Chapter 17 Chapter 1 The Legendary Kid

In Silicon Valley, there is probably no one more legendary than Steve Jobs.Jobs may be the only member of the American Academy of Engineering who did not complete a year of college.Although Bill Gates did not graduate from college, after all, he has been in school for two years.Jobs only attended college for half a year, sat in for a while, and then left school entirely.The reason why he was selected as an academician was "For contributions to creation and development of the personal computer industry". Jobs' biological mother was a young, unwed graduate student who decided to put Jobs up for adoption because she couldn't take care of her children while studying.She desperately wanted to find someone with a college degree.To start with, she found a couple of lawyers, but the couple wanted a girl.In this way, Jobs was sent to his foster parents.However, Jobs' biological mother later discovered that not only was his adoptive mother not a college graduate, but his adoptive father hadn't even graduated from high school, so she refused to sign the final adoption papers.Later, Jobs' adoptive parents promised to send him to college in the future, and his biological mother agreed.

After graduating from high school, Jobs entered a private university with very expensive tuition.His impoverished adoptive parents used all their savings to pay for his college tuition.After studying for half a year, on the one hand, Jobs felt that his studies were useless, and on the other hand, he couldn't bear to spend his adoptive parents' life savings, so he dropped out of school.However, he did not leave school and began to drop in on classes that interested him and might be of use to him in the future.Jobs had no income, so he slept on a spot on the floor of the dormitory of his classmates, and earned a little money by picking up glass bottles and Coke cans.Every Sunday, in order to have a meal of charity, he would walk ten kilometers to a church.At the time, Jobs only did what he wanted to do.His university calligraphy is very famous, and he was also fascinated by calligraphy.Although he didn't know what calligraphy would be used for in the future, it turned out that Jobs' artistic accomplishment made all Apple's products very beautifully designed.For example, the computer fonts in the past were very monotonous. When Jobs designed the Apple Macintosh computer, he suddenly thought of the beautiful calligraphy of the year, and designed a very beautiful interface and font for this personal computer.

In 1976, when Jobs was twenty years old, he, Steve Wozniak (Steve Wozniak) and Wayne (Wayne) started Apple in the garage to develop personal microcomputers.Later Wayne withdrew, leaving only Jobs and Woz.At that time, a computer cost at least tens of thousands of dollars, and even if the price dropped several times, it was impossible to enter the homes of ordinary people.In every technological revolution, new technologies must be orders of magnitude better than older ones to stand.Jobs knew this very well. He had to reduce the price of computers by dozens, or even hundreds of times, before anyone would want them.In order to reduce costs, Apple-I has no peripherals except a host with a keyboard.However, it has a video port that can be connected to a home TV, and an interface that can be connected to a cassette recorder, ensuring that data and programs can be stored on ordinary tapes.And television sets and tape recorders are available in almost every household in the United States.In the same year, the two developed Apple-I, the world's first general-purpose personal computer.Ordinary people can buy it for hundreds of dollars.Ten years later, the Ministry of Electronics Industry of China presided over the research of several units including Tsinghua University, and developed an Apple compatible machine called the Chinese Learning Machine. The price was only 400 RMB at that time, while an IBM PC cost 20,000 RMB, so China Learning Machine sold 100,000 units in less than two years, exceeding the total sales of other microcomputers in China during the same period.It is a pity that this company in China, which is also the company I work for, is very inexperienced in management. Its style is very much like a government agency rather than a commercial company. It has never developed.Of course this is off topic.

The earliest Macintosh can't actually do much, it can only let children who learn computers practice simple programming and play some simple games such as police and thief.The operation of the Macintosh is also very inconvenient, and ordinary people would not like to use it.So its symbolic significance is far greater than its practical significance, that is, computers can enter the home.In the past, the president of DEC believed that the entry of computers into the home was the most unrealistic assumption.Now, Jobs and his colleagues have done just that. DEC paid the price for their arrogance and prejudice.The emergence of personal computers had a strong impact on DEC's minicomputer market. In 1988, the long-term loss-making DEC finally couldn't sustain it and was acquired by the personal computer company Compaq.Jobs knew very well that a toy like the early Apple Macintosh would not be popular with consumers for long.In fact, when IBM introduced a PC that actually worked, it took three-quarters of Apple's market share.Therefore, Jobs began to work on developing a personal computer that could actually be used. In 1984, the second-generation Macintosh (Macintosh) was born.

The Macintosh was the world's first commercially available personal computer with an interactive graphical interface and the use of a mouse.Its hardware performance is slightly better than that of the IBM PC of the same period, and its operating system is a whole generation ahead of the IBM-PC operating system DOS at that time.The latter is a command-line operating system, and users must remember all operating commands to use the computer.Today, when we are used to Windows with an interactive graphical interface, it would be awkward for us to go back to DOS.The difference between Macintosh and IBM-PC was as big as that of Windows and DOS.In addition to the difference in the interface, the Macintosh operating system has an incomparable advantage over DOS in memory management, because the actual available memory of the latter is always limited to 640K, while the former has no restrictions.The Macintosh sold well when it came out, so it was a huge success, both technically and commercially.

When it comes to Mackintosh, two points must be mentioned. First, its interactive graphical window interface was first developed from Xerox's Palo Alto (Palo Alto, where Stanford University) laboratory (Parc) .The Palo Alto lab may be the most innovative and least commercialized place in the world.Another invention that changed the world but didn't do Xerox any favors was Ethernet, which everyone uses today.Although Apple has made outstanding contributions to the use of the graphical interface in the operating system, because it was first invented by Xerox after all, Apple did not make a profit in the subsequent lawsuit against Microsoft.Second, Apple has taken a closed path. It does not allow others to make compatible machines in order to monopolize the PC market.If Apple opened up Macintosh's hardware technology and allowed other hardware manufacturers to enter the market, we may not be using the IBM PC series today, but the Apple series.However, because Apple may not be able to compete with compatible machine manufacturers in terms of hardware, it can only play the role of a software company with an operating system as the core like Microsoft.At this time, the key to the outcome of the two series of personal computers depends on the duel between Apple and Microsoft on the operating system.Apple couldn't challenge Microsoft without the help of a compatible computer, and although it tried hard, it ultimately lost.

By 1985, Apple was developing smoothly, with 4,000 employees and a stock market value of up to $2 billion.Jobs was also very successful personally, gaining both fame and fortune.But then, Jobs encountered two things that others may never encounter in his life-being kicked out of the company he founded, and then he went to hell again.And Apple has also begun to enter a trough that lasted fifteen years.