Steve Jobs founded NeXT while on a break from Apple

Steve Jobs saved a nearly bankrupt Apple

Apple nearly went bankrupt in 1997, when the tech company had only three months of operational cash left. Apple's board ousted cofounder Steve Jobs in 1985, but he was brought back as interim CEO to revive the company when Apple purchased Jobs' company, NeXT.

Steve Jobs changed the world with Apple and Pixar

The devices Jobs introduced during his time at Apple, including the iPad and iPhone, were imitated by competitors, ultimately helping to create the numerous options consumers have today. In addition to leading Apple, Jobs also helped turn Pixar and the software startup NeXT into success stories.

A short biography of Apple cofounder Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs led Apple for almost a quarter century, first from 1976 through 1985 and then from 1997 through just before his death in 2011. A brief synopsis of his career underscores the impact he made during that timespan, across everything from technology to smartphones, moviemaking, retail and much more.

Lessons learned from Steve Jobs

From predicting our screen-filled future in 1983 to slashing Apple's product line in 1997, Steve Jobs believed in focus, simplicity, and the fusion of technology and art. His philosophies still influence how products are built and marketed today.

Before starting Apple, Steve Jobs cold-called HP at 12 years old and got a summer job

As a leader, Jobs was both admired and resented for his unwavering commitment to his vision, which led him to push his colleagues beyond their limits. Jobs once told a rival computer executive that he'd make a product so good, they'd buy one for their kid.

A young Steve Jobs visited India on a spiritual pilgrimage

In 1974, Steve Jobs traveled to India after reading a book by the famous American psychologist Ram Dass. Jobs visited the temple of one of Dass’s influences, Neem Karoli Baba. He stayed in India for seven months before returning to the US to found Apple. Jobs’s trip to India helped shape the tech leader’s vision for Apple.

Apple started out in a garage in 1976

Shifting the focus of personal computing from businesses to everyday consumers, Apple found early success with the Apple II, which sold 6 million units, and the Macintosh, which featured a user-friendly graphical interface.

Apple's first backer recruited his own CEO to help manage the company

Wanting Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak to focus on developing Apple computers, Mike Markkula brought in his colleague from Fairchild Semiconductor, Michael Scott. As employee number five, Scott helped professionalize the fledgling computer company and getting manufacturing off the ground. (Some users may experience a paywall.)

Steve Jobs designed the original Mac calculator in 10 minutes

Unsatisfied with the designs provided by Chris Espinosa—Apple's youngest employee when he was hired at 14 in 1976—the engineer designed a program that gave Jobs access to every visual parameter, which he used to build the calculator's user interface.

Watch Steve Jobs introduce the first iPad

Apple's cofounder debuted the first iPad in 2010, framing it as a third category of personal electronics between the laptop and the smartphone. Steve Jobs showed off how thin the device was (for the time) and explained how it was better than smartphones and laptops for browsing the web.

How Steve Jobs tried to end development on Linux by offering Linus Torvalds a job

In a 2012 interview, Linus Torvalds claimed that the Apple CEO offered him a job in 2000 to exclusively work on Mac OS's Mach kernel. While Linux has not provided the financial benefits that a business venture with Apple may have, Torvalds stated, "I'm very happy with feeling that I've done the right thing." (Some readers may experience a paywall.)

Steve Jobs introduced Apple’s 'Think Different' marketing campaign

Jobs introduced the now-iconic “Think Different” marketing campaign. It won numerous awards, symbolized Apple’s new era under Jobs, and showed off his understanding of branding.

Creating the iPhone ended the marriages of several of Apple's engineers

In the early 2000s, Apple recruited multiple engineers onto rival teams tasked with combining phone, internet, and iPod capabilities. Despite significant technical hurdles, Steve Jobs favored a prototype with multitouch technology and a modified Mac operating system over a competing in-house model based on the iPod's click wheel. (Some users may experience a paywall.)

Why Steve Jobs always wore the same outfit

Steve Jobs is well-known for his signature outfit: a black mock turtleneck and denim jeans. The outfit originated in Japan, where Jobs observed Sony employees all wearing matching uniforms. He proposed Apple employees do the same, but that idea was rejected. However, he still decided to create his own uniform.

Microsoft's initial successes came from promising products that did not yet exist

In discussions with teams responsible for MITS's Altair 8800 and IBM's PC, Bill Gates and Paul Allen claimed to have created ready-to-use software. Code for the former was not completed until Paul Allen's flight to MITS' headquarters, where the software was successfully tested for the first time.

The origin of the World Wide Web, plus a look at its first website and web browser

Invented by Tim Berners-Lee in 1989 while working at CERN—home of the world's largest particle physics laboratory—the Web was developed to facilitate the sharing of information among scientists at institutions worldwide. By the end of 1990, the first Web server was operational as a proof-of-concept on a NeXT workstation.

See the original websites for companies like Google, Facebook, and Apple

Explore archived images of homepages on websites dating all the way back to 1991.

Sears once tried to become a tech company

In 1984, Sears arguably created one of the first online retail services, called “Prodigy,” in 1984 alongside IBM and CBS. But it was more of a WeChat than an Amazon, offering a variety of other services to users a few years before the dot com era.

