Adopted as an infant by a Northern California machinist, Jobs attended Homestead High School in Cupertino, California, where he befriended Steve Wozniak. After a brief stint at Reed College in Oregon, Jobs dropped out and trekked around India seeking spiritual enlightenment. He returned to find Wozniak working at Hewlett-Packard and building computers to impress pals in the Homebrew Computer Club. Convinced Wozniak's latest invention, the Apple I computer, would attract a wider audience than computer hobbyists, Jobs persuaded his friend to launch a business. Together the two started Apple Computers in Jobs' garage in 1976.

By building the first personal computer that appealed to businesses and the public, Apple quickly became a $335 million company that dominated the fledgling market. But by 1981, IBM had joined the race with the IBM PC and Apple began losing ground.

Meanwhile, Jobs was leading a development team that would change the face of personal computing forever. In December 1979, Jobs and his team visited the elite Xerox PARC research center, where they saw the Alto computer, a prototype which featured a graphical user interface and a mouse. Jobs' team rushed back to the office and modified specifications for the Lisa (a computer which bore the same name as Jobs' daughter). Both the Lisa, and its successor, the Macintosh, launched with a mouse and a point-and-click interface. Xerox unsuccessfully sued Apple for hijacking the graphic interface. Ironically, Apple also later sued Microsoft for using a graphic interface on its Windows operating system. Like Xerox, Apple lost the case.

Although the graphic user interface radically changed the way people thought of computers, the Macintosh fell short of its early sales predictions, and Jobs was ousted from the Macintosh team before the product became successful. In 1985, Jobs left the company. He founded NeXT Software and purchased Pixar Animation Studios from filmmaker George Lucas in 1986. Under Jobs, Pixar produced 1995’s Toy Story (the first wholly computer generated film), 1998’s A Bug's Life, and 1999’s Toy Story 2. The studio is currently in production on its fourth animated feature, Monsters Inc., which is targeted for release in 2001.

In a strange twist, Jobs was invited back to Apple in 1996 when Apple bought NeXT for $400 million. Jobs became interim CEO, and helped turn around the company's dwindling market share with the introduction of the tremendously popular iMac and iBook computer lines in the summer of 1998.