Today in History: Founder of Apple, Steve Jobs dies
At the time of his death, Jobs, a father of four, had a net worth estimated at more than $7 billion.
On this day in 2011, Steve Jobs, the visionary co-founder of Apple Inc., which revolutionised the computer, music and mobile communications industries died at age 56 of complications from pancreatic cancer.
In 1976, Jobs and his computer engineer friend Stephen Wozniak founded Apple Computer in Jobs’ parents’ garage in Los Altos, California. As Bloomberg News would later note about Jobs, “He had no formal technical training and no real business experience.
What he had instead was an appreciation of technology’s elegance and a notion that computers could be more than a hobbyist’s toy or a corporation’s workhorse. These machines could be indispensable tools.” In 1977, Jobs and Wozniak launched the Apple II, which became the first popular personal computer.
In 1985, Jobs left the company following a power struggle with Apple’s board of directors. That same year, he established NeXT, a business that developed high-performance computers. The machines proved too pricey to gain a wide consumer audience; however, British computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee developed the World Wide Web using a NeXT workstation.
In 1986, Jobs acquired a small computer-graphics studio founded by filmmaker George Lucas and renamed it Pixar Animation Studios. In 1995, Pixar released its first film, Toy Story” the first-ever feature-length, computer-animated movie.
In 2006, Walt Disney Company purchased Pixar for more than $7 billion, making Jobs the largest Disney shareholder. In late 1996, Apple, which had floundered without Jobs, announced it would buy NeXT and hire Jobs as an advisor.
The following year, he became Apple’s interim CEO (the “interim” was dropped in 2000), and under his leadership a nearly bankrupt Apple was transformed into one of the planet’s most valuable corporations. A charismatic, demanding perfectionist, Jobs was said to possess the ability to intuit what customers wanted before they knew it themselves.
Despite a series of medical issues, including surgery in 2004 to remove a pancreatic tumour and a 2009 liver transplant, Jobs continued to lead Apple until August 24, 2011, when he stepped down as the company’s chief executive. Six weeks later, he passed away at his Palo Alto, California, home.
According to biographer Walter Isaacson, Jobs was the greatest business executive of our era, the one most certain to be remembered a century from now. History will place him in the pantheon right next to Thomas Edison and Henry Ford.
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