Steve Jobs Dead at 56, Legacy Lives On

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Steve Jobs, while a creative genius, was also lucky. His adoptive parents reared him in the San Francisco Bay area in the 1950s and 1960s, a time when theHewletts and Packards and the Varian brothers and other people who created Silicon Valley were running their first-generation companies.

He was lucky to be born only a few years after the transistor had been invented and patented at AT&T's Bell Labs and electrical engineers like Jack Kilby and Robert Noyce invented the integrated circuit. In 1961, President John F. Kennedy set as a national goal sending a man to the moon by 1971, sending the technology sector into a frenzy of computation, miniaturization and communications that today is largely taken for granted.

By the time Jobs and Wozniak were teenagers, they were forerunners of today's computer hackers. They tinkered with electronic instruments and became so-called "phone phreaks." They saw the first large-scale computers brought about by manufacturers like IBM, NCR and Burroughs and thought that with enough off-the-shelf components, they could make computing democratic and personal.

They worked at it, too, visiting companies like Hewlett-Packard and Xerox, especially Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) where Xerox engineers had developed things like the mouse, the icon and preliminary versions of small-screen computers. Xerox didn't have a clue how to deal with these innovations. Jobs and Wozniak did, starting first in garages cobbling the first Apple computers, designed with its own operating system, before Bill Gates had dropped out of Harvard.

They found that if they could assemble these first Apple machines, which were expensive but not out of the question for consumers, people would buy them for the home. Later, they hit up investors like electronics tycoon Max Palevsky and the Rockefeller family's Venrock Associates for money to start their own company.

They deliberately chose the name Apple because it was easy, instantly recognizable and an everyday item in every household -- much like the Apple computer would become, then the MacIntosh computer, followed much later by appliances like the iPod, iPhone and iPad.

Jobs always exercised an authoritarian grip on products, software and design -- always hating leaks, strictly controlling everything. He pitched Apple to the educational and creative markets, a niche it has always kept. It was not so successful in the office and enterprise market.

Jobs stayed as CEO until after Apple went public, then participated in the search for a professional manager and marketer who could lead the company to greater stature and have the formal Wall Street cred he lacked. That led to the hiring of John Sculley from PepsiCo., who ultimately fired Jobs and then was fired himself by the board.

In the wilderness, Jobs recouped, raising more money for a new company, NeXT Computer from billionaire Ross Perot, the founder of Electronic Data Systems in Dallas. In the 1990s, NeXT designed innovative workstations to compete against high-end products from IBM, Sun Microsystems and Apollo Computer as well as a new version of the Unix software that ran them. NeXT didn't go far but ultimately was wrapped into Apple when Jobs came back and the NeXT OS became the template for the OS now running all of Apple's prodcuts due to its multifunctionality strengths.