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Technology | By Megan Friedman | @megancarol | October 5, 2011 | +

Steve Jobs: His Life and Career in the Pages of TIME

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As the world pauses to remember Steve Jobs, NewsFeed looks back at how TIME covered the visionary Apple founder through the decades.

Related Topics: apple, from the archives, steve jobs, Technology, Technology

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February 15, 1982

"Steven Jobs, 26, the co-founder of five-year-old Apple Computer, practically singlehanded created the personal computer industry. This college dropout is now worth $149 million."

—Alexander L. Taylor III, writing about "a new breed" of tech entrepreneurs who were not afraid to take risks

September 30, 1985

"In a characteristically petulant move, the chairman leaked his letter of resignation to the press hours before delivering it to Apple on Sept. 17. 'The company's recent reorganization,' Jobs wrote, 'has left me with no work to do and no access even to regular management reports. I am but 30, and want still to contribute and ... achieve.' Apparently intended to arouse sympathy, the tone of the letter and its public release struck some Apple executives as a clear attempt to embarrass them. Said Steve Wozniak, Apple's co-founder who left the company last February to establish his own electronics firm: 'Steve can be an insulting and hurtful guy.' One wag dubbed Jobs the John McEnroe of business."

—Barbara Rudolph, on Jobs' resignation as Apple chairman in 1985, after a much-publicized conflict with then-president John Sculley

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August 18, 1997

"This is the fateful call for the boy titans of the personal-computer revolution, meant to settle the war. At one point, talking about Apple, Jobs says, 'There are a lot of good things, happily--and a lot of screwed-up things.' Then, to his crew, he yells, 'Have we got satellite contact with the other side?' Assured this has ... been taken care of, he answers a question from Gates about what to wear on the morrow ('I'm just going to wear a white shirt,' he assures him), and he finally ends the conversation with a heartfelt 'Thank you for your support of this company. I think the world's a better place for it.' And so that's how Apple and Microsoft, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, finally seal it--on a cell-phone call."

—Cathy Booth, following Jobs as he was about to announce that Microsoft would invest in and cooperate with Apple

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October 10, 1997

Ah, the loneliness of command. Vacationing on a distant Hawaiian isle, Steve Jobs — interim Apple CEO — will mull over suggestions that he drop the 'interim' from his title. 'I'm trying to get away for a week, to walk on the beach and chill out and think about things,' Jobs told reporters Thursday after hinting that he ... 'might' assume permanent leadership of the struggling computer firm he co-founded in his parents' garage.

So what's to think about? Well, Jobs has always claimed he was happy running his animation firm, Pixar, the wizards behind Toy Story. And Apple experts always assumed he preferred running the company from behind the scenes, which Jobs has in effect been doing since his triumphal return last December. Many among the Macintosh faithful wanted Jobs to assume the mantle of supreme charismatic dictator for life, but up until now he has shunned the Napoleon role to work from the backroom on such 'insanely great' things as August's Microsoft deal.

—Chris Taylor, on whether Jobs would reclaim Apple's top spot, for good this time

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January 18, 1999

Steve Jobs, acting-CEO-for-life of the resurgent Apple Computer, said last week of his new fruit-colored desktops, 'We knew we had to name them after things you eat, because you just want to walk up and lick them.'

Well, some of us do, anyway. Nearly two decades after the original Macintosh all but invented the home-computer ... market, Apple finally has another hit. The product is the new iMac, and the five refreshing 'flavors' announced by Jobs at last week's MacWorld show in San Francisco are blueberry, grape, lime, strawberry and tangerine.

—Michael Krantz, on Jobs' unveiling of the colorful, wildly popular iMac desktop computers

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August 2, 1999

Watching Steve Jobs hold his gorgeous new iBook triumphantly aloft before his assembled legions at last week's MacWorld convention in New York City, it was easy to imagine Apple Computer's interim-CEO-for-life perched somewhere in the pantheon between Odysseus and Simba the Lion King.

—Michael Krantz, on Jobs' "golden age," ... having brought Apple back to productivity and made groundbreaking films with Pixar

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October 18, 1999

"For many employees, the boss's volatile demeanor is a small price to pay for that passion. 'Steve might be capable of reducing someone to tears,' says John Patrick Crecine, an academic turned entrepreneur and Jobs friend of long standing, 'but it's not because he's meanspirited; it's because he's absolutely single minded, almost ... manic, in his pursuit of quality and excellence.' Indeed, Jobs' most potent weapon is still his messianic zeal to fulfill his original vision of Apple as the bridge between the average citizen and the mysterious world of the computer. 'His DNA was built into this company,' says Heidi Roizen, a partner at the Softbank venture-capital firm who has known Jobs since the beginning."

