119 Facts About Steve Jobs: Awards, Career, Childhood And More

Steve Jobs was a celebrity inventor known worldwide.

He was popular as the creator of the Apple brand of electronics. However, there is more to the person than meets the eye.

Steve Jobs' life has been an interesting inspiration for many including his various inventions. He had a personality that was quite captivating and his speeches have helped to motivate many a youth. He is still a legend in the field of innovative technology and a role model for the emerging brilliant minds in this field of knowledge.

Steve Jobs was considered by a majority of the population as a genius mind who transformed the world of modern technology with his ideas and inventions. Although he was not born in a wealthy household, Jobs earned millions later on in his life.

This was possible only through the use of his brilliant mind and hard work. Read on to find more surprising facts about Steve Jobs' personal and professional life that you may not have known before.

Once you finish reading this fun facts article, you might also be interested in reading the articles Adam Levine facts and Blake Shelton facts, here at Kidadl.

Fun Facts About Steve Jobs

The life of Steve Jobs is a fascinating study for people who have found his personality quite different from others and inspiring in many ways. He was someone who had a unique personality and a vision that was not easily understood by many people. Therefore, facts about him are an interesting read.

Steve Jobs believed in pescetarianism which meant that except for the meat from fish, he ate no other type of meat. This might come as a surprise to many people as it is one of the lesser-known facts about Jobs.

He was a vegetarian for most of his life and even his meals consisted of simple foods. It was later on in his life that he became a pescetarian.

Jobs was a college dropout from Reed College. He had not liked the education structure at that time. He even had a very low GPA of around 2.65.

Yet, even though he was a college dropout, that did not mean Steve Jobs didn't like studying. He educated himself informally by auditing classes. Interestingly, Jobs had once mentioned how one of the classes he audited, which were for a calligraphy course, had later inspired the focus on font and topography that you can see in the Apple products.

Since he had no formal university education, during the years that he audited the classes, Steve Jobs struggled a lot. He slept on the floor of his friends' dorms.

He ate the free meals he got from the local Hare Krishna temple and sold coke bottles to earn money. He also spent several months traveling across India and thus, adopted the belief and practices of Zen Buddhism.

Steve Jobs was in high school when he met his partner, Steve Wozniak. While Steve Wozniak was 18 years old, Steve Jobs was a mere 13 years old. Later, they co-founded Apple, the computer company, together. However, the relationship between Jobs and co-founder Steve Wozniak wasn't the best or most honest.

When Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak created the 'Breakout' game for Atari, they had initially decided to divide the money they would get out of the deal in a 50-50 ratio. However, Steve Jobs did not give a fair share to co-founder Steve Wozniak.

Where the actual amount Atari gave for the game was $5000, Steve Jobs told Steve Wozniak that they got only $700. According to the amount mentioned by Jobs then, Wozniak got $350 as his share, while Jobs accumulated $4650 for himself.

Moreover, apart from these two, there was a third co-founder of Apple Co. His name was Ronald Wayne. He was the one who designed the first logo for the Apple computer company. However, shortly after he joined the company, he resigned and gave up his 10% stake in the company to the other two partners for only $800.

Jobs did not have a good relationship with the media as he wanted to have complete control of Apple's image in the public. An example of this involves the company issuing a sue order against Nicholas Ciarelli, a teenager who was the author of the 'Think Secret' blog.

He was sued for revealing secrets and rumors about new Apple products.

Steve Jobs was a tough boss and had very contrasting thoughts towards the work he did. Although Apple sold personal computers, Jobs disliked them as he had once mentioned to one of his friends.

A weirdly interesting fact about Jobs is that he never put a number plate on his Mercedes.

He drove it for years and was never fined. This was possible because of a rule in California that states a driver has six months to put on a number plate and Jobs just kept changing his car with the exact same model every few months.

Moreover, according to Wozniak, Jobs never learned the coding language. He also actually had a team dedicated to packaging in order to experience the emotional responses from opening a package, studying these responses, and applying the knowledge to create better packaging for Apple products.

Facts About Steve Jobs' Career

It is a widely known fact that Steve Jobs, along with Steve Wozniak, founded the Apple company. However, Jobs' career didn't just involve the currently most valuable company in the world. He made many other contributions in the professional world.

Steve Jobs founded the Apple company in April 1976 along with Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne. Although the first Apple computer product, the Apple I computer, did not get much popularity.

The second one, the Apple II computer was very popular. This was the eight-bit personal computer invented primarily by Wozniak, which was first sold in 1977. The series for this computer was produced until 1993, after which it was discontinued.

In 1985, Steve Jobs was removed from the Apple company although, he became the CEO of Apple again in 1997. During the short period where Jobs wasn't working with Apple, he had tried to become a civilian astronaut and fly in a space shuttle, however, his request was rejected.

