Coin-Op'ed Gaming Facade: Tribute & Memorial to the man known as Steve Jobs...

Steve Jobs was originally born in San Francisco, California on February 25th, 1955. He was adopted by Paul and Clara Jobs of Mountain View, California, and named him Steven Paul; and later also adopted a daughter they would name Patti. Steve Jobs biological mother went on to eventually marry and later give birth to Steve Jobs' biological sister, Mona Simpson. At best speculation, Jobs' parents weren't originally married, and the birth of Steve Jobs may not have initially been a planned intention, hence why he was put up for adoption, and yet, look what this genius mind grew up to become.

Steve Jobs would go on to attend Cupertino Junior High School and Homestead High School in Cupertino, California. Steve Jobs often liked to frequent after-school lectures at the

Hewlett-Packard Company in Palo Alto, California. Later on, Steve Jobs eventually got hired by HP and worked alongside Steve Wozniak as a summer employee. Later on, in the year of 1972, Steve Paul Jobs graduated from high school and enrolled himself in Reed College of Portland, Oregon. After only one semester, however, he dropped out of the college, even though he continued to audit the classes of Reed College, for instance, a class in calligraphy. During this time, he would sleep on the floor in friend's rooms, while returning empty soda bottles in order to procure money for food. He also got weekly free meals at the local Hare Krishna temple. Yet, oddly enough, Steve Jobs gives a small homage to the experience in expressing, "If I had never dropped in on that class at Reed, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts".

Come the autumn of 1974, Steve Jobs returned to California, where he began attending meetings of the Homebrew Computer Club with Wozniak. He took a job as a technician at Atari, with the sole intent of saving money for a spiritual retreat to India.

When he finally had the money, Steve Jobs took his trip to India, looking to visit the Neem Karoli Baba at his Kainchi Ashram with a friend from Reed College who was also the first employee of Apple Computers, Daniel Kottke. In search of spiritual enlightenment, Steve Jobs returned an official Buddhist, with head shaved while wearing traditional Indian clothing. It was also during this time that Steve Paul Jobs began experimenting with psychedelic narcotics such as LSD, which he later credited as "one of the two or three most important things he had done in life". He always claimed that his associated who didn't share in the counter-cultural roots with him couldn't fully understand, or relate to, his thinking.

Jobs returned to his position with Atari, and found himself being given the task of creating a circuit board for the game Breakout. Atari founder Nolan Bushnell claims that Atari offered one-hundred dollars for each chip that was eliminated in the machine. Steve Jobs had very little interest, nor knowledge, in circuit board design, so he made "The Woz" a deal to split the bonus evenly between them, if Steve Wozniak minimized the number of chips for him. When Wozniak managed to reduce the number of chips by 50, Atari found themselves amazed. So amazed in fact, they had found the design was so tight, it was actually impossible to replicate the same exact design via an assembly line. Sadly, Steve Jobs had claimed to Steve Wozniak that Apple had only given them seven-hundred dollars, and then gave "half" to Wozniak in the amount of three-hundred and fifty, when Atari had actually given Steve Jobs five-thousand dollars for this feat.

As time went on, and 1976 blossomed upon the horizon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne (with later funding from a semi-retired Intel product-marketing manager and engineer:

A.C. "Mike" Markkula Jr.) founded the Apple corporation. Prior to co-founding Apple, Steve Wozniak was an electronics hacker. Jobs and Wozniak had by this point culminated five years of friendship, at which point Steve Jobs managed to convince Steve Wozniak in assembling a computer and selling it. Apple continued to expand, and as they did so, the company began looking for an experienced executive to help manage its expansion.

Come 1978, Apple Corp recruited Mike Scott from National Semiconductor to serve as CEO for what turned out to be quite a few rough years. In 1983, Steve Jobs recruited John Sculley from Pepsi-Cola to serve as Apple's CEO, asking him a ground-breaking question, "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?". The next year, during the Super Bowl, Apple would air a television commercial entitled "1984". Then at the annual shareholders meeting on the 24th of January, 1984, a quite emotional Steve Jobs introduced the Macintosh to a wildly enthusiastic audience. The scene was described, by Andy Hertzfeld, as "pandemonium". The Macintosh became the first commercially small computer with a graphical user interface (thanks to former technology "borrowed" from Xerox). The development of the Mac was originally started by Jef Raskin, and eventually taken over by Steve Jobs.

Even though Steve Jobs was a persuasive and charismatic director for Apple, some of his associates, employees, and colleagues from that time would describe him as an erratic and quite temperamental manager. Following an industry-wide sales slump near the end of 1984, the working relationship between Jobs and Sculley ultimately deteriorated. Come the end of May 1985, following a rather large internal power struggle resulting in an announcement of significant layoffs, Sculley relieved Steve Jobs of his duties as the head of the Macintosh division. Which later on, Steve Jobs would admit, being fired from Apple was the best thing that could happen 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."

Steve Jobs would continue to go on to make several noteworthy footholds in history, all the way from the Apple Lisa, to the NeXT Computer. Steve Jobs also later on would purchase, from Lucasfilm's computer graphics division, what is now known as Pixar, for the price of ten-million dollars.

Finally, in 1996, Apple purchases the rights to NeXT Computers for a whopping sum of $429 million, bringing Steve Jobs back into the company he had originally co-founded, making him de facto chief after then-CEO Gil Amelio was ousted in July.

(Credit for the information goes to www.wikipedia.com)

From then on, most of us know the history of Apple/Macintosh, especially it's continuous history with Bill Gates. Not everybody knew where Steve Jobs came from, or what made the man that helped to make the Apple, hence the long layout of history.

Now, for what it's worth, I'd like to take this moment to say a special thanks to Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and everybody else along the way that helped to not only make Apple what it is today, but aided hands in building, shaping, and molding the technology industry as we know it now. As I've said before, I grew up in the boom of technology, and was there to see many of the original innovations that now are so easily taken for granted. I got to witness first-hand the blossoming of computers and computer systems, as well as the role that Apple played on all of it. Admittedly, I didn't have as much exposure to Mac computers as I would have liked, especially since I feel the Macintosh is quite a superior system, but I was aware of its presence, and what Apple was strongly bringing to the table. I can't help but feel that had history not had a handful of young, enthusiastic, and brilliant minds, of which Steve Jobs was one within that handful, computers today might not be even half as far as they've come. So for what it's worth, Steve Paul Jobs... thank you. Even though you may have been wild and quirky at times, and who doesn't have those moments, you were a respected pioneer who helped to lay the foundation of an industry that many of us either presently or in the past have made a living in, and so often have taken its roots for granted. May you rest in peace and finally be within the peaceful rest and nirvana you so long searched for in life, you will be missed by many. Amen.

If anybody else would like to say a few words or any thoughts on your reaction to Steve Jobs' passing, feel free to throw in your two cents in the comments section below, thank you.