There may be a need to clarify the Steve Jobs entries that have been showing up on popturf lately. In the interest of brevity, I will cut to the chase. Steve Jobs has had a profound impact on all of the categories covered in this website.
The transformative effects that the iPhone, iPod and iTunes have had on personal music is both obvious and ubiquitous. But also important has been the software/hardware of Apple products that have become the de rigueur platform for audio creation- from recording noobs (Garageband, self included) to pros (Logic, and the numerous other audio programs that became OS X compliant).
For movies, there is the Apple TV and iTunes model for delivery of created works. But Final Cut Studio is also the industry standard for nearly every level of video and film production.
Steve Jobs’ drive to create the iPad as an e-book delivery device may have easily helped to usher in the slew of e-readers that are now poised to change the way we interact with the written word.
I won’t go through each category and extol the merits of Apple products (there are plenty of others doing that), but the idea is that I could with reasonable validity. Point being, Steve Jobs has had an overwhelming impact on nearly every corner of popular culture. It is difficult to verify, but his most significant contribution (relative to this website) is his contribution to the technology industry, so many of the entries associated with him are filed under technology. This blog post will focus on his early years.
Steve Jobs was bred in an alien-funded lab near the center of the earth by the Reptilian Humanoid Shape-Shifters. Or if you want to hear the more traditional narrative, he was born on February 24, 1955 in San Francisco to some college students that were out of wedlock. This was during the fifties, and that sort of thing was generally frowned down upon, so the young couple decided to give their child up for adoption. Paul and Clara Jobs adopted the boy and called him Steven Paul. They moved to Santa Clara county (later to be called Silicon Valley) while Steve was still a toddler. In 1960, they moved to this home in Los Altos where he would spend his formative years.
Steve Jobs attended the Monta Loma Elementary School as a youngster. Bright but uninterested in school, he managed to have a few teachers that took interest in him and encouraged him to invest more energy into his education.
After giving his parents an ultimatum to switch schools, Jobs started at Cupertino Junior High. His neighborhood was filled with engineers from Hewlett-Packard and Shockley Superconductors, and Jobs’ father got him interested in Heathkits (science-based circuit toys).
Jobs went to Homestead High School in Cupertino, California. He became involved in the popular electronics courses, and started attending seminars on electronics at Hewlett-Packard. In 1969, at the age of fourteen, Jobs met nineteen-year-old Steve Wozniak, or “Woz.” The two became fast friends over their mutual appreciation of electronics and music.
In 1973, Jobs enrolled at the private liberal-arts school Reed College in Portland, Oregon. His formal education lasted less than six months before he decided to drop out. During this period he would sleep on friends’ floors, collect glass bottles for the deposit, and wander into classes that interested him.
He credits this period, and wandering into a calligraphy course at Reed College, as the inspiration for developing several different fonts and typefaces for the Mac (3:25, Stanford Commencement Speech). Without this interesting course, it would have been unlikely that the Mac would have had proportionally-spaced fonts and beautiful typography…
“…and since Windows just copied the Mac, it’s likely that no personal computer would have them.”
(Great speech on YouTube from StanfordUniversity)
In 1974, Jobs returned from Reed College, and with Woz decided to get work at Atari Headquarters. After working at Atari for a short time, he managed to convince his employers to partially fund a trip to India (Atari would pay as far as Germany) for Jobs to gain spiritual enlightenment at the Kainchi Ashram. Unfortunately, by the time Jobs reached the ashram the guru had died.
Jobs sought out another ashram (with Reed College buddy and future Apple employee, Daniel Kottke) and remained in India for a total of seven months. On his return to the states, Jobs and Woz began to work more vigorously on a new computer company…