Steve Jobs: 5 facts you may not have known about the Apple founder

Steve Jobs: Every Apple enthusiast has almost certainly heard his name. But how much do we actually know about the genius founder of Apple? WANT editor Sabine has collected some interesting facts about the pioneer that you may not have known.

Unfortunately Steve Jobs is not allowed to be very old. At the age of 56, the CEO died in 2011 from the effects of cancer. Meanwhile, Tim Cook has taken on his job as Apple CEO, which has certainly not turned out badly for the tech giant.

5 facts about Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs was a visionary. Long before the arrival of the eSim, he wanted to say goodbye to the physical SIM card and bring the macOS operating system to Dell PCs. That we’re not just talking about anyone is proven by the fact that a best man autograph sold for nearly 500K. Here are five more facts you may not have known about Steve Jobs.

#1 Career start as a hacker

Apple is certainly not where it started for Steve Jobs. He and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak collaborated in the 1970s on a “blue box” that allowed users to make free calls over longer distances. The two Steves saw bread in the device and marketed it. After a small success among students, the illegal trade of the then very inexperienced entrepreneurs was stopped after they were robbed at gunpoint during the sale at a pizzeria.

#2 Technician at Atari

Although Steve Jobs is known as the man who saw nothing in games, he really worked on games in the distant past. In 1974 he started working as a technician at Atari. He was working on that breakout, an enhanced single player version of the popular Atari game pong. This is again seen as the main source of inspiration for Space Invaders. His Atari adventure was short-lived. He co-founded Apple in 1976 with Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne.

#3 The Magic Number ‘3’

When the iPhone iconic saw the light of day in 2007, Steve Jobs repeated several times that he was about to unveil three revolutionary products: an iPod, a phone and a device that can connect to the Internet. As you probably know, not three products were launched, but only a single device that can handle these three tasks at once: the iPhone. Three years later, at the launch of the iPad, Steve Jobs says the new product should be seen as a “third device” between a smartphone and a laptop. He also used three words in one of his last Apple keynotes to describe the new iPad 2: thinner, lighter and faster. “3” is the magic number that made Apple the company it is today.

#4 Pixar made him rich

You would almost think: where did this man not have a finger in the pie? In 1985 Steve Jobs left Apple (which later turned out to be temporary) and bought the Graphics Group from Star Wars director George Lucas. He invested several million of his own money in the company and called it, you guessed it, Pixar. Pixar’s big break came in 1995 with the advent of the animated film toy story, after which the money started pouring in. The 2006 sale of Pixar to the Walt Disney Company even made him a billionaire!

#5 Never Coded

Steve Jobs is one of the most famous names in the computer world, but did you know that he actually had no real programming experience at all? “Steve never coded,” Wozniak said. “He was not an engineer (…) but he was technical enough to change and add other designs.” Ironically, Jobs did say again in 1995 that “everyone should learn how to program a computer”…