He also thought about establishing a computer company in the Soviet Union.

During the break, Steve Jobs also used his creativity and bought an animation studio. The animation studio, which people now know as Pixar, was later purchased by the Walt Disney company. When Jobs went back to Apple, he rebuilt the company's reputation which was failing in his absence.

Steve Jobs, while working at Apple, only earned $1 as his annual salary. This amount was designated by himself. However, he wasn't poor as he was one of the major shareholders and also had earnings from the animation studio. Moreover, he also had several patents under his name.

Jobs was 12 when he worked for the Hewlett Packard (HP) company. It is said that he had once called the co-founder of Hewlett Packard (HP), Bill Hewlett, and asked for some spare parts to be given to him as he wanted to build a frequency computer.

Even though Steve Jobs died in 2011 due to pancreatic cancer, his main office and the nameplate outside of it still remain the same, according to the information provided by Tim Cook in an interview in 2014.

Awards Won By Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs has received many awards for his work over his lifetime. The list is as follows:

Steve Jobs, along with Steve Wozniak, was awarded the National Medal of Technology in 1985 by the then President of the United States, Ronald Reagan. Then in 1987, he was given the Jefferson Award for Public Service.

The award category of the award given to Jobs is awarded to individuals below the age of 35 years for public service. The exact award name is the 'Samuel S. Beard Award for Outstanding Public Service by an Individual 35 years or Under'.

In 1989, Steve Jobs was named the Entrepreneur of the Decade by Inc. Magazine. He received the Howard Vollum Award in 1991 from his previous college, Reed College. Then from 2004 to 2010, on five separate occasions, Jobs was part of the list of 'Time 100: Most Influential People in the World'.

Fortune Magazine named Steve Jobs as the Most Powerful Person in Business in 2007. Meanwhile, in the same year, Jobs was also admitted to the California Hall of Fame which was situated at The California Museum for History, Women and the Arts.

Interestingly, in 2012, Jobs was posthumously given the Grammy Trustees Award which is awarded to people who have been an influence in the music industry excluding the performance aspect. Steve Jobs was also posthumously awarded with Edison Achievement Award in the same year. This award was given to him because of his dedication to innovation all through his career.

Moreover, he was also added to the list of Disney Legends after his death. He received PGA Vanguard Award in 2002 and Bravo Otto Award in 2011.

Facts About Steve Jobs' Family

The family life of Steve Jobs is somewhat complex. Even so, Jobs loved his family a lot.

Steve Jobs was born in 1955 in San Francisco, California. He was actually adopted by Paul Jobs and Clara Jobs thus, the full name of Steve Jobs is actually Steven Paul Jobs. The biological father of Steve Jobs was Syrian while his biological mother was American.

Jobs' biological parents wanted his adoptive parents to have a college education. However, neither Paul nor Clara had a college education yet they became Steve Jobs' parents when they promised that he would receive a college education.

Chrisann Brennan was Steve Jobs' first girlfriend. She was a painter and an author who wrote the autobiography 'The Bite of an Apple' which depicts the relationship she had with Jobs. Although the relationship between them didn't last, they had a daughter named Lisa Brennan.

For years Jobs did not acknowledge the fact that Lisa was his daughter. However, he did so after many years and thus Lisa changed her full name to Lisa Brennan Jobs.

Interestingly, Jobs named a new Apple computer as the Apple Lisa around the time when Lisa Brennan Jobs was actually born. However, Jobs stated that Lisa just stood for Local Integrated Software Architecture.

Steve Jobs also had two siblings. Mona Simpson is the biological sister of Jobs with whom he reconnected with in the latter part of his life. Patricia Ann Jobs is his adoptive sister.

The wife of Steve Jobs was Lauren Powell. They had three children: Eve Jobs, Erin Jobs, and Reed Jobs.

Eve Jobs is the eldest daughter of Steve Jobs from his marriage to Lauren Powell. Erin Jobs is the second daughter and Reed Jobs is the youngest and only son of Steve Jobs. His family had been present at his death bed in their house in Palo Alto when he died.

Steve Jobs' Inventions

Steve Jobs was known as an inventor. He also has around 346 patents as primary, as well as co-inventor, for a range of technologies. Some of the inventions of Steve Jobs are listed below.

Jobs founded the Apple company along with Wozniak. He overlooked the invention of the Apple I computer and the Apple II computer. While Apple Lisa has already been mentioned, there is also the Macintosh computer which helped his career greatly.

Along with these, he also invented the iMac, iTunes, iPod, iPad, and the iPhone which is one of the most sought-after mobile phone brands currently.

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