Choose A, B, C, D, or E for the correct answer.

    Steve Jobs was born February 24, 1955, in San Francisco, California. At 20, Steve Jobs and a friend (Steve Wozniak) started a company in a garage on April 1, 1976. Later that year, the duo debuted the Apple I at the Homebrew Computer Club in Palo Alto, California. Steve Jobs named their company Apple in memory of a happy summer he had spent as an orchard worker in Oregon.

    By 1982 however, his company sales sagged in the face of competition from IBM's new PC. Steve Jobs and Wozniak unveiled their new creation, Lisa to increase the company's bottom line, only to be another expensive failure.

    Not wanting to dwe11 on these successive failures, they worked on a new machine called the Macintosh. Jobs was reported to commandeered the project, ruthlessly pushing its computer engineers and flying a pirate flag above the b.uilding where the team worked.

    By 1986 the Mac, which Steve Jobs promised to be "insanely great" was a huge success. After 10 - years, starting from 2 kids working in a garage, Apple computer had grown into a $2 billion dollar company with over 4,000 employees.

    At 30 Steve Jobs, however, was fired from the company he co-founded with Steve Wozniak. He left the company after losing a bitter battle over control with Apple's CEO John Sculley, whom Jobs had recruited from Pepsi Cola.

    During the next five years he started two companies—NeXTStep and Pixar.

    NeXTStep which produces NeXT, $9,995 cube-shaped workstation which aimed to create a workstation for research and higher, didn't do as · well as Jobs had dreamed for. It did poorly arid Jobs pulled the plug in 1993.

    Pixar, however, was a success story. The company started the first computer-animated film, the Toy Story, and when Pixar's stock went public, Jobs became an instant billionaire.

    Meanwhile, his old company, Apple was under immense pressure from rival Microsoft and in. 1 996 posted billions of dollars in losses.

    In December 1996 Steve Jobs convinced Apple to buy NeXT and make its software the· foundation of the next-generation Mac OS. The technology he developed at NeXT became the catalyst of Apple's comeback. Initially appointed as Apple's adviser, Steve Jobs was named Apple's interim CEO in 1997.

Adapted from: http://www. inspiring-quotes-and-stories. com/ stevejobs.html (September 20, 2019)

" ... Jobs became an instant billionaire." The underlined word is similar in meaning to _____.