STEVE JOBS || Apple founder dead at 56

October 6, 2011 at 12:00a.m.

Bio

NAME: Steven Paul Jobs

BORN: Feb. 24, 1955, in San Francisco

DIED: Wednesday at 56. Apple announced his death without giving a specific cause.

EDUCATION: Graduated from high school in 1972 and enrolled in Reed College in Portland, Ore., but dropped out after six months.

FAMILY: Wife, Laurene Powell; their three children, Reed Paul, Erin Sienna and Eve; plus daughter, Lisa Brennan-Jobs, from different relationship.

CAREER: Worked for video game maker Atari before founding Apple with Steve Wozniak in 1976 in Jobs’ garage. Launched the Mac in 1984. But a year later, Jobs was pushed out as Apple’s chairman. He returned to advise the company in 1996. After a stint as interim CEO, he took the helm of Apple Inc. permanently in 2000 and oversaw the launch of the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad.

Took third medical leave in January 2011 and resigned as CEO in August. Elected Apple chairman.

Combined dispatches

CUPERTINO, Calif.

In dark suit and bowtie, he is a computing-era carnival barker — eyebrows bouncing, hands gesturing, smile seductive and coy and a bit annoying. It’s as if he’s on his first date with an entire generation of consumers. And, in a way, he is.

It is Jan. 24, 1984, and a young Steve Jobs is standing at center stage, introducing to shareholders of Apple Computer Inc. the “insanely great” machine that he’s certain will change the world: a beige plastic box called the Macintosh.

Here is the Wizard of Cupertino at the threshold of it all, years before the black mock turtleneck and blue jeans. He is utterly in command — of his audience and of his performance. All of the Jobs storytelling staples are emerging.

The hyperbole: “You have to see this display to believe it. It’s incredible.”

The villain: “And all of this power fits in a box that is one-third the size and weight of an IBM PC.”

The tease: “Now I’d like to show you Macintosh in person. All of the images you are about to see on the large screen will be generated by what’s in that bag.”

He retreats into the shadows, pulls the inaugural Mac out of its satchel. He inserts a disk and boots up. Suddenly, on the screen — roughly pixelated by today’s standards but, for 1984, stunning — a typeface rolls by to the theme from “Chariots of Fire.” A picture of a geisha appears. Then a spreadsheet. Architectural renderings. A game of video chess. A bitmapped drawing of Steve Jobs dreaming of a Mac.

The computer speaks. “Hello. I’m Macintosh. It sure is great to get out of that bag,” it says. “It is with considerable pride that I introduce a man who’s been like a father to me: Steve Jobs.”

Applause shakes the place. Steven Paul Jobs, basking in it, tries not to grin. He fails. The future, at this moment, is his.

It is 27 years later now, and Steve Jobs has exited the stage he managed so well. The Apple founder and former CEO who invented and masterfully marketed ever-sleeker gadgets that transformed everyday technology, from the personal computer to the iPod and iPhone, died Wednesday. He was 56.

Apple announced his death without giving a specific cause.

Jobs battled cancer in 2004 and underwent a liver transplant in 2009 after taking a leave of absence for unspecified health problems. He took another leave of absence in January — his third since his health problems began — before resigning as CEO six weeks ago. Jobs became Apple’s chairman and handed the CEO job over to his hand-picked successor, Tim Cook.

We are left with the talismans of his talent, a tech diaspora: the descendants of that original Mac. The iPod and iTunes, Nanos and Shuffles and Classics and Touches. The Apple Store. The iPhone and the App Store and the iPad 2. They are part of the cultural fabric — tools that make our lives easier and, some insist, sexier and more streamlined.

But taken together, what do they mean? Are they merely gadgets and services that sold well, that answered the market’s needs for humans of the late 20th and early 21st centuries? Did Jobs’ prickly perfectionism — born, some said, of outsized ego — merely create a whole run of really useful tools? Or is something more elemental at play here?

Michael Capito, of MJ Marketing Consultant Services in Warren, said Jobs left Apple with product plans for many years.

“Because of his vision, he’s left Apple with a product pipeline for the next 10 years,” Capito said. “He was always known as a man who built products, not for today, but for tomorrow.”

