PMI may stand for:

Computer science[link]

• Portable Management Interface, a platform-dependent interface defined by Sun Microsystems used in network management
• pmi (unix), a command line utility for power management
• Privilege Management Infrastructure, security infrastructure to authorize users
• Product and manufacturing information, annotation shown on 3D CAD models of components and products

Companies[link]

• Pacific Market International, a company that manufacture, market and design food and beverage solutions
• Peoples Ministry Inc., Christian ministry in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, that operates Peoples Christian Academy
• Philip Morris International, international tobacco company
• Picture Music International, former division of EMI that specialised in music video releases
• Precious Moments, Inc., a company that designs and distributes Precious Moments products
• Precision Monolithics, a semiconductor manufacturing company

Economics[link]

• Passenger-mile or pmi, a unit of passenger transportation quantity
• Post merger integration, the integration phase directly after the legal merger of at least two companies
• Private medical insurance
• Private Mortgage Insurance, credit enhancement insurance
• Purchasing Managers Index, a measure of manufacturing activity
• Performance Monitoring Indices, measuring the performance of a private company for IPO
• Performance of Manufacturing Index

Locations[link]

• Palma de Mallorca Airport (IATA airport code PMI)

Mathematics[link]

• Principle of mathematical induction, method of mathematical proof
• Pointwise mutual information, measure in statistical probability theory

Organizations[link]

• People's Mujahedin of Iran, socialist political organization in exile, mostly in Iraq
• Project Management Institute, establishes Project Management ISO validated standards and policy
• Pensions Management Institute, United Kingdom professional body supporting pension management organizations
• Palang Merah Indonesia, the Indonesian Red Cross Society

Schools[link]

• Philippine Maritime Institute, a private, non-sectarian maritime school in the Philippines, and may refer to the following campuses:
  • PMI Colleges - Manila, Sta. Cruz, Manila
  • PMI Colleges - Quezon City, San Francisco del Monte, Quezon City
  • PMI College - Bohol, Tagbilaran City, Bohol

Medicine[link]

• Point of Maximum Impulse, the point on the chest where the impulse of the left ventricle is strongest
• Post-mortem interval, the time that has elapsed since a person has died

Other[link]

• Personal management interview, communication program between a manager and subordinates
• Pessimistic meta-induction, or Pessimistic induction, an argument in the philosophy of science
• Presidential Management Internship, program now known as the Presidential Management Fellows Program
• Priority Mail International, mailing service offered by the United States Postal Service
• Positive Material Identification, identification of materials by spectrographic analysis of electromagnetic interrogation
• Preventive Maintenance Inspection, a common term for scheduled servicing of electrical, electronic and mechanical equipment

This disambiguation page lists articles associated with the same title. If an internal link led you here, you may wish to change the link to point directly to the intended article.

Christopher Nolan
Nolan at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival
Born	Christopher Jonathan James Nolan (1970-07-30) 30 July 1970 (age 41) London, United Kingdom
Residence	Los Angeles, California, U.S. Highgate, London, UK
Other names	Chris Nolan
Citizenship	United Kingdom United States of America
Education	B.A. in Eng. Lit.
Alma mater	Haileybury and Imperial Service College, University College London
Occupation	Film director, screenwriter, producer
Years active	1985–present
Style	Neo-noir, Nonlinear, psychological[1]
Influenced by	Ridley Scott, Stanley Kubrick, Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles, Sergio Leone, John Carpenter, Terrence Malick, Nicolas Roeg
Home town	London, England, Chicago, Illinois
Board member of	Syncopy Films
Spouse	Emma Thomas (1997–present)
Children	4
Family	Jonathan Nolan (brother), Matthew Francis Nolan (brother)[2]
Awards	See here

Christopher Jonathan James Nolan (/ˈnoʊlən/; born 30 July 1970), also known as Chris Nolan is a British/American^[3] film director, screenwriter and producer.

He received serious notice after his second feature Memento (2000), which he wrote and directed based on a story idea by his brother, Jonathan Nolan. Jonathan went to co-write later scripts with him, including the Batman series and The Prestige. He also first collaborated with Wally Pfister, who would photograph all his subsequent films. After directing Insomnia (2002), Nolan pitched an idea for a reboot of the Batman film franchise to Warner Bros., eventually making a successful trilogy consisting of Batman Begins (2005), The Dark Knight (2008) and The Dark Knight Rises (2012).

Inception (2010) was an original screenplay by Nolan, a heist film set in the world of "shared dreaming." Nolan co-founded Syncopy Films with his wife, Emma Thomas, and they have produced all his films since The Prestige (2006).

Nolan has also worked with screenwriter David S. Goyer, film editor Lee Smith, composers David Julyan and Hans Zimmer, special effects coordinator Chris Corbould, and actors Christian Bale, Cillian Murphy, Jeremy Theobald, Tom Hardy, Ken Watanabe, and Michael Caine.

Nolan spent his childhood in the United States and England, and later studied English literature at University College London, which he chose specifically for its film-making facilities. There he made a series of short films in the college film society, and met the friends with whom he would later make Following (1998), his independent début feature.

Early life[link]

Nolan was born in London, the son of an Englishman, who worked as an advertising copywriter, and an American mother, a flight attendant.^[4][5] He has a younger brother, Jonathan, with whom he often collaborates on film scripts. As a dual citizen of the United Kingdom and the United States,^[6] he spent his childhood in both London and Chicago.^[7] Nolan found an interest in botany and "dicots" early on, until he found his father's camera. He began film-making at the age of seven using his father's Super 8 camera and his toy action figures.^[8] While living in Chicago as a child, he also made short films with Roko Belic, who would become a director and producer in his own right.

