Steven Paul Jobs, an orphan, was adopted by Paul and Clara Jobs of Mountain View, Calif., in February 1955. After the family relocated to Los Altos, Calif., Jobs attended Homestead High School and after school went to lectures at the Hewlett-Packard electronics firm in nearby Palo Alto. With characteristic boldness, he approached the president, William Hewlett, to request parts for a frequency counter that he needed for a school project. Hewlett gave him the parts and a job as well, hiring him as a summer employee. In 1972 Jobs graduated from high school and entered Reed College in Portland, Ore. Although he dropped out of his program after one semester, he stayed on campus for a year while taking classes in philosophy and immersing himself in the counterculture. Among other activities, he practiced meditation and studied the ‘I Ching', the Chinese book on divination and fortune-telling.

In 1974 Jobs took a position as a video-game designer at Atari, Inc. After saving his salary for several months he left for India, where he traveled with a friend from Reed in search of spiritual enlightenment. Upon returning to California in the autumn of 1974, Jobs began attending meetings of the Homebrew Computer Club, a group of young computer enthusiasts led by Wozniak, an employee of Hewlett-Packard whom Jobs had met during his time there. Wozniak, an engineering whiz with a penchant for creating electronic gadgets, agreed to team up with Jobs, who lacked Wozniak's technical facility but had an eye for marketability, to pursue their goal of getting computers into the hands of everyday people. They designed their first computer in Jobs's bedroom and built the prototype in his family's garage. Encouraged by a local electronics retailer that ordered 25 machines, Jobs and Wozniak scraped together a small capital base of 1,300 dollars and begged for credit from local electronics suppliers in order to launch their first production line. Jobs suggested Apple as a name for the new enterprise, in memory of a summer he had spent as an orchard worker in Oregon.

The company introduced Apple I, as their initial offering was named, to the public in 1976. Notable for its essential simplicity and compactness, Apple I was the first single-board computer with a built-in video interface and onboard read only memory (ROM), which enabled the machine to load other programs from an external source. Although Apple I was chiefly of interest to hobbyists, the next year Jobs and Wozniak brought out Apple II, which was intended for beginners and general computer users. In a bold move, Jobs encouraged independent programmers to develop applications for the Apple II, which resulted in a library of thousands of software titles for work and leisure. The Apple II proved to be a breakthrough, setting the standard in personal computers and causing Apple's market value to skyrocket. By the inception of the trouble-plagued Apple III in 1980, however, Apple was facing competition from IBM's PCs (personal computers), which used Microsoft's operating system and software.

Jobs moved into the chairman position in the early 1980s, when Apple was still growing rapidly. With the introduction of the Macintosh in 1984, the company revolutionized the home-computer industry. The Macintosh was praised for its unprecedented user-friendliness: instead of having to type complex commands on a keyboard, users could command the computer by using a device called a mouse to point and click on easily identifiable icons on the screen. Jobs also linked the laser printer with Apple's computers, ushering in the age of desktop publishing. Jobs's belief that Apple's computers should remain incompatible with IBM's, however, eroded the company's prospects.

A bitter power struggle within Apple's managerial ranks led to the resignations of Wozniak in February and Jobs in September of 1985. (Jobs's ouster began in May, when the board of directors backed John Sculley, whom Jobs had recruited from PepsiCo, Inc., to become Apple's president and CEO in 1983, in a battle that stripped Jobs of his daily management responsibilities.) Jobs rebounded quickly and formed NeXT Software, Inc., based in Redwood City, Calif., with his own money, 100 million dollars from Canon, Inc., and a sizable investment from billionaire H. Ross Perot. NeXT's first computer, a powerful but expensive and widely incompatible machine, hit the market in 1989. NeXT languished at first, but by the early 1990s its revenues had grown as Jobs worked feverishly to convince skeptics that his company was a viable alternative to Microsoft.

After Jobs's departure, Apple's market share continued to erode in favor of companies whose computers used Intel Corporation's microchips and Microsoft's Windows operating system. As Apple continued to struggle under new leadership in the mid-1990s, calls for Jobs's return began. Joseph A. Graziano, then the company's chief financial officer, was convinced that the company needed a visionary like Jobs to spearhead its recovery, which he indicated before the board of directors before resigning in the fall of 1996. Meanwhile, Jobs had received calls from groups with plans to buy Apple. Rather than participate in a hostile takeover of the company he cofounded, Jobs renewed his affiliation with Apple in December 1996 by selling it NeXT Software, Inc., for 424 million dollars. Apple, which saw NeXT's acclaimed operating system as the long-awaited follow-up to its own operating system, also hired Jobs as a part-time consultant to chief executive officer (CEO) Gilbert Amelio.

Jobs's profile at Apple grew in July 1997, when the board of directors ousted an embattled Amelio and bowed to Jobs's strong recommendations that Apple take steps to reverse the policies implemented during Amelio's tenure. Although Jobs refused the titles of chairman and CEO, he agreed to serve as Apple's interim CEO while the board searched for a full-time replacement. In his new role, Jobs removed the board of directors and virtually handpicked a new one. He also made the decision to stop licensing the Macintosh operating system to makers of low-cost Macintosh clones, which had been an integral part of Apple's comeback strategy. In addition, in a move designed to recall what he called the egalitarian spirit under which Apple was founded, Jobs instituted cost-cutting measures that included ending cash bonuses for executives, cutting severance pay, and eliminating employee sabbaticals.

Jobs's saved his most shocking move, however, for Apple's Macworld trade show of August 1997. Backlit by a movie-style screen emblazoned with the smiling image of Bill Gates, Jobs announced a momentous agreement between long-time rivals Apple and Microsoft that he intended to ensure Apple's survival. (See also Computer.)

Despite vehement disapproval from many of Apple's most ardent supporters, the deal appeared to bolster the company's chances of becoming competitive once again. Jobs maintained, however, that he would lead Apple only until the board of directors found a new full-time CEO. He intended to devote more time to his position as chairman and CEO of Pixar Animation Studios, which he bought from director George Lucas in 1986. The success of Pixar's ‘Toy Story' (1995), the first animated feature film produced entirely on computer, fueled Jobs's enthusiasm for his latest venture.