Capito said though he thinks Apple will stand the test of time, the real challenge will be once Jobs’ “product pipeline” comes to an end. “The true tell is going to be down the road, after all Jobs’ products have come out,” he said. “The core people of Apple, these were the people he put in place. He had the best of the best. As long as they stay, I think they’ll be fine.”

Jobs the CEO, Jobs the technologist and futurist, Jobs the inventor and innovator and refiner of others’ ideas: All of them, in the end, relied upon another Steve Jobs who sewed the others together and bottled their lightning: Steve Jobs the storyteller, spinning the tale of our age and of his own success, and making it happen as he went.

From his earliest days with Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, he was a half-step ahead of the rest of us, innovating and inventing and creating and doggedly marketing it all by building a lifestyle around it. From Apple’s personal computers, he harnessed the new and repackaged the existing to create something fresh, something more.

Beyond his measurable successes, though, Steve Jobs claims one spot in history above all others: He realized what we wanted before we understood it ourselves.

We wanted easy to use. We wanted to lose ourselves in what our gadgets did. We wanted sleek, cool, streamlined — things that weren’t always associated with consumer electronics. We wanted the relationship between object fetish and functionality to be indistinguishable. We wanted to touch the future without seams that would yank us out of our communion with our machines. We wanted, in short, intricate simplicity.

To Jobs, the above sentences might have been commandments. They were used to denounce — in a friendly manner, but always pointed — what Apple cast as the corporate, bland chaos of the PC culture that IBM and Microsoft were creating.

In Jobs’ hands, those principles were potent weapons. Apple’s successes and missteps are well known, but things seemed to accumulate voltage when they passed through the switching station of Jobs’ brain.

Jobs started Apple with a high school friend in a Silicon Valley garage in 1976, was forced out a decade later and returned in 1997 to rescue the company. During his second stint, it grew into the most valuable technology company in the world with a market value of $351 billion. Only Exxon Mobil, which makes its money extracting and refining oil instead of ideas, is worth more.

He helped change computers from a geeky hobbyist’s obsession to a necessity of modern life at work and home, and in the process he upended not just personal technology but the cellphone and music industries.

Some of it is the American penchant for big personalities. Microsoft had Bill Gates, Facebook Mark Zuckerberg. A dominant human face focuses things. In a world of corporations and committees and consultation and collaboration, Jobs personified the power of the individual to effect an outcome — or at least the appearance of it. He was nothing if not cinematic. He projected his own image onto giant screens behind him as he rolled out product after product like some microchip Merlin. He was not merely a technologist; he was a stylemaker.

For transformation of American industry, he ranks among his computer-age contemporary, Microsoft Corp. co-founder Bill Gates and other creative geniuses such as Walt Disney that left an indelible imprint on the world. Jobs died as Walt Disney Co.’s largest shareholder, a by-product of his decision to sell computer animation studio Pixar in 2006.

Jobs “saw there was this personal quality to computing,” says Paul Levinson, author of “Cellphone: The Story of the World’s Most Mobile Medium and How It Has Transformed Everything.”

“The attractiveness of the product . They’re gleaming, beautiful objects that are physically attractive,” Levinson says. “iPods are almost worn as jewelry. Who would have imagined it would have been cool to see wires coming out of somebody’s ear?”

Steven Paul Jobs was born Feb. 24, 1955, to Joanne Simpson, then an unmarried graduate student, and Abdulfattah Jandali, a student from Syria. Simpson gave Jobs up for adoption, though she married Jandali and a few years later had a second child with him, Mona Simpson, who became a novelist.

Steven was adopted by Clara and Paul Jobs of Los Altos, Calif., a working-class couple who nurtured his early interest in electronics. He saw his first computer terminal at NASA’s Ames Research Center when he was around 11 and landed a summer job at Hewlett-Packard before he had finished high school.

Jobs enrolled in Reed College in Portland, Ore., in 1972 but dropped out after a semester.

“All of my working-class parents’ savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn’t see the value in it,” he said at a Stanford University commencement address in 2005. “I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out.”