Nolan was educated at Haileybury and Imperial Service College, an independent school on Hertford Heath in Hertfordshire, England, and later read English literature at University College London. Nolan chose UCL specifically for its film-making facilities, which consisted of a "Steenbeck editing suite (real film, real spools) plus a couple of 16mm cameras".^[9] Nolan was president of the college film society from 1992 to 1994; a contemporary described him as talented and focused on learning as much as possible about the mechanics and technology of film-making.^[9] Nolan graduated from UCL in 1993, but continued to associate with the film society, friends from there would later be involved in Following. Meanwhile he earned a living by producing corporate training videos. In 1997, Nolan married Emma Thomas, his college girlfriend and long-time film producer. They have four children.^[10]

Short films[link]

Tarantella (1989) was shown on Image Union, an independent film and video showcase on the Public Broadcasting Service.

Larceny (1996) was a short film by Nolan which contained traits later to be seen in his first feature, Following. Jeremy Theobald also appeared in Larceny, a short film shot by Nolan while in the UCLU Film Society. Theobald stated "Still, it was clear Chris was different. We met through friends because he’d heard that I was interested in making films. He gave me a script for Larceny, a short that he proposed to make in black-and-white with a restricted cast, crew and equipment in the space of a weekend. It was different from any other script I’d read at college. They were often art pieces that would explore the slamming of train doors on Euston station (in the days when trains had doors that you could slam). This script was sharp, irreverent and clever. Larceny worked well and I thought as a first foray into film acting, I did okay."^[11] Larceny was funded by Nolan himself, but shot using the Society's equipment. It is considered to be one of the best shorts produced by the Society in recent generations. Filmed in black and white on an Arri 16BL, it contains some superb hand-held camera work, and a fast-paced, gripping story.^[12]

Doodlebug (1997) is a three minute film about a man chasing an insect with a shoe around a grotty flat, only to discover on killing it that it is a miniature of himself: seconds after he himself is crushed by a larger version of himself. Nolan wrote, directed, co-produced, photographed, and edited the film. Jeremy Theobald was listed as "the man" in the credits; he would later play the protagonist in Following (1998), Nolan's first feature.

Features[link]

[edit] Following

Nolan directed his first feature film, Following, in 1998. The film depicts a writer who is obsessed with following random people. Scenes are shown out of chronological order. Nolan made the film on a budget of only $6,000.^[13] He shot it on weekends, over the course of a year, working with friends he had met at the University College London film society.^[14] To conserve expensive film stock, every scene in the film was rehearsed extensively to ensure that the first or second take could be used in the final edit. Nolan directed the film from his own script, and also photographed and edited it himself.^[14] It began to receive notice after a screening at the 1998 San Francisco Film Festival, and was eventually distributed on a limited basis by Zeitgeist in 1999.

[edit] Memento and Insomnia

Emma Thomas and Christopher Nolan answer questions about Inception (2010). The husband and wife team founded Syncopy Films; she has worked as a producer on all of Nolan's pictures.

As a result of the film's success, Newmarket Films optioned the script for Nolan's next film, Memento. Memento (2000) is a critically acclaimed cult film,^[15] and was nominated for both a Golden Globe and an Academy Award (Oscar) for best screenplay. The movie is based on the short story Memento Mori, written by Christopher's brother, Jonathan Nolan. It follows widower Leonard Shelby (played by Guy Pearce) who suffers a head injury and is unable to form new memories. In keeping with this inability to know what has just happened before, the film's narrative structure runs in reverse (with an interlude between each pair of major "flashback" sequences). At the Sundance Film Festival in 1999, Nolan met Wally Pfister, after being impressed by his work on The Hi-Line (1999). They shot about a quarter of Memento in black and white, and elsewhere used colors, light and darkness to emphasize the noir nature of the story.^[16]

In 2002, Nolan directed Insomnia, an American remake of the 1997 Norwegian film of the same name, albeit with major changes in both the plot and the nature of the main character. The plot of Insomnia revolves around two Los Angeles homicide detectives that are dispatched to a small town in Alaska, where the sun does not set, to investigate the methodical murder of a local teenager. The never setting sun was a central reference point in the story, and indeed the title, and while filming in Alaska during the summer months, Nolan and Pfister opted for a natural look to evoke the landscape, and played with putting the actors in darkness or light, for instance, they asked the production designer to position the detective's bed in a certain way in relation to the window. This allowed them to move his face in and out of shadows. Pfister recounted one shot of Al Pacino, when his character was struggling with his guilt as local policemen came looking for him. Pfister explained to the actor in the darkness he would catch the "ambient bounce", but the light was eight stops over-exposed. He recalled, "I said, when you’re in the shadows, you’ll be catching the ambient bounce. If you move forward, you’ll be in this nuclear, bright melting light. He knew exactly how to play it."^[16]

[edit] Batman trilogy

In 1997, Warner Bros. put its Batman film franchise on an indefinite hiatus when the fourth installment, Batman & Robin, was released to negative reviews and disappointing box office reception. In 2003, Nolan, together with David S. Goyer, who had written Blade (1998) convinced Warner Bros. to entrust the first of a revived Batman film series to a relatively unknown director. Batman Begins was released on June 15, 2005 and became a box office hit, ranking as the eighth highest grossing film of 2005 in the United States and the ninth highest grossing worldwide. It received a very positive critical and public reception, with many ranking it as superior to Tim Burton's Batman (1989); for instance Rotten Tomatoes' wide panel gave it an 85% rating compared to 71% for Burton's film.^[17][18] Strengths of the movie included its dark and intelligent storyline, strong emphasis on character, and the predominant themes of fear and duality. At the 32nd annual Saturn Awards, Batman Begins won "Best Fantasy Film", "Best Actor" for Christian Bale, and "Best Writing" for Nolan and Goyer. The film was also nominated for the Academy Award for Best Cinematography.

