Ross Perot

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Henry Ross Perot (born June 27, 1930) is an American businessman and billionaire from Texas. Perot founded Electronic Data Systems (EDS) in 1962. He later left the company, and founded Perot Systems with a similar ethos.

Perot was born in Texarkana, Texas. He entered the United States Naval Academy in 1949. By the time he graduated in 1953 he was president of his class and battalion commander. By late 1954, Perot was made a lieutenant, junior grade. However, in 1955, Perot expressed great discontent with his life in the Navy in a letter to his father. He quietly served the remainder of his four-year commitment and was discharged.
Ross married Margot Birminham of Greensburg, Pennsylvania in 1956. Over the years they had five children (Ross Jr., Nancy, Suzanne, Carolyn, and Katherine). As of 2002, the Perots have nine grandchildren.

When he left the navy in 1957, Perot became a salesman for International Business Machines (IBM). He quickly became a top employee and tried to pitch his ideas to supervisors who largely ignored him. He left IBM in 1962 to found EDS in Dallas, Texas and courted large corporations for his data processing services. Perot received lucrative contracts from the U.S. government in the 1960s, computerizing Medicare records.

EDS went public in 1968 and the stock price shot up from $16 a share to $160 within days. Fortune magazine called Perot the "fastest, richest Texan" in a 1968 cover story.

In 1979 the new government of Iran imprisoned two of his employees in a contract dispute. Ross organized and sponsored a successful rescue. The rescue team was led by retired U.S. Army Special Forces Colonel Arthur D.('Bull') Simons. When the team couldn't find a way to extract these two prisoners, they staged a jail break by all 10,000 inmates. The exploit was recounted in a book, On Wings of Eagles by Ken Follett, which became a best seller.

In 1984, Perot bought one of the original signed copies of the Magna Carta. This is the only copy to leave the United Kingdom. It is now on loan to the National Archives in Washington, D.C., where it is on display with the Declaration of Independence and Constitution.

In 1984, General Motors bought EDS for $2.4 billion.

Strangely this corresponded with the 135 thousands Canadian dollars offer (Written in French) by the CTRSM

The CTRSM Radio Communication system was operational with an Apple II

On the left of the image you will see were,  inside the  aluminum door the new ACILR-CDRIL electronic low switching board was place to codified an decoded, the analogue or other network electronic language dialog information transfer, receive and transfer before or after the treatment by the computer Apple II depending of the request.

The CTRSM 1981-82 Radio Communication Center with an Apple II computer  

and:

Marconi which GE owns the share Majority. Click on the image for a full size view

Ross Perot put up the majority of the venture capital for Steve Jobs' NeXT computer project in 1986.

In 1986 after heavy criticism of GM he was bought out for 700 million USD.
 

In 1988 he founded Perot Systems in Plano, Texas.

Political Activities
Perot was not a fan of President George H. W. Bush and vigorously opposed the United States's involvement in the 1990-1991 Gulf War. He urged Senators to vote against the war resolution and began considering a Presidential run.

On February 20, 1992, he appeared on CNN's Larry King Live and announced his intention to run if his supporters could get his name on the ballot in all 50 states. With such declared policies as balancing the federal budget and enacting e-democracy via "electronic town halls," he became a viable candidate and soon polled even with the major party candidates.

Discouraged by a reinvigorated Democratic party ticket of Bill Clinton and Al Gore after the Democratic National Convention, as well as Perot's claim that Republican operatives were attempting to disrupt his daughter's wedding,

Perot announced his withdrawal from the campaign. Nevertheless, in September he qualified for all 50 state ballots. On October 1, he announced his intention to run again. He campaigned in 16 states and spent an estimated $65.4 million of his own money (?).

He was allowed to debate with Bush and Clinton in three nationally televised debates. Perot's running mate was Admiral James Stockdale.