The name 'Silicon Valley' arose from the founding of Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory in Fairchild Semiconductor in 1956-57, founded near Stanford University in Palo Alto

The Grateful Dead's online bulletin board system inspired the early internet

The legendary countercultural band the Grateful Dead had a popular hub on The Well, an online extension of the Whole Earth Catalog, a popular hippie magazine in the '60s and '70s. Users included Craig Newmark (founder of Craigslist), Steve Case (founder of AOL), and Steve Wozniak (cofounder of Apple).

Adam Neumann started another real estate company after WeWork

Former WeWork CEO Adam Neumann has attempted to purchase WeWork before, although, thus far, he hasn’t been successful. Since leaving the company, he has founded a residential real estate firm, among other projects.

Elon Musk's first company was an online business directory called 'Zip2'

Musk started the online alternative to Yellow Pages in 1995 with his younger brother. Musk sold the company for $305M in 1999.

How the National Science Foundation supports the US economy

The NSF has filled funding gaps in the research and development of products developed in the private sector, particularly when the research requires more than three years to complete. These investments, including in startups such as Qualcomm and Symantec, have supported job creation, generated economic returns, and helped build the technologies many industries rely upon, such as the internet.

The Nasdaq was founded in 1971, marking the debut of electronic trading

The Nasdaq stock exchange arguably invented electronic trading, making it a key part of fintech history. It's often used as a benchmark for how the tech industry is performing.

The term 'startup' can be traced back to a 1976 Forbes article

The magazine article included what’s widely considered the first recorded use of the word “startup.” The following year, the publication Business Week went on to use the term in a piece as well.

Jeff Bezos launched his philanthropic ‘Bezos Day One Fund’ in 2018 with his then-wife, Mackenzie Scott

The fund focuses on promoting education and reducing homelessness. This article compares Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ philanthropic initiatives to those of other billionaires, including Warren Buffett and Bill Gates.

SpaceX's S-1 or 'prospectus' revealed many previously unknown details about the company, including its unprofitability despite doing $18.7B in revenue in 2025, exactly how many voting shares Elon Musk will have in the company (roughly 85%), and more.

The Nasdaq's 'Magnificent 7' companies are responsible for roughly 40% of the Nasdaq 100 index's gains, while the remaining 93 companies account for the other 60%.

The animatronic shark from Steven Spielberg's 'Jaws,' the first modern blockbuster, was a complex underwater apparatus called 'Bruce.'

A vending machine run with Anthropic's AI went out of business after it was convinced to give away items for free and sell a video game console.

Netflix profits when you're not watching, and its movies are designed that way—read a detail-rich critical essay exposing lesser-known Netflix takes

How Amazon operates a 'flywheel' business model, a self-reinforcing cycle that drives continuous growth

In 2019, a laptop loaded with six of the worst malware in history and described as 'an exhibit of historical weaponry' sold for $1.3M.

While the first exchange-traded fund (a 'basket' of different assets that can be bought and sold on a stock exchange) in the US only launched in 1993, the global ETF market has grown to more than $10T in the short time since.

Legendary architect Frank Lloyd Wright designed the SC Johnson headquarters in Wisconsin, aiming to make a cathedral-like workplace

After the Boston Tea Party, colonists switched to coffee, which became the main morning drink for revolutionaries.

Quincy Jones' 'Big Band Bossa Nova' helped introduce bossa nova—a jazz-influenced Brazilian genre—to the US

In its famous catalog, Sears sold $600 DIY house kits from 1908 through the 1940s, resulting in an estimated 100,000 'Sears and Roebuck homes.'

English mathematician Ada Lovelace wrote the first computer algorithm a century before computers existed and hypothesized that computing devices would one day be able to compose music—foreseeing the generative AI systems of today.

Budweiser stores yeast derived from the original 1800s strain in a secret bunker, which only the Head of Yeast Management can access—not even the CEO

When a Paris department store hesitated to sell Estée Lauder's perfume, she 'accidentally' broke a bottle, causing the smell to spread throughout the store and shoppers to start asking to buy the scent.

Warren Buffett's former professor Benjamin Graham is known as the 'father of value investing,' a strategy in which investors seek to buy stocks trading below their intrinsic worth.

Mid-century modern graphic designers, known for their bright colors and bold lines in advertising, also found success with children's books.

In 2018, 26-year-old missionary John Allen Chau was killed by tribesmen after attempting to reach and evangelize on India's isolated North Sentinel Island

Search a massive database of over 4 decades of clues from the TV quiz show 'Jeopardy!'

For centuries, it was common to sleep in two shifts: a few hours at the beginning of the night, and a longer period beginning around midnight

While atoms are normally made of protons, neutrons, and electrons, exotic ones have been built with antimatter—alternate versions of normal matter that live for fractions of a second and are about a billion times as rare.

Some researchers have labeled nomophobia, the fear of being without your phone, as 'the phobia of the 21st century.'

Watch contemporary footage covering the US-backed Shah of Iran fleeing the country in the face of the 1979 Iranian Revolution