In late July 2006, a sequel was officially confirmed as The Dark Knight with Nolan again directing, and Heath Ledger cast as The Joker, Batman's arch-enemy.^[19] Nolan and his brother Jonathan wrote a script, based on a treatment written by himself and David S. Goyer. The film began production in early 2007 and was released on July 16, 2008 in Australia and July 18, 2008 in the United States, to overwhelming critical acclaim: some critics calling it the greatest comic-book based movie ever made.^[20] It also had enormous box office success, setting the record for the highest-grossing weekend opening in the U.S., over $158 million, and as of October 2011 becoming the 3rd highest earning film of all time in the United States (it was the second at the time), and the sixth-highest worldwide at the time.^[21] At the 2009 Golden Globe Awards, Christopher Nolan accepted the award for Best Supporting Actor in a Motion Picture on behalf of the deceased Ledger. Nolan was nominated for the Directors Guild of America Award for Best Director for The Dark Knight. At the 81st Academy Awards, it was nominated for a total of eight Oscars, and won two, the Academy Award for Best Sound Editing, and a posthumous Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for Ledger.

Nolan is currently doing post-production on The Dark Knight Rises, a sequel to The Dark Knight and said it will be his last Batman movie and a conclusion to the story: "Without getting into specifics, the key thing that makes the third film a great possibility for us is that we want to finish our story. And in viewing it as the finishing of a story rather than infinitely blowing up the balloon and expanding the story... I'm very excited about the end of the film, the conclusion, and what we’ve done with the characters. My brother has come up with some pretty exciting stuff. Unlike the comics, these things don’t go on forever in film and viewing it as a story with an end is useful. Viewing it as an ending, that sets you very much on the right track about the appropriate conclusion and the essence of what tale we're telling. And it hearkens back to that priority of trying to find the reality in these fantastic stories."^[22][23] Warner Bros. announced the film is scheduled to be released July 20, 2012.

[edit] The Prestige

The Prestige, released on October 20, 2006, is an adaptation of the Christopher Priest novel about two rival magicians in the 19th century. It reunites Nolan with Batman Begins stars Christian Bale and Michael Caine, with Hugh Jackman playing the other lead role. The movie had a mostly positive response from critics and made over $109 million worldwide.^[24] The film was co-written with his brother, Jonathan Nolan and co-produced with his wife, Emma Thomas. The film revolves around the intense professional rivalry between two stage illusionists, their desire to develop better tricks than the other draws them into a battle of skill and technology, dominated by obsession, secrecy and duality. Like the novel before it, the film has aspects of meta-fiction and makes use of flash-back to tell parts of the story. Its title refers to the final part of a stage performance, where the performer attempts to return a vanished object before the eyes of the audience. (This usage of "prestige" is an archaic meaning that was revived by Priest for use in the book.^[25])

[edit] Inception

After the success of The Dark Knight (2008), Warner Bros. contracted Nolan to a seven-figure deal to direct Inception (2010). Nolan wrote and directed the film which was described as "a contemporary sci-fi actioner set within the architecture of the mind".^[26] Filming began in summer 2009, and Inception was released on July 16, 2010 to largely positive reviews and became a box office hit.^[27]

Writing in Senses of Cinema, Ian Allen Paul placed Inception within a trend in modern American film which treats themes of simulation and "meta-reality".^[28] Exploration of the subjectivity of experience, and questioning the reality of the material world had been explored in the preceding decade in The Matrix (1999), eXistenZ (1999), in Paprika (2006 film) and Charlie Kaufman’s Baudrillard-inspired Synecdoche, New York (2008), and have existed long before in Western philosophy and post-modernism. Nolan's framework in Inception is lightly different to other films: characters sedate themselves, connect to a machine and can inhabit a shared dream space built by one of them, "the architect". The world is constantly evolving as each character's movements affects the shared environment.^[28]

During post-production on Inception, Nolan gave an interview for These Amazing Shadows, a documentary spotlighting film appreciation and preservation by the National Film Registry. He agreed to do the interview after speaking with Doug Blush, the producer, at a piano recital featuring his son and Blush's daughter.^[29]

[edit] Man of Steel

On March 10, 2010, Nolan confirmed that he and David Goyer have been working on an idea for a Superman film. Nolan says, "He basically told me, 'I have this thought about how you would approach Superman.' I immediately got it, loved it and thought: That is a way of approaching the story I’ve never seen before that makes it incredibly exciting. I wanted to get Emma and I involved in shepherding the project right away and getting it to the studio and getting it going in an exciting way… A lot of people have approached Superman in a lot of different ways. I only know the way that has worked for us that’s what I know how to do." Although Zack Snyder is directing,^[30] Nolan will have significant creative input in the process.^[22]

Future projects[link]

[edit] Mr. Hughes

Originally scheduled for production in 2004, Nolan's film about Howard Hughes was delayed due to the release of Martin Scorsese's The Aviator (2004); Nolan feels that making it ten years after The Aviator would be more suitable as people would have forgotten about Scorsese's rendition. Nolan described the screenplay as being "The best thing I ever wrote...it's going to be a very, very unusual script and a very unusual movie."^[31] He described how the film will focus on Hughes's later life which was not covered in depth in Scorsese's film, "We’ll meet the Howard Hughes who spent much of 1948 sitting naked in a bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel with only a pink dinner napkin covering his genitals as he screened movies from his studio, RKO Pictures, and ran up an $11 million tab; the Hughes who — obsessed with food safety — once bought every franchise restaurant chain in his home state of Texas, and who was similarly so concerned about air quality that he installed an aircraft filtration system in his 1954 Chrysler New Yorker, taking up its entire trunk; the Howard Hughes who had his hair cut and nails trimmed only once a year, and who was seemingly as addicted to Baskin Robbins Banana Ripple ice cream as he was to regular codeine injections; the Hughes who at the end of his life considered only Mormons trustworthy enough to be let into his inner circle."^[32][33] The script would be based on Citizen Hughes: The Power, the Money and the Madness, a biography of the industrialist by Michael Drosnin.