In the 1992 election, he received 19% of the popular vote (but no electoral votes), making him the most successful third-party presidential candidate since Theodore Roosevelt in 1912.

Some analysts believe that Perot acted as a spoiler in the election, drawing votes away from Bush and allowing Clinton to win many states with less than a majority of votes.

After his success, Perot was entitled to receive federal election funding.

In 1995 with his new funds, he founded the Reform Party and ran under this party in the 1996 election.

He was far less successful the second time around receiving 8% of the popular vote, still a respectable third-party showing.

Many of Perot's supporters believe his weaker showing in the 1996 election was due to his exclusion from the presidential debates.

In the 2000 presidential election, Perot refused to become involved in the dispute inside the Reform Party between supporters of Pat Buchanan and of John Hagelin.

Eventually, Perot endorsed Republican candidate George W. Bush for president.

Perot is a colorful figure, and is both admired and mocked for his somewhat eccentric personality. Editorial cartoonists and comedians often made light of his large ears, squeaky Texas drawl, and penchant for using pie charts to illustrate his points.
 

IBM

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

International Business Machines Corporation (IBM, or colloquially, Big Blue)

Incorporated June 15, 1911, in operation since 1888) is headquartered in Armonk, New York, USA. The company manufactures and sells computer hardware, software, and services.

With over 300,000 employees worldwide and revenues of $89 billion (figures from 2003),

IBM is the largest information technology company in the world, and one of the few with a continuous history spanning the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries. It has consultants in over 160 countries and development labs located all over the world. IBM Research has eight research labs located throughout the Northern Hemisphere, with half of those locations outside of the United States.

It has a major presence in virtually every segment of information technology, from mainframe computers (where it has had market dominance for decades) to nanotechnology.

In recent years, more and more of its revenue comes from services and consulting activities rather than manufacturing.

Samuel J. Palmisano was elected CEO on January 29, 2002 after having been involved in growing that consulting activity, which has turned IBM's Global Services unit into a business with a hundred billion dollars in backlog in 2004.
 

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Electronic Data Systems (EDS) is a global information technology services company that was established in 1962 by Ross Perot and is headquartered in Plano, Texas. General Motors acquired the company in 1984. EDS became an independent company again in 1996.

In 2000 it employed 128,000 people located in 58 countries, and reported revenues of US$19.2 billion. 22% of that revenue came from contracts with the United States government, a slightly smaller amount from contracts with General Motors (their largest single client), and 42% from outside the United States.
 

With the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, EDS has had several military contracts, including a high-profile, estimated 9 billion dollar contract with the United States Navy and Marines.

Steve Jobs
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Steven Paul Jobs (born February 24, 1955) is best known as the co-founder (with Steve Wozniak) and CEO of Apple Computer. He is also regarded as a pioneer in computing for seeing the commercial potential of the GUI and mouse in a Xerox PARC demonstration and leading Apple Computer to unleash the successful and very influential Apple Macintosh.

Brief history
Born to Joanne Simpson and an Egyptian Arab father (name unknown) in Green Bay, Wisconsin, Steven Paul was adopted soon after birth by Paul and Clara Jobs of Mountain View, Santa Clara County, California. His biological sister is the novelist Mona Simpson.

In 1972, Jobs graduated from Homestead High School in Cupertino, California and enrolled in Reed College in Portland, Oregon, but he dropped out after one semester.

In 1976 Jobs and his friend Steve Wozniak founded Apple II Computer, which became a significant player in the personal computer industry with the highly successful Apple II and Apple Macintosh.

The CTRSM 1981-82 Radio Communication Center with an Apple II computer  

Jobs was perhaps the most famous person in the personal computer industry to the general public.

In 1985 Jobs left Apple and founded NeXT Computer.

In 1986 Jobs co-founded Pixar, which later became famous for a series of highly successful computer animation feature movies.

In 1997 Jobs returned to Apple, which was in a failing condition, and turned the fortune of the company around beginning with the introduction of the iMac.