TIME staff reporters, on Jobs' micromanaging in his dual roles at Apple and animation studio Pixar

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January 22, 2001

You've got to hand it to Steve Jobs. Age has not withered the Apple CEO's famous flash and showmanship. P.T. Barnum himself could not have done a better job at the Macworld convention in San Francisco last week. Barnum, of course, could only offer dancing elephants; Jobs has some of the most sublimely sexy high-tech products of ... our age. And he was able to pull these latest tricks out of his hat at a time when Apple's profits are turning to deficits and Macs are selling at fire-sale prices. Whatever his flaws, the man knows a thing or two about timing.

—Chris Taylor, as Jobs took to the stage to unveil Apple's titanium-covered G4 PowerBook

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May 2, 2001

"Getting to see Steve Jobs at Apple is like having an audience with one of the later Roman Emperors, powerfully charismatic men who loved the adulation of the crowd in the Coliseum but made sure to put many veils between themselves and visitors. The object, it seems, is to drench you in anticipation. [...] And if your mouth is ... dry and your hands clammy by the time you reach him, Jobs will know it. He'll bat your slightly probing questions away like bugs. He'll smash your really probing questions in mid-sentence like conspiratorial vials of poison. As one journalist who has covered the man for many years says, 'he can smell fear.'"

—Chris Taylor, on the mood in the room as Jobs announced Apple's new, improved iBook laptop

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January 14, 2002

"Jobs is betting the company that what consumers most want from technology is control of their digital lives. And what better way to do that than with the smartest-looking, easiest-to-use, best-engineered computer there is? The time is right, he says. We are wallowing in digital cameras and camcorders and MP3 players that get ... harder to use, not easier. The thing that will connect us to our gadgets needs to be a digital hub, a computer designed to simplify our lives. This, Jobs says, is what Apple was meant to do--and it's what no one else in the PC world is doing."

—Josh Quittner, writing as Jobs was unveiling the follow-up to those ubiquitous, candy-colored iMacs; TIME got an exclusive test run

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April 26, 2004

Sometimes Steve Jobs is wrong. When he launched Apple Computer's iTunes Music Store in April 2003, for instance, he predicted it would sell 100 million songs within a year. As of last month, a little more than 50 million 99 cent songs had been downloaded. Sometimes wrong is right enough, though. "I'm thrilled," he says. "It's ... been a great year." For a man whose marketing prowess is almost as brilliant as his imprint on the computer age, "great" is an understatement.
—Josh Quittner, on Steve Jobs' inclusion in 2004's TIME 100

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August 9, 2004

RECOVERING. STEVE JOBS,49, tireless CEO of Apple Computer; from surgery for pancreatic cancer; in Cupertino, California. He announced the details of his condition — a rare but treatable form of pancreatic cancer — in a companywide e-mail in which he noted, 'I'm sending this from my hospital bed using my 17-inch PowerBook ... and an Airport Express.'

—Sarah M. Broom, in TIME's 'Milestones' section, noting Jobs' treatment for pancreatic cancer

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April 18, 2005

When Steve Jobs evaluates something, it's either "insanely great" or an expletive that's unpublishable here. This relentless perfectionism typifies how Steve views everything he has created in 28 years at Apple Computer and nearly 20 at Pixar Animation Studio. It also explains why he has been successful again and again in ... creating breakthrough products.

—Terry Semel, then chairman and CEO of Yahoo, on Jobs' inclusion in the 2005 TIME 100

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October 16, 2005

Jobs is into control. In itself, that is of no real importance, except that in a lot of ways, Apple is an expression of Jobs' personal ethos. One reason Apple makes its own hardware and software is that when Jobs goes to the trouble of creating a piece of software, he doesn't want it running on hardware built by a bunch of ... dudes he doesn't know and can't fire. He wants it on hardware he makes himself. How else can he be sure that every little thing integrates together the way he says — nay, insists — it should?

—Lev Grossman, writing about Apple's business process as the new, video-playing iPod was released

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January 10, 2007

The iPhone wouldn't have happened without Apple's 'we're special' attitude. One reason there's limited innovation in cell phones generally is that the cell carriers have stiff guidelines that the manufacturers have to follow. They demand that all their handsets work the same way. 'A lot of times, to be honest, there's some ... hubris, where they think they know better,' Jobs says. 'They dictate what's on the phone. That just wouldn't work for us, because we want to innovate. Unless we could do that, it wasn't worth doing.' Jobs demanded special treatment from his phone service partner, Cingular, and he got it. He even forced Cingular to re-engineer its infrastructure to handle the iPhone's unique voicemail scheme.

—Lev Grossman, on Apple's first unveiling of the iPhone

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May 3, 2007

"Jobs is still Jobs. He still projects a manic self-confidence in public. He still, at 54, wears his signature jeans-and-black-turtleneck outfit. And he still has his edge: prosperity hasn't robbed him of his disrespect for conventional wisdom, his spooky ability to see around corners, and his feral determination to make ... perfect products at all costs. All in all, success becomes him."