[edit] The Keys To The Street

Gemma Arterton showed interest in starring in The Keys to the Street, based on a Ruth Rendell novel that was adapted by Nolan. Christopher Nolan had adapted the book into a screenplay which he originally planned to direct for Fox Searchlight, but moved on to make Batman Begins at Warner Bros instead. The film has since been deemed dead until interest recently re-appeared for it. It is unknown whether Nolan will direct the script though he has said that he probably would not given similarities between it and his previous films.^[34] The project is currently "in development" and not planned for production.

Recurring collaborators[link]

• Nolan often casts the same actors in different films. Christian Bale, Michael Caine, Cillian Murphy, Jeremy Theobald, Tom Hardy, Ken Watanabe and Larry Holden are among his more frequent acting collaborators.
• Nolan's wife Emma Thomas has produced most of his films, with the exception of Memento.
• Lee Smith has been Nolan's editor since Batman Begins, with Dody Dorn editing Memento and Insomnia.
• Wally Pfister has served as cinematographer for all of Nolan's films starting with Memento.
• David Julyan composed music for Following, Memento, Insomnia, and The Prestige, while Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard provided music for Batman Begins and The Dark Knight. Zimmer scored Inception, and The Dark Knight Rises, without Howard.
• Production designer Nathan Crowley has worked with Nolan since Insomnia (with the exception of Inception).
• From Batman Begins, Nolan has been collaborating with special effects supervisor Chris Corbould, stunt coordinator Tom Struthers and visual effects supervisor Paul Franklin (from Double Negative).

Filmography[link]

Feature films[link]

Short films[link]

Reception[link]

As of October 2011^[update], Nolan's films have earned a total over nearly USD$ 1.2 billion at the North American box office, according to boxofficemojo.com. The variance is large: his independent debut, Following, was mostly shown at film festivals and earned $48,482 in just two theatres, while The Dark Knight earned $533,345,358 in 4,366 cinemas.^[35]

Critical[link]

Awards and nominations[link]

Publications[link]

• Nolan, Christopher"Charisma as Natural as Gravity". Christopher Nolan. Newsweek. 2008-01-26. A memoir of Heath Ledger
• Nolan, C. (Author); Nolan, Jonah (Preface) (2010), Inception: The Shooting Script, Insight Editions, ISBN 1-60887-015-4 
• Nolan, C. (2001), Memento & Following, Faber and Faber, ISBN 0-571-22994-8 
• Nolan, C.; Goyer, David, S. (2005), Batman Begins: The Screenplay, Faber and Faber, ISBN 0-571-21047-3 

See also[link]

• Syncopy Films

References[link]

External links[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Christopher Nolan

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Christopher Nolan

• Christopher Nolan at the Internet Movie Database
• Christopher Nolan at AllRovi
• Christopher Nolan at Yahoo! Movies
• NolanFans.com Website dedicated to news and information on Nolan's work
• Telegraph.co.uk Interview with Christopher Nolan and Christian Bale

Steve Jobs
Jobs holding a white iPhone 4 at Worldwide Developers Conference 2010
Born	Steven Paul Jobs (1955-02-24)February 24, 1955[1][2] San Francisco, California, U.S.[1][2]
Died	October 5, 2011(2011-10-05) (aged 56)[2] Palo Alto, California, U.S.
Cause of death	Pancreatic cancer
Nationality	American
Ethnicity	Syrian, German[3]
Alma mater	Reed College (dropped out)
Occupation	Co-founder, Chairman and CEO, Apple Inc. Co-founder and CEO, Pixar Co-founder and CEO, NeXT Inc.
Years active	1974–2011
Board member of	The Walt Disney Company[4] Apple Inc.
Religion	Zen Buddhism
Spouse	Laurene Powell (1991–2011, his death)
Children	Lisa Brennan-Jobs Reed Erin Eve
Relatives	Mona Simpson (sister)
Signature

Steven Paul "Steve" Jobs (/ˈdʒɒbz/; February 24, 1955 – October 5, 2011)^[5][6] was an American businessman, designer and inventor. He is best known as the co-founder, chairman, and chief executive officer of Apple Inc. Through Apple, he was widely recognized as a charismatic pioneer of the personal computer revolution^[7][8] and for his influential career in the computer and consumer electronics fields. Jobs also co-founded and served as chief executive of Pixar Animation Studios; he became a member of the board of directors of The Walt Disney Company in 2006, when Disney acquired Pixar.

