Steve Jobs: A life lived well....a job accomplished to perfection

Jobs...A job to perfect

Steven P. Jobs, the charismatic technology pioneer who co-founded Apple Inc. and transformed one industry after another, from computers and smart phones to music and movies, has died. He was 56.

Apple announced the death of Jobs — whose legacy included the Apple II, Macintosh, iMac, iPod, iPhone and iPad. He had resigned as chief executive of Apple in August, after struggling with illness for nearly a decade, including a bout with pancreatic cancer in 2003 and a liver transplant six years later.

Few public companies were as entwined with their leaders as Apple was with Jobs, who co-founded the computer maker in his parents' Silicon Valley garage in 1976, and decades later — in a comeback as stunning as it seemed improbable — plucked it from near-bankruptcy and turned it into the world's most valuable technology company. Jobs spoke of his desire to make "a dent in the universe," bringing a messianic intensity to his message that technology was a tool to improve human life and unleash creativity. "His ability to always come around and figure out where that next bet should be has been phenomenal," Microsoft Corp.co-founder Bill Gates, the high-tech mogul with whom Jobs was most closely compared, said in 2007. In the annals of modern American entrepreneur-heroes, few careers traced a more mythic sweep. An adopted child in a working-class California home, Jobs dropped out of college and won the title "father of the computer revolution" by the age of 29.

But by 30 he had been forced out of the company he had created, a bitter wound he nursed for years as his fortune shrank and he fought to regain his early eminence. Once out of the wilderness of exile, however, he brought forth a series of innovations — unveiling them with matchless showmanship — that quickly became ubiquitous. He turned the release of a new gadget into a cultural event, with Apple acolytes lining up like pilgrims at Lourdes.

This brief video chronicles the life and history of a man whom generations of IT professionals will remember as beacon of vision and strength. A life lived well....a job accomplished to perfection