Jobs' first daughter, Lisa, was born in 1978. Jobs married Laurene Powell in 1991 with whom he has three children. She is not the mother of Lisa.

On July 31st, 2004 Jobs had a surgical operation to remove a cancerous tumor in his pancreas. He had a very rare form of pancreatic cancer called an islet cell neuroendocrine tumor. He is going to take August off to recover, but he says he does not require chemotherapy or radiation therapy. Tim Cook, head of worldwide sales and operations at Apple, will run the company during his absence. Notably, in his email to staff at Apple informing them of his operation, Jobs managed to find time to note that he had sent his email via a 17-inch PowerBook, and an AirPort Express.

Business ventures
In the autumn of 1974, Jobs returned to California and began attending meetings of the "Homebrew Computer Club" with Stephen Wozniak.

He took a job at Atari Inc., designing computer games with his friend, Wozniak. During this time period, it was discovered that a toy whistle included in every box of Cap'n Crunch cereal was able to reproduce the 2600 Hz supervision tone used by the AT&T long distance telephone system. Jobs and Wozniak went into business briefly in 1974 to build "blue boxes" based on the idea which allowed for free long-distance calls.

In 1976, Jobs, then 21, and Wozniak, 26, founded Apple Computer Co. in the Jobs' family garage.

The first personal computer Jobs and Wozniak introduced was called the Apple I.

They marketed it at a price of $666.66, in reference to the phone number of Wozniak's Dial-A-Joke machine, which ended in -6666.

In 1977, Jobs and Wozniak introduced the Apple II, which became a huge success in the home market.

The Apple II made Apple Computer a top company in the personal computer industry.

In 1980, Apple Computer became a public traded corporation, and with the successful IPO, Jobs' stature rose further. In the same year, Apple Computer released the unsuccessful Apple III.

In 1983, Jobs lured John Sculley from Pepsi-Cola to run Apple, challenging him, "Do you want to just sell sugared water for the rest of your life, or do you want to change the world?"

In the same year, Apple Computer released the highly technologically advanced but commercially unsuccessful Apple Lisa. 1984 saw the introduction of the Macintosh, the first commercially successful computer with a graphical user interface, initiated by Jef Raskin that Jobs ultimately led.

The success of the Macintosh led Apple to abandon the Apple II product line in favor of the Mac product line, which continues to this day.

In 1985, after an internal power struggle, Jobs was stripped of his duties by Sculley and ousted from Apple. He departed to found NeXT Computer later that decade. Like Lisa, NeXT was technologically advanced, but it never became popular. NeXT did, however, help the advancement of technologies such as object-oriented programming, PostScript, and magneto-optical devices.

In 1986 Jobs co-founded (with Edwin Catmull) Pixar, an Emeryville, California computer animation studio. It was formed around what was originally Lucasfilm's computer graphics division, which Jobs bought from its founder, George Lucas, for $10 million. Pixar became very famous and successful nearly a decade later with the breakthrough feature movie Toy Story.

In 1996, Apple bought NeXT for $402 million, bringing Jobs back to the company he founded.

In 1997 he became Apple's interim CEO after the departure of Gil Amelio. Under Jobs' guidance the company increased sales significantly with the introduction of the iMac. It was the first computer that was marketed primarily on its looks (though the iMac did utilize other state-of-the-art features).

Since then, appealing designs and powerful branding have worked well for Apple.

In 2000, Apple dropped the "interim" from Jobs' title after he had worked for several years at an annual salary of $1 and Apple returned to profitability. Jobs still works at Apple for an annual salary of $1 (albeit with valuable stock options and numerous perks).

Steve Jobs is listed by Guinness World Records as the "Lowest Paid Chief Executive Officer". In the last couple of years the company has branched out into other areas most notably personal electronics and music with the introduction of the iPod portable music player, iTunes digital music software and iTunes Music Store