In the late 1970s, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak engineered one of the first commercially successful lines of personal computers, the Apple II series. 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 and, one year later, the Macintosh. During this period he also led efforts that would begin the desktop publishing revolution, notably through the introduction of the LaserWriter and the associated PageMaker software.^[9]

After losing a power struggle with the board of directors in 1985, Jobs left Apple and founded NeXT, a computer platform development company specializing in the higher-education and business markets. In 1986, he acquired the computer graphics division of Lucasfilm, which was spun off as Pixar.^[10] He was credited in Toy Story (1995) as an executive producer. He remained CEO and majority shareholder at 50.1 percent until its acquisition by The Walt Disney Company in 2006,^[11] making Jobs Disney's largest individual shareholder at seven percent and a member of Disney's Board of Directors.^[12][13]

After difficulties developing a new Mac operating system, Apple purchased NeXT in 1996 in order to use NeXTSTEP as the basis for what became Mac OS X.^[14] As part of the deal Jobs was named Apple advisor. As Apple floundered, Jobs took control of the company and was named "interim CEO" in 1997, or as he jokingly referred to it, "iCEO". Under his leadership, Apple was saved from near bankruptcy, and became profitable by 1998.^[15][16] Over the next decade, Jobs oversaw the development of the iMac, iTunes, iPod, iPhone, and iPad, and on the services side, the company's Apple Retail Stores, iTunes Store and the App Store.^[17] The success of these products and services, providing several years of stable financial returns, propelled Apple to become the world's most valuable publicly traded company in 2011.^[18] The reinvigoration of the company is regarded by many commentators as one of the greatest turnarounds in business history.^[19][20][21]

In 2003, Jobs was diagnosed with a pancreas neuroendocrine tumor. Though it was initially treated, he reported a hormone imbalance, underwent a liver transplant in 2009, and appeared progressively thinner as his health declined.^[22] On medical leave for most of 2011, Jobs resigned as Apple CEO in August that year and was elected Chairman of the Board. He died of respiratory arrest related to his metastatic tumor on October 5, 2011.

Jobs has received a number of honors and public recognition for his influence in the technology and music industries. He has widely been referred to as "legendary", a "futurist" or simply "visionary",^{[23][24][25][26]} and has been described as the "Father of the Digital Revolution",^[27] a "master of innovation",^[28][29] and a "design perfectionist".^[30][31]

Early life and education[link]

Steven Paul Jobs was born in San Francisco on February 24, 1955 to two university students, Joanne Carole Schieble and Syrian-born Abdulfattah "John" Jandali (Arabic: عبدالفتاح جندلي‎), who were both unmarried at the time.^[32] Jandali, who was teaching in Wisconsin when Steve was born in 1955, said he had no choice but to put the baby up for adoption because his girlfriend's family objected to their relationship.^[33] The baby was adopted at birth by Paul Reinhold Jobs (1922–1993) and Clara Jobs (1924–1986), an Armenian-American^[3] whose maiden name was Hagopian.^[34] Later, when asked about his "adoptive parents," Jobs replied emphatically that Paul and Clara Jobs "were my parents."^[35] He stated in his authorized biography that they "were my parents 1,000%."^[36] Unknown to him, his biological parents would subsequently marry (December 1955), have a second child Mona Simpson in 1957, and divorce in 1962.^[36]

The Jobs family moved from San Francisco to Mountain View, California when Steve was five years old.^[1][2] The parents later adopted a daughter, Patti. Paul was a machinist for a company that made lasers, and taught his son rudimentary electronics and how to work with his hands.^[1] The father 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, Steve became interested in and developed a hobby of technical tinkering.^[37]

Clara was an accountant^[35] who taught him to read before he went to school.^[1] Clara Jobs had been a payroll clerk for Varian Associates, one of the first high-tech firms in what became known as Silicon Valley.^[38]

Jobs's youth was riddled with frustrations over formal schooling. At Monta Loma Elementary school in Mountain View, he was a prankster whose fourth-grade teacher needed to bribe him to study. Jobs tested so well, however, that administrators wanted to skip him ahead to high school—a proposal his parents declined.^[39]

Jobs then attended Cupertino Junior High and Homestead High School in Cupertino, California.^[2] At Homestead, Jobs became friends with Bill Fernandez, a neighbor who shared the same interests in electronics. Fernandez introduced Jobs to another, older computer whiz kid, Stephen Wozniak (also known as "Woz"). In 1969 Woz started building a little computer board with Fernandez that they named “The Cream Soda Computer”, which they showed to Jobs; he seemed really interested.^[40] Jobs frequented after-school lectures at the Hewlett-Packard Company in Palo Alto, California, and was later hired there, working with Wozniak as a summer employee.^[41]

Following high school graduation in 1972, Jobs 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.^[40] Jobs dropped out of college after six months and spent the next 18 months dropping in on creative classes, including a course on calligraphy.^[42] He continued auditing classes at Reed while sleeping on the floor in friends' dorm rooms, returning Coke bottles for food money, and getting weekly free meals at the local Hare Krishna temple.^[43] Jobs later 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."^[43]

Early career[link]

This section may be in need of reorganization to comply with Wikipedia's layout guidelines. Please help by editing the article to make improvements to the overall structure. (March 2012)

Homebrew Computer Club Newsletter, September 1976

In 1974, Jobs took a job as a technician at Atari, Inc. in Los Gatos, California.^[44] He traveled to India in mid-1974^[45] to visit Neem Karoli Baba^[46] at his Kainchi Ashram with a Reed College friend (and, later, an early Apple employee), Daniel Kottke, in search of spiritual enlightenment. When they got to the Neem Karoli ashram, it was almost deserted as Neem Karoli Baba had died in September 1973.^[44] Then they made a long trek up a dry riverbed to an ashram of Hariakhan Baba. In India, they spent a lot of time on bus rides from Delhi to Uttar Pradesh and back, then up to Himachal Pradesh and back.^[44]

After staying for seven months, Jobs left India^[47] and returned to the US ahead of Daniel Kottke.^[44] Jobs had changed his appearance; his head was shaved and he wore traditional Indian clothing.^[48][49] During this time, Jobs experimented with psychedelics, later calling his LSD experiences "one of the two or three most important things [he had] done in [his] life".^[50] He also became a serious practitioner of Zen Buddhism, engaged in lengthy meditation retreats at the Tassajara Zen Mountain Center, the oldest Sōtō Zen monastery in the US.^[51] He considered taking up monastic residence at Eihei-ji in Japan, and maintained a lifelong appreciation for Zen.^[52] Jobs would later say that people around him who did not share his countercultural roots could not fully relate to his thinking.^[50]

