Задание 3 Ответьте на вопросы (письменно).
What are Jobs and Wozniak credited for in the computer world?
What was the value of the market when Apple Computer became a publicly traded company?
W
hy
did Jobs and Wozniak name their
own business as “Apple Computer Company”?
STEVE JOBS
Steve Jobs (Steven Paul) was born in San Francisco, California, on February 24, 1955. Smart but directionless, Jobs experimented with different pursuits before starting Apple Computers with Steve Wozniak in 1976. Apple's revolutionary products, which include the iPod, iPhone and iPad, are now seen as dictating the evolution of modern technology.
Steve was adopted at birth by Paul Reinhold Jobs (1922–1993) and Clara Jobs. The Jobs family moved from San Francisco to Mountain View, California when Jobs was five years old. Paul worked as a mechanic and a carpenter, and taught his son rudimentary electronics and how to work with his hands. Paul showed Steve how to work on electronics in the family garage, demonstrating to his son how to take apart and rebuild electronics such as radios and televisions. As a result, he became interested in it and developed a hobby of technical tinker.
Clara was an accountant who taught him to read before he went to school. Clara Jobs had been a payroll clerk for Varian Associates, one of the first high-tech firms, later known as Silicon Valley.
S. Jobs’s youth was riddled with frustrations over formal schooling. At Monta Loma Elementary school in Mountain View, he frequently played pranks on others. Though school officials recommended two grades skipping on account of his test scores, his parents agreed to skip only one grade.
Jobs then attended Cupertino Junior High and Homestead High School in Cupertino, California. At Homestead, Jobs became friends with Bill Fernandez, a neighbor who shared the same interests in electronics. Fernandez introduced Jobs to his neighbor, Steve Wozniak, a computer and electronics kid, who was also known as “Woz”. In 1969 Wozniak started creating a little computer board with Fernandez that they named “The Cream Soda Computer”, which they showed to Jobs and he seemed really interested. Wozniak stated that they called it the Cream Soda Computer because he and Fernandez drank cream soda all the time whilst they were working on it.
F
ollowing
high school graduation in 1972, Jobs was enrolled at Reed College in
Portland, Oregon. Reed was an expensive college which Paul and Clara
could ill afford. They were spending much of their life savings on
their son’s higher education. Jobs dropped out of the college after
six months and spent the next 18 months dropping in on creative
classes, including a course on calligraphy. In the commencement
address he gave at Stanford, Jobs said that, while he continued to
audit classes at Reed, he slept on the floor in friends’ dorm
rooms, returned Coke bottles for food money, and got weekly free
meals at the local Hare Krishna temple. In that same speech, Jobs
said: “If I had never dropped in on that single calligraphy course
in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or
proportionally spaced fonts.” Steve
Jobs attended Homestead High School in Cupertino California and went
to Reed College in Portland Oregon in 1972 but dropped out after only
one semester, staying on to “drop in” on courses that were
interesting for him. He took a job with video game manufacturer Atari
to save enough money for a trip to India. Back in Cupertino after the
trip he returned to Atari where his old friend Steve Wozniak was
still working. Wozniak was creating his own computer and in 1976 Jobs
presold 50 of the yet unmade computers to a local store and managed
to buy the components on credit solely on the
APPLE COMPUTER.
In
1972, Wozniak designed his own version of the classic video
game, Pong. After finishing it, Wozniak gave the board to Steve Jobs, who then took the game down to Atari Inc. in Los Gatos, California. Atari thought that Jobs had built it and gave him a job as a technician. Atari’s co-founder Nolan Bushnell later described him as “difficult but valuable”, pointing out that he was very often the smartest guy in the room, and he would let people know that. S. Jobs
was assigned to create a circuit board for the arcade video game Breakout. According to Bushnell, Atari offered $100 for each chip that was eliminated in the machine. Jobs had little specialized knowledge of circuit board design and made a deal with Wozniak to split the fee between them if Wozniak could minimize the number of chips. Much to the amazement of Atari engineers, Wozniak reduced the number of chips by 50.
Wozniak had designed a low-cost digital “blue box” to generate the necessary tones to manipulate the telephone network, allowing free long-distance calls. Jobs decided that they could make money selling it. The clandestine sales of the illegal “blue boxes” went well, and perhaps planted the seed in Jobs’s mind that electronics could be fun and profitable. S. Jobs, in a 1994 interview, recalled that it took six months for him and Wozniak to figure out how to build the “blue boxes”. Jobs said that if not for the “blue boxes”, there would have been no Apple. He states it showed them that they could take on large companies and beat them.
Jobs began attending meetings of the Homebrew Computer Club with Wozniak. He greatly admired Edwin H. Land, the inventor of instant photography and founder of Polaroid Corporation, and would explicitly model his own career after that of Land’s. In 1976, Jobs and Wozniak formed their own business, which they named “Apple Computer Company” in remembrance of a happy summer Jobs had spent picking apples. At first they started off selling circuit boards. In 1976, Wozniak single-handedly invented the Apple I computer. After Wozniak showed it to Jobs, who suggested that they would sell it. They formed Apple Computer in the garage of Jobs’s parents in order to sell the product. They received funding from a semi-retired Intel product marketing manager and engineer Mike Markkula. Scott McNealy, one of the co-founders of Sun Microsystems, said that Jobs broke a ‘glass age ceiling’ in Silicon Valley because he had created a very successful company at a young age.
In 1978, Apple recruited Mike Scott from National Semiconductor to serve as CEO for what turned out to be several turbulent years. In 1983, Jobs lured John Sculley away from Pepsi-Cola to serve as Apple’s CEO, asking, “Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water, or do you want a chance to change the world?” In the early 1980s, Jobs was among the first to see the commercial potential of Xerox PARC’s mouse-driven graphical user interface, which led to the creation of the Apple Lisa. A year later, Apple completed the Macintosh.
VOCABULARY
pursuit – поиск, стремление, занятие
commencement – начало, старт
rudimentary – элементарный, начальный
clandestine – нелегальный, тайный
circuit board – печатная плата
arcade – аркада
recruit – нанимать на работу
low-cost – бюджетный
single-handedly – единолично
chip – микросхема, чип
mouse-driven interface – интерфейс, управляемый мышью
video game manufacturer – производитель видео-игр