—Lev Grossman, on Steve Jobs' inclusion in the TIME 100 in 2007

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September 9, 2008

"When Jobs, who battled pancreatic cancer four years ago and has been the subject of whispers of ill health since he appeared looking gaunt at the Macworld conference in June, took the stage today, it was in front of a giant slide that said, 'The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.' [...] He walked under his own steam, ... of course, easily and without any apparent discomfort. While he remains impossibly thin — I doubt he weighs 100 lbs. wet — he actually looked jaunty. (The new version of the iPod Nano was billed, by the way, as 'The Thinnest iPod Ever.')"

—Josh Quittner, reporting on Jobs deflecting rumors about his health while announcing a new line of iPods

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January 5, 2009

"Even in the best of times, Jobs doesn't observe normal conventions and does as he damn well pleases. In January 2002, an international affiliate of TIME.com accidentally broke an embargo the night before Jobs was set to deliver a Macworld address to unveil the flat-panel iMac. (It was my story; I know.) I later heard that Jobs ... was so upset that he told his handlers he wasn't going to give the speech; he'd simply cancel the keynote. They had to spend a significant amount of energy talking him off the roof."

—Josh Quittner, weighing the reasons why Jobs would not deliver the keynote address at the 2009 Macworld expo

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April 30, 2009

"Jobs may be a celebrity CEO, but he doesn't jump out of airplanes or traipse around Africa with bundles of cash. He is always in character and always on message, so much so that when late-night TV parodies him, he's invariably rolling out some new iProduct . Jobs gets called mercurial, egomaniacal, a micromanager. If that ... sounds a little like a CEO doing his job, maybe that's because he is—and a mighty fine one."

—Barbara Kiviat, on Jobs' inclusion in 2009's TIME 100 list

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April 12, 2010

In five years, Jobs has emerged from two serious health scares. His obituaries had been written, much as Apple's had been back in 1997. "Is this then the curtain dropping on your third act?" I ask. "Will you perhaps leave Apple on this high, a fitting end to your career here?" "I don't think of my life as a career," he says. "I ... do stuff. I respond to stuff. That's not a career — it's a life!"

After he leaves, I am finally left alone with an iPad [...] Ten minutes later I am rolling on the floor, snarling and biting, trying to wrestle it from the hands of an Apple press representative.

—Stephen Fry, actor, writer and self-described Apple fanboy, speaking to Steve Jobs before the launch of the iPad

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April 29, 2010

"As a young man, Steve Jobs, Apple's CEO, decided to be the Beatles of computing. I once said that I make what the Beatles would have made if they made sculpture, and I can appreciate how Steve, 55, applies their ethos of optimism to his work."

—Sculptor Jeff Koons, on Jobs' inclusion in the 2010 TIME 100

August 25, 2011

"The entrepreneur whom Jobs resembles most is another self-made tycoon whose business stood where Jobs has often said Apple's does: at the intersection of technology and the liberal arts. That man was Walt Disney, and he was just as irritable, obsessed and visionary as Jobs. Like Jobs, he built a team of people who had skills ... he didn't, and then goaded them into creating things — in Disney's case, things such as Snow White and Disneyland — which they would never have come up with on their own."
—Harry McCracken, remarking on Jobs' career after he announced he would step down as CEO of Apple

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Steve Jobs: His Life and Career in the Pages of TIME

More Photo Galleries

John Glenn's Flight: Celebrating the First American in Orbit

Ash Wednesday Around the World

Google Doodles: A Photo History

Photos from the Europe's Deep Freeze

Fat Tuesday Photos: Inside the Mardi Gras Mayhem

Gary Carter: A Baseball Career in Photos

February 15, 1982

September 30, 1985

August 18, 1997

October 10, 1997

January 18, 1999

August 2, 1999

October 18, 1999

January 22, 2001

May 2, 2001

January 14, 2002

April 26, 2004

August 9, 2004

April 18, 2005

October 16, 2005

January 10, 2007

May 3, 2007

September 9, 2008

January 5, 2009

April 30, 2009

April 12, 2010

April 29, 2010

August 25, 2011

Latest on NewsFeed

Lou Dobbs: The Lorax is Indoctrinating American Children

Why the Rihanna and Chris Brown Reunion Collaborations Won't Erase the PastSlate

Class Notes: Affirmative Action, iPads In Class and More Education News

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Our partners

TRENDING NOW

More Photo Galleries

February 15, 1982

September 30, 1985

August 18, 1997

October 10, 1997

January 18, 1999

August 2, 1999

October 18, 1999

January 22, 2001

May 2, 2001

January 14, 2002

April 26, 2004

August 9, 2004

April 18, 2005

October 16, 2005

January 10, 2007

May 3, 2007

September 9, 2008

January 5, 2009

April 30, 2009

April 12, 2010

April 29, 2010

August 25, 2011

Latest on NewsFeed

Why the Rihanna and Chris Brown Reunion Collaborations Won't Erase the PastSlate

Stay Connected with TIME.com

Our partners