Jobs then returned to Atari, and was assigned to create a circuit board for the arcade video game Breakout. According to Atari co-founder Nolan Bushnell, Atari offered $100 for each chip that was eliminated in the machine. At that time, Jobs had little specialized knowledge of circuit board design and made a deal with Wozniak to split the fee evenly 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, a design so tight that it was impossible to reproduce on an assembly line.^{[further explanation needed]} According to Wozniak, Jobs told him that Atari gave them only $700 (instead of the offered $5,000), and that Wozniak's share was thus $350.^[53] Wozniak did not learn about the actual bonus until ten years later, but said that if Jobs had told him about it and had said he needed the money, Wozniak would have given it to him.^[54]

In the early 1970s, Jobs and Wozniak were drawn to technology like a magnet. 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.^[55]

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, but eventually they produced a complete computer prototype.^[56] Jobs began attending meetings of the Homebrew Computer Club with Wozniak in 1975.^[2] 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.^[57][58]

Career[link]

Apple Computer[link]

Home of Paul and Clara Jobs, on Crist Drive in Los Altos, California. Steve Jobs formed Apple Computer in its garage with Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne in 1976. Wayne stayed only a short time, leaving Jobs and Wozniak as the primary co-founders of the company.

Jobs and Steve Wozniak met in 1971, when their mutual friend, Bill Fernandez, introduced 21-year-old Wozniak to 16-year-old Jobs. In 1976, Wozniak invented the Apple I computer. Jobs, Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne founded Apple computer in the garage of Jobs's parents in order to sell it.^[59] They received funding from a then-semi-retired Intel product-marketing manager and engineer Mike Markkula.^[60]

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 sell sugar water for the rest of your life, or do you want to come with me and change the world?"^[61]

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. One year later, Apple employee Jef Raskin invented the Macintosh.^[62][63]

The following year, Apple aired a Super Bowl television commercial titled "1984". At Apple's annual shareholders meeting on January 24, 1984, an emotional Jobs introduced the Macintosh to a wildly enthusiastic audience; Andy Hertzfeld described the scene as "pandemonium".^[64]

Apple logo in 1977, created by Rob Janoff with the rainbow color theme used until 1998.

While Jobs was a persuasive and charismatic director for Apple, some of his employees from that time described him as an erratic and temperamental manager. Disappointing sales caused a deterioration in Jobs's working relationship with Sculley and it eventually became a power struggle between Jobs and Sculley.^[65] Jobs kept meetings running past midnight, sent out lengthy faxes, then called new meetings at 7:00 am.^[66]

Sculley learned that Jobs—believing Sculley to be "bad for Apple" and the wrong person to lead the company—had been attempting to organize a boardroom coup, and on May 24, 1985, called a board meeting to resolve the matter.^[65] Apple's board of directors sided with Sculley and removed Jobs from his managerial duties as head of the Macintosh division.^[67][68] Jobs resigned from Apple five months later^[65] and founded NeXT Inc. the same year.^[66][69]

In a speech Jobs gave at Stanford University in 2005, he said being fired from Apple was the best thing that could have happened to him; "The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life." And he added, "I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was awful-tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it."^[43][70][71]

NeXT Computer[link]

A NeXTstation with the original keyboard, mouse and the NeXT MegaPixel monitor

After leaving Apple, Jobs founded NeXT Computer in 1985, with $7 million. A year later, Jobs was running out of money, and with no product on the horizon, he appealed for venture capital. Eventually, he attracted the attention of billionaire Ross Perot who invested heavily in the company.^[72] NeXT workstations were first released in 1990, priced at $9,999. Like the Apple Lisa, the NeXT workstation was technologically advanced, but was largely dismissed as cost-prohibitive by the educational sector for which it was designed.^[73] The NeXT workstation was known for its technical strengths, chief among them its object-oriented software development system. Jobs marketed NeXT products to the financial, scientific, and academic community, highlighting its innovative, experimental new technologies, such as the Mach kernel, the digital signal processor chip, and the built-in Ethernet port. Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web on a NeXT computer at CERN.^[74]

The revised, second-generation NeXTcube was released in 1990, also. Jobs touted it as the first "interpersonal" computer that would replace the personal computer. With its innovative NeXTMail multimedia email system, NeXTcube could share voice, image, graphics, and video in email for the first time. "Interpersonal computing is going to revolutionize human communications and groupwork", Jobs told reporters.^[75] Jobs ran NeXT with an obsession for aesthetic perfection, as evidenced by the development of and attention to NeXTcube's magnesium case.^[76] This put considerable strain on NeXT's hardware division, and in 1993, after having sold only 50,000 machines, NeXT transitioned fully to software development with the release of NeXTSTEP/Intel.^[77] The company reported its first profit of $1.03 million in 1994.^[72] In 1996, NeXT Software, Inc. released WebObjects, a framework for Web application development. After NeXT was acquired by Apple Inc. in 1997, WebObjects was used to build and run the Apple Store,^[77] MobileMe services, and the iTunes Store.

