's the twist: Jobs didn't stick around long. After just one term, he called it quits. Why? Well, for starters, he found the structured school vibe too tight. The courses didn't click with what he wanted to learn or where he saw himself going. Plus, the strain on his folks' finances weighed heavy on him. Dropping out seemed like the best way to lighten that load and chase his own dreams.
The Unconventional Education: Auditing Classes and Seeking Enlightenment
Even though Jobs bailed on the official college scene, he didn't ditch learning altogether. He hung around Reed, sitting in on classes that sparked his interest. He continued to attend by auditing his classes, including a course on calligraphy that was taught by Robert Palladino. Jobs later explained that, since he had dropped out and didn't have to take normal classes, he decided to take a calligraphy class. "I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle…and I found it fascinating." At the time, he thought that his interest was just in fun, without "even a hope of any practical application in my life."
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A few months later, Steve returned to California to look for a job. He was hired at the young video game maker Atari, and used his wages to make a trip to India with one of his college friends, Dan Kottke, in order to 'seek enlightenment'. In 1974, he traveled through India, seeking enlightenment before later studying Zen Buddhism. During this time period, Jobs and Brennan both became practitioners of Zen Buddhism through the Zen master Kōbun Chino Otogawa.
The Birth of Apple and a New Trajectory
Leaving Reed College was just the start of Jobs' wild journey into the tech world. Back in California, he dove into the tech hustle. He did odd jobs, tried out different ideas, and linked up with Steve Wozniak, a tech whiz he'd known for ages. Woz, whose interest in electronics had grown stronger, was regularly attending meetings of a group of early computer hobbyists called the Homebrew Computer Club. They were the real pioneers of personal computing, a collection of radio jammers, computer professionals and enlightened amateurs who gathered to show off their latest prowess in building their own personal computer or writing software. The knowledge that Woz gathered at the Homebrew meetings, as well as his exceptional talent, allowed him to build his own computer board - simply because he wanted a personal computer for himself. Steve Jobs took interest, and he quickly understood that his friend's brilliant invention could be sold to software hobbyists, who wanted to write software without the hassle of assembling a computer kit.
Jobs and Wozniak conceived a series of user-friendly personal computers. Their first model, the Apple I, earned them $774,000, and revenues grew to $139 million in the years following the release of the Apple II. in 1976, right out of Jobs' garage. That move shook up tech like nobody's business and put Jobs on the map big time. The two decided on the name "Apple" after Jobs returned from the All One Farm commune in Oregon and told Wozniak about his time in the farm's apple orchard. Jobs originally planned to produce bare printed circuit boards of the Apple I and sell them to computer hobbyists for $50 each.
Lessons from College: Typography and Design
However, it turned out differently, with world-transforming consequences. "When we were designing the first Macintosh computer, [what I learned in that class] all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac." He added that, since Windows copied the Mac, it's likely that no personal computer would have the elegant typography that they all now share if Jobs had not dropped in on that college calligraphy class during his free time of intellectual soul-searching.
Later, he credited it with inspiring the slick fonts that made Apple products so stylish. That artsy touch played a big part in how Macs looked and how easy they were to use.
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Apple's Rise, Fall, and Triumphant Return
In 1980, Apple Computer became a publicly traded company with a market value of $1.2 billion on the very first day of trading. Apple's success attracted the attention of the computer giant IBM, which until then was still only selling mainframe computers to large companies. A crash project was started and in August 1981, the IBM PC entered the personal computer market. It was the biggest threat yet to Apple, whose reputation was being put into question after the flop of the Apple III in 1980. The following year Jobs purchased an animation company from George Lucas, which later became Pixar Animation Studios.
In May 1985, Steve Jobs started trying to convince some directors and top executives at Apple that Sculley should go. Instead, many of them talked to Sculley, who took the matter to the board of directors. Steve was aghast: Apple was his life, and he was effectively kicked out of it. As a result, Steve Jobs resigned from Apple and sold all but one of his Apple shares in disgust. He went ahead with his plan anyway, and incorporated NeXT.
Business wasn't all sunshine and roses at Apple. In the decade following Steve's departure, the computer maker had milked all the cash it could from the Macintosh and its successors, surfing on the wave of the desktop publishing revolution that the Mac and the laser printer had made possible. Eventually, Amelio chose to buy NeXTSTEP, NeXT's operating system - and agreed to buy the company for $400 million (roughly equivalent to $670 million today). In August 1997, Jobs took the stage at Macworld Boston to explain his plan for Apple: he had gotten rid of the old board of directors, and made a deal with Microsoft to settle patent disputes and invest $150 million in the struggling Silicon Valley icon. Introduced in May 1998, it was Apple's first truly innovative product since the original Macintosh of 1984. Its translucent design blew away the whole PC industry, which had failed to produce anything but black or beige boxes for over a decade. Moreover, it was a hot seller, and put the company's finances back in the black.
The Pixar Chapter
To understand how Steve Jobs got out of his nadir, let's go back eight years earlier, in late 1985. At the time, George Lucas, who was in the middle of an expensive divorce, was selling the computer graphics division of his Lucasfilm empire. Steve Jobs had millions in the bank, after having sold all his Apple stock, and was interested. In early 1986, he bought the small group of computer scientists, and incorporated a new company: Pixar.
Although he had used his personal money to fund Pixar for nine years, Jobs had never been implicated that much in the company, which was always more of a 'hobby' to him compared to NeXT. But by 1995, NeXT had more or less tanked, whereas Pixar was obviously going to benefit widely from the Disney marketing machine and make a hit with its movie, Toy Story. Steve understood this new momentum full well: he planned to take Pixar public the week following the release of the movie, in November 1995. He was right, and Toy Story's box-office success was only surpassed by the Pixar stock's success on Wall Street.
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The Legacy of Innovation
Critics started to believe in Steve Jobs's ability to run Apple when he unveiled his first great product, the iMac. The iconic iMac also played a key role in bringing back tons of developers to the Mac platform. Design innovations continued throughout 1998 and 1999 with the colored iMacs and the iBook, Apple's consumer notebook. At Macworld in January 2000, Steve Jobs made two significant announcements: first, he demoed Aqua, the graphics-intensive user interface that Apple would use in its next-generation operating system derived from NeXTSTEP, Mac OS X. Second, he announced he had accepted the Apple board's offer, and became the company's CEO, dropping the 'interim' from his title. It was quite controversial, as he remained CEO of Pixar, another public company.
After Steve Jobs stepped down from his post as Apple's CEO, his innovative career was enthusiastically celebrated by the media and public alike. Starting with his founding of Apple Computer when he was in his early twenties, Jobs has left his mark on the personal computer, the laptop, the mobile phone, the tablet computer, recorded music, film animation, and several other communication technologies that have brought the people of the world closer together.
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