Steve Jobs - what do you know about him?

If you were to draw up a list of the true fathers of computing and technology as it stands today, Steve Jobs would on it. He'd be very close to the top of it too. The co-founder of Apple is recognised as one of the worlds most influential business men and as shrewd an operator as you'll find. However, just how much do you know about the man credited with so much of the technology we take for granted today?

There are a lot of little gems of facts about Steve Jobs that make for very interesting reading indeed.

Childhood and family

Jobs was adopted as a baby. His early life wasn't one of luxury as his adopted parents worked hard to bring him up with the ethics of hard work. The young Steve wasn't an easy child to control either. Often in trouble, his family moved his school on one occasion to try to get their son to settle in a better environment for what was rapidly being acknowledged as a very enquiring mind.

Moving to an area in which electronics firms were major employers was to be a relocation that set the future of Jobs going in one direction only. He befriended neighbours of his parents as a child and would often be found watching them working in their garages on various electronic items.

It wasn't until later in his life, when he was a very well known businessman (and a very wealthy one by then) that Jobs discovered he had a sister. She turned out to be a very respected author (Mona Simpson).

He also denied being the father of his first child, Lisa (the name given to an Apple Mac). It was only when his daughter was older that Jobs admitted paternity.

Early success

Over time, the young Jobs linked up with a number of students who shared his passion for electronics. One such youngster was called Steve Wozniak (later to become his co-founder of Apple). The two Steves enjoyed their first success in a less than legitimate manner - they designed a 'box' that exploited a weakness in telephone systems and allowed you to make calls without charges! They sold the boxes for a few hundred dollars and made a reasonable killing from it for a while. They weren't very popular with the telecoms company though.

Remember Atari?

Steve Jobs was employed by Atari as a rather scruffy and uncoventional electronics wizard. When challenged to reduce the number of chips used in a console game he made a deal with his friend, the aforementioned Steve Wozniak, for him to tweak the hardware. The deal was that they'd split the bonus Jobs would receive for succeeding on the project.

However, ever the man with an eye for making money, Jobs lied to Wozniak about the amount he was paid. He told Wozniak he'd received $600 from Atari and therefore gave him his 50% share of $300. The truth was that he'd been paid $5,000 - something that a rather unhappy Wozniak would later discover.

The Unconventional

Jobs had only joined Atari to save up enough money to go on a spiritual journey to India - and he came back from India as a Buddhist, shaved head and all.

The man he travelled to India with, Daniel Kottke, went on to become the first ever employee of Apple.

He also became a fruitarian (now a vegetarian) and developed a thinking for 'self cleaning'. In other words, he rarely washed and didn't use deodorants of any kind - something that would become an issue to a good few people over the years until someone was brave enough to point out to him that his body odour was a problem!

He acknowledges experimenting with drugs and calls the period 'one of the two or three most important things done in [his] life'.

The Tempermental

Jobs is known to have had a somewhat firey trait in him. Employees from the 1980's have reported that encountering Jobs in a corridor or elevator would be a disaster. He'd often ask them why they weren't at their desks working, find a reason to disagree with them on anything possible or generally question whatever they were working on - whether he agreed with it or not.

Former employees have described him an erratic manager who was impossible to predict.

It is also claimed that Jobs would often take credit for the developments of other staff members (one of the best known auto-biographies on him, Steve Jobs, The Second Coming, claims that the Apple Macintosh was being developed a team leader in Apple - and that Jobs got the project scrapped and then took it over himself).

When Apple needed their first advertising agency Jobs went along to see them. These were the days when Apple were little known. The agency refused to handle their account, deeming them unsuitable or not large enough as a client. Unperturbed, or perhaps for the sheer challenge of it, Jobs made a point of calling the company every day until they agreed to take the account on.

Fortune magazine noted that 'he is considered one of Silicon Valleys leading egomaniacs'.

The Entrepeneur

Having been ousted from Apple (by the man he brough in from PepsiCo, John Sculley), Jobs set up NeXT Computer. The hardware the company developed was incredibly powerful but dismissed by most companies as being prohibitively expensive (though it did have moderate success in medical related use).

NeXT seemed destined to fail. So, Jobs did a deal with Apple whereby they bought NeXT for $429 million. That, in turn, got him back into Apple and NeXT ultimately provided the backbone for Mac OS X.

Jobs also invested $10 million in buying an arm of George Lucas 'Lucasfilm' - namely 'The Graphics Group'. This was to turn out to be one of the biggest successes of Jobs life. Few seem to realise that The Graphics Group was former name of Pixar - a giant in the field of animation. Under the control of John Lasseter (a man who Jobs brought through the company from an early stage), Pixar developed relationships with Walt Disney and went on to produce the very first true computer generated animated films.

Toy Story, A Bugs Life, Monsters Inc., Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, Cars, Ratatouille, WALL-E and 'Up' all sprang to life because of Jobs initial investment in The Graphics Group.

As time went on, Jobs relationship with the then Chief Executive of Disney, Michael Eisner, became more and more strained. In 2004 Jobs announced that Pixar would seek a new partner and wouldn't be developing productions for Disney. The reaction, because of the potential damage to Disney, was swift. Eisner, once consider one of the industries most powerful men, left Disney to be replaced by Bob Iger - who immediately set to work on repairing the relationship with Jobs.

Ultimately, Disney agreed to purchase Pixar - for a collosal $7.4 billion (remember, it was founded on $10m!).

However, the deal saw Jobs take 7% of the total shareholding in Disney - making him the single largest shareholder of one of the worlds most renown names. Jobs also joined the Disney main board and today is acknowledged to be one of the most influential figures in the motion picture world.

The Man

Jobs is a notable fan of The Beatles. He is even quoted as saying that his business model is based on The Beatles in that 'they were four guys that kept each others negative tendancies in check; they balanced each other. And the total was greater than the sum of the parts. Great things in business are not done by one person, they are done by a team of people'.

He spent years renovating an apartment in The San Remo building in New York - only to sell it to U2 lead singler Bono 20 years later, having never moved in.

He personally banned all books published by John Wiley and Sons from Apple stores - because they published an unauthorised biography about him.

Having recovered from a very rare form of pancreatic cancer, Jobs underwent a liver transplant in April 2009, from which he is said to be making excellent progress.

On that note, we sincerely hope so. Steve Jobs is a legend of the technology world. A man admired for his genius, for his flaws and for his vision. The Apple Mac, whatever you think of it nowadays, the iPod, the iPhone and Pixar - all the ultimate visions of Steve Jobs.