Pixar and Disney[link]

In 1986, Jobs bought The Graphics Group (later renamed Pixar) from Lucasfilm's computer graphics division for the price of $10 million, $5 million of which was given to the company as capital.^[78]

The first film produced by the partnership, Toy Story, with Jobs credited as executive producer,^[79] brought fame and critical acclaim to the studio when it was released in 1995. Over the next 15 years, under Pixar's creative chief John Lasseter, the company produced box-office hits A Bug's Life (1998); Toy Story 2 (1999); Monsters, Inc. (2001); Finding Nemo (2003); The Incredibles (2004); Cars (2006); Ratatouille (2007); WALL-E (2008); Up (2009); and Toy Story 3 (2010). Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, Ratatouille, WALL-E, Up and Toy Story 3 each received the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, an award introduced in 2001.^[80]

Steve Jobs on computer graphics Steve Jobs on computer graphics. Interview excerpt from 1995.[81]

In the years 2003 and 2004, as Pixar's contract with Disney was running out, Jobs and Disney chief executive Michael Eisner tried but failed to negotiate a new partnership,^[82] and in early 2004, Jobs announced that Pixar would seek a new partner to distribute its films after its contract with Disney expired.

In October 2005, Bob Iger replaced Eisner at Disney, and Iger quickly worked to patch up relations with Jobs and Pixar. On January 24, 2006, Jobs and Iger announced that Disney had agreed to purchase Pixar in an all-stock transaction worth $7.4 billion. When the deal closed, Jobs became The Walt Disney Company's largest single shareholder with approximately seven percent of the company's stock.^[12] Jobs's holdings in Disney far exceeded those of Eisner, who holds 1.7 percent, and of Disney family member Roy E. Disney, who until his 2009 death held about one percent of the company's stock and whose criticisms of Eisner — especially that he soured Disney's relationship with Pixar — accelerated Eisner's ousting. Jobs joined the company's board of directors upon completion of the merger and also helped oversee Disney and Pixar's combined animation businesses from a seat on a special six-person steering committee.^[83] Upon Jobs's death his shares in Disney were transferred to the Steven P. Jobs Trust led by Laurene Jobs.^[84]

Return to Apple[link]

Logo for the Think Different campaign designed by TBWA\Chiat\Day and initiated by Jobs after his return to Apple Computer in 1997.

In 1996, Apple announced that it would buy NeXT for $427 million. The deal was finalized in late 1996,^[85] bringing Jobs back to the company he co-founded. Jobs became de facto chief after then-CEO Gil Amelio was ousted in July 1997. He was formally named interim chief executive in September.^[86] In March 1998, to concentrate Apple's efforts on returning to profitability, Jobs terminated a number of projects, such as Newton, Cyberdog, and OpenDoc. In the coming months, many employees developed a fear of encountering Jobs while riding in the elevator, "afraid that they might not have a job when the doors opened. The reality was that Jobs's summary executions were rare, but a handful of victims was enough to terrorize a whole company."^[87] Jobs also changed the licensing program for Macintosh clones, making it too costly for the manufacturers to continue making machines.

With the purchase of NeXT, much of the company's technology found its way into Apple products, most notably NeXTSTEP, which evolved into Mac OS X. Under Jobs's guidance, the company increased sales significantly with the introduction of the iMac and other new products; since then, appealing designs and powerful branding have worked well for Apple. At the 2000 Macworld Expo, Jobs officially dropped the "interim" modifier from his title at Apple and became permanent CEO.^[88] Jobs quipped at the time that he would be using the title "iCEO".^[89]

Jobs on stage at Macworld Conference & Expo, San Francisco, January 11, 2005

The company subsequently branched out, introducing and improving upon other digital appliances. With the introduction of the iPod portable music player, iTunes digital music software, and the iTunes Store, the company made forays into consumer electronics and music distribution. On June 29, 2007, Apple entered the cellular phone business with the introduction of the iPhone, a multi-touch display cell phone, which also included the features of an iPod and, with its own mobile browser, revolutionized the mobile browsing scene. While stimulating innovation, Jobs also reminded his employees that "real artists ship".^[90]

Jobs was both admired and criticized for his consummate skill at persuasion and salesmanship, which has been dubbed the "reality distortion field" and was particularly evident during his keynote speeches (colloquially known as "Stevenotes") at Macworld Expos and at Apple Worldwide Developers Conferences. In 2005, Jobs responded to criticism of Apple's poor recycling programs for e-waste in the US by lashing out at environmental and other advocates at Apple's Annual Meeting in Cupertino in April. A few weeks later, Apple announced it would take back iPods for free at its retail stores. The Computer TakeBack Campaign responded by flying a banner from a plane over the Stanford University graduation at which Jobs was the commencement speaker.^[43] The banner read "Steve, don't be a mini-player—recycle all e-waste".

In 2006, he further expanded Apple's recycling programs to any US customer who buys a new Mac. This program includes shipping and "environmentally friendly disposal" of their old systems.^[91]

Resignation[link]

In August 2011, Jobs resigned as CEO of Apple, but remained with the company as chairman of the company's board.^[92][93] Hours after the announcement, Apple Inc. (AAPL) shares dropped five percent in after-hours trading.^[94] This relatively small drop, when considering the importance of Jobs to Apple, was associated with the fact that his health had been in the news for several years, and he had been on medical leave since January 2011.^[95] It was believed, according to Forbes, that the impact would be felt in a negative way beyond Apple, including at The Walt Disney Company where Jobs served as director.^[96] In after-hours trading on the day of the announcement, Walt Disney Co. (DIS) shares dropped 1.5 percent.^[97]

Business life[link]

Wealth[link]

Jobs earned only $1 a year as CEO of Apple,^[98] Jobs held 5.426 million Apple shares worth $2.1 billion, as well as 138 million shares in Disney (which he received in exchange for Disney's acquisition of Pixar) worth $4.4 billion.^[99][100] Jobs quipped that the $1 per annum he was paid by Apple was based on attending one meeting for 50 cents while the other 50 cents was based on his performance.^[101] Forbes estimated his net wealth at $8.3 billion in 2010, making him the 42nd wealthiest American.^[102]

