Jobs led a technical revolution

Jobs led a technical revolution

Kansas City Star: Few people have done more to revolutionize our daily lives than Steve Jobs. In the 1970s, he and Steve Wozniak, an engineer at Hewlett Packard, dreamed up a new design for a personal computer, the Apple.

Wozniak offered that design to HP. Incredibly, the company turned it down.

From the start, Jobs stood out from ordinary business folk because of his vision. He saw possibilities that were virtually limitless. His greatest legacy was to blow up the nightmare vision of centralized control portrayed in George Orwell’s novel “1984” and replace the faceless corporate executive with the image of the businessman or woman as a revolutionary.

What unspooled over the ensuing years was a world in which the pace of change accelerated and computing power — once controlled solely by big business and big government — flowed out to individuals.

Jobs’ death is not only a loss for Apple Inc. but for the nation.