As the industry loses perhaps its most famed, loved and divisive pioneer, we recall the life and times of one technology's greatest talents.
The greatest talent technology has ever seen has died. Steve Jobs has lost his battle with cancer, aged 56.
The college drop-out, who had no formal qualifications, business experience or technical training, was famed for his ability to inspire the whole technology industry as a whole to do better, and left a legacy of industry-firsts.
The original Apple Macintosh was the first computer for end-users with a full graphical user interface. Although the idea for its interface was borrowed from a GUI Jobs had seen running at Xerox, it sparked a shift in personal computing from text-based interfaces to graphical interfaces, with many of the concepts in Mac OS becoming the basis of Windows for years to come.
Famed early in his career for his "reality distortion field", Jobs later became known as a rare blend of consummate marketing nouse and technology vision. In conjunction with key lietenants such as Jonathan Ives, he frequently pushed the boundaries of manufacturing technologies in order to make possible products he had in mind.
Jobs pushed for the invention of a method of carving computer chassis' from blocks of aluminium, allowing the MacBook Air -- an unbelievably thin and light computer that still packed a full size keyboard and reasonably sized screen at an affordable price.
iTunes and the iPod took what was a niche geek hobby -- converting CDs into MP3s -- and made it a mainstream process that anyone could understand, forever changing the music industry. The iTunes store is still by far the most popular way to legally acquire music, TV and movies online all over the world.
The iPhone changed the smartphone industry from thinking about what colour plastic would be used for the next clip-on case to an era of full-powered, high-speed pocket computers with high quality software.
After years of Microsoft failing to make tablet computers work, the iPad properly rethought desktop-size computing from a touch perspective.
Jobs was also characterised by his fearsome defence of Apple's secrets. He believed that Apple's secrecy and first-mover advantage in many product categories was key to its success, and he was never afraid of the adverse publicity that would result from suing people who leaked those secrets.
Most famously, Apple pushed for criminal prosecution of Gizmodo editor Jason Chen over his coverage of an unreleased iPhone 4 that was left in a bar by an employee, then sold by a third party to Gizmodo.
Early Jobs
Steve Jobs was not born into privilege. He was the natural son of a Syrian man, Abdulfattah Jandali and college student Joanne Schieble. He was put up for adoption and raised by Paul and Clara Jobs in Mountain View, California.
He convinced Hewlett Packard to send him free parts for his first Apple I computer -- and a job at the company.
He was a spiritual explorer, travelling to India to study Buddhism and experimenting with LSD. He famously once said that Bill Gates would be a "broader guy if he had dropped acid once."
Jobs wasn't always the stunning success he has been in recent years. After Apple's success waned in the early years of the Apple Macintosh, he was fired in 1985 by Apple's board of directors -- from the company he had co-founded.
He spent subsequent years at NeXT, where he created the operating system NeXT OS that would later form the basis of Mac OS X, and at Pixar, where he created a string of groundbreaking computer-animated films that humiliated traditional animation houses like Disney with their success.
As Apple struggled to stay afloat, Jobs was hired back in 1999 as an interim CEO, saying that he was not on Apple's shortlist of candidates for permanent hire. He stripped back Apple's many similar product lines to a bare minimum, and introduced iconic products such as the iMac and iPod.
Rather than trying to follow the rest of the PC industry to the lowest price on beige boxes, Jobs seized on the phrase "think different" as Apple's differentiator.
Jobs told American public broadcaster PBS he knew exactly what was wrong with Microsoft: "They just have no taste. And I don't mean that in a small way, I mean that in a big way, in the sense that they don't think of original ideas, and they don't bring much culture into their products."
Despite these comments, he convinced Microsoft founder Bill Gates to invest $150 million into Apple at its most vulnerable point, and a commitment that Microsoft Office would continue to be made for the platform.
Of course, Jobs never left Apple and from that point, Apple's stock price rocketed from $8 per share to $380 per share today as he presided over a string of unparalleled tech successes. Today, Apple is the richest company in America.
Steve Jobs, the showman
Jobs was also known for his incredible ability to engage an audience.
He was known to have a slavish attention to detail in preparing for his public presentations, with teams of Apple staffers working on his presentation materials, including professionally printed presentation books for him to follow.
He would also rehearse, and rehearse again, presentations, micro-managing the smallest details such as the precise position of lighting on products.
Despite being a college drop-out, one of his most famous speeches was to Stanford University students. He had attended Stanford University as a "drop in" -- an unregistered student, attending only classes that interested him, and only for personal education, not counting towards a degree.
RIP Steve Jobs, technology's greatest talent.