Stock options backdating issue[link]

Steve Jobs and Bill Gates at the fifth D: All Things Digital conference (D5) in 2007

In 2001, Jobs was granted stock options in the amount of 7.5 million shares of Apple with an exercise price of $18.30. It was alleged that the options had been backdated, and that the exercise price should have been $21.10. It was further alleged that Jobs had thereby incurred taxable income of $20,000,000 that he did not report, and that Apple overstated its earnings by that same amount. As a result, Jobs potentially faced a number of criminal charges and civil penalties. The case was the subject of active criminal and civil government investigations,^[103] though an independent internal Apple investigation completed on December 29, 2006, found that Jobs was unaware of these issues and that the options granted to him were returned without being exercised in 2003.^[104]

On July 1, 2008, a $7-billion class action suit was filed against several members of the Apple Board of Directors for revenue lost due to the alleged securities fraud.^[105][106]

Management style[link]

Jobs was a demanding perfectionist^[107][108] who always aspired to position his businesses and their products at the forefront of the information technology industry by foreseeing and setting trends, at least in innovation and style. He summed up that self-concept at the end of his keynote speech at the Macworld Conference and Expo in January 2007, by quoting ice hockey player Wayne Gretzky

There's an old Wayne Gretzky quote that I love. 'I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.' And we've always tried to do that at Apple. Since the very very beginning. And we always will.^[109]

Steve Jobs announcing the transition to Intel processors in 2005.

Much was made of Jobs's aggressive and demanding personality. Fortune wrote that he was "considered one of Silicon Valley's leading egomaniacs".^[110] Commentaries on his temperamental style can be found in Michael Moritz's The Little Kingdom, The Second Coming of Steve Jobs, by Alan Deutschman; and iCon: Steve Jobs, by Jeffrey S. Young & William L. Simon. In 1993, Jobs made Fortune's list of America's Toughest Bosses in regard to his leadership of NeXT.

NeXT Cofounder Dan'l Lewin was quoted in Fortune as saying of that period, "The highs were unbelievable ... But the lows were unimaginable", to which Jobs's office replied that his personality had changed since then.^[111]

In 2005, Jobs banned all books published by John Wiley & Sons from Apple Stores in response to their publishing an unauthorized biography, iCon: Steve Jobs.^[112] In its 2010 annual earnings report, Wiley said it had "closed a deal ... to make its titles available for the iPad."^[113] Jef Raskin, a former colleague, once said that Jobs "would have made an excellent king of France", alluding to Jobs's compelling and larger-than-life persona.^[114] Floyd Norman said that at Pixar, Jobs was a "mature, mellow individual" and never interfered with the creative process of the filmmakers.^[115]

Jobs had a public war of words with Dell Computer CEO Michael Dell, starting in 1987 when Jobs first criticized Dell for making "un-innovative beige boxes".^[116] On October 6, 1997, in a Gartner Symposium, when Michael Dell was asked what he would do if he ran then-troubled Apple Computer, he said "I'd shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders."^[117] In 2006, Jobs sent an email to all employees when Apple's market capitalization rose above Dell's. The email read:

Team, it turned out that Michael Dell wasn't perfect at predicting the future. Based on today's stock market close, Apple is worth more than Dell. Stocks go up and down, and things may be different tomorrow, but I thought it was worth a moment of reflection today. Steve.^[118]

Jobs was also a board member at Gap Inc. from 1999 to 2002.^[119]

Reality distortion field[link]

Apple's Bud Tribble coined the term "reality distortion field" in 1981, to describe Jobs's charisma and its effects on the developers working on the Macintosh project.^[120] Tribble claimed that the term came from Star Trek.^[120] Since then the term has also been used to refer to perceptions of Jobs's keynote speeches.^[121]

The RDF was said by Andy Hertzfeld to be Steve Jobs's ability to convince himself and others to believe almost anything, using a mix of charm, charisma, bravado, hyperbole, marketing, appeasement, and persistence. Although the subject of criticism, Jobs's so-called reality distortion field was also recognized as creating a sense that the impossible was possible. Once the term became widely known, it was often used in the technology press to describe Jobs's sway over the public, particularly regarding new product announcements.^[122][123]

Inventions and designs[link]

His design sense was greatly influenced by the Buddhism which he experienced in India while on a seven-month spiritual journey.^[124] His sense of intuition was also influenced by the spiritual people with whom he studied.^[124]

As of October 9, 2011 (2011 -10-09)^[update], Jobs is listed as either primary inventor or co-inventor in 342 United States patents or patent applications related to a range of technologies from actual computer and portable devices to user interfaces (including touch-based), speakers, keyboards, power adapters, staircases, clasps, sleeves, lanyards and packages. Most of these are design patents (specific product designs) as opposed to utility patents (inventions).^[125][126] He has 43 issued US patents on inventions.^[127] The patent on the Mac OS X Dock user interface with "magnification" feature was issued the day before he died.^[128]

Applying his Triple F Model to Apple under Steve Jobs, Anand Kurian opines that Job's contribution in the area of pure ‘Function’ are less significant, but that his contribution in the areas of ‘Functionality’ and ‘Form’ are major and substantial.^[129]

Apple I Computer[link]

The first significant invention that Steve Jobs was involved in was the Apple I which came along in 1976. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, who was at the time working for HP, scraped together some cash for printed circuit boards. Then they planned to sell the machine as a kit for $666.66. A store called the Byte Shop ordered 50 fully assembled devices, and sold them all.^[130] The Apple’s first computer was for hobbyists and engineers so it was made in small numbers.^[131]

Apple II Computer[link]