Steve Jobs: 1955 - 2011
One of the world’s great visionaries, Steve Jobs of Apple, passed away today from pancreatic cancer. Apple Computer was formed in 1976 by Steve Jobs along with Ronald Wayne and Steve Wozniak. It grew to become of the most influential computing companies of all time. Jobs may well have been one of the most fascinating people of the 20th century. He held over 330 patents on items ranging from computers to lanyards, and owned NeXT Computers as well as Pixar Animation. He was married to Laurene Powell, with whom he had three children. He also had one daughter from a previous relationship. Jobs was intensely private, going so far as to ban publisher John Wiley & Sons from selling books at any Apple retail operation, due to an unauthorized biography they published of him in 1995. Wiley & Sons finally reached an agreement to sell books for the iPad last year. His many honors and awards included one of the first National Medals of Technology in 1984, Fortune Magazine named him CEO of the Decade in 2009 as well as the Most Powerful Person in Business in 2007.
Jobs resigned as CEO in August of this year, saying that he could no longer fulfill the demands required as Apple CEO. He was a man who lived life large and full, in time to his own drummer.