Mr. Jobs died only a few miles from the family garage in Los Altos, Calif., where he and fellow college dropout Steve Wozniak assembled the first Apple computer in 1976.
Mr. Jobs transformed the computer from an intimidating piece of business machinery - its blinking lights often caged behind a glass wall - to a device people considered "personal," and then indispensable.
He was the undisputed "i" behind the iMac, the iPod, the iPhone, and the iPad, and there was very little about his personality that was lowercase.
According to Fortune magazine, he was considered "one of Silicon Valley's leading egomaniacs," but he also cultivated a loyal coterie of ergomaniacs - ergonomic designers who created the sleek stable of iHits, whose devotion to him was the centrifugal force holding Apple together. Shares of the company's stock plunged 22 points after Mr. Jobs announced his final medical leave Jan. 17.
"A hundred years from now, when people talk about Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, Gates is going to be remembered for his philanthropy, not technology," said tech forecaster Paul Saffo, "the same way people remember Andrew Carnegie for the money he gave to education, not the fortune he made in steel. But what they're going to say about Steve Jobs is that he led a revolution."
It was a war waged on three fronts - computers, music, and movies - and with each successive triumph, Mr. Jobs altered the landscape of popular culture. With its user-friendly interface and anthropomorphic mouse, the Macintosh forever changed the relationship between humans and computers.
After acquiring Pixar Animation Studios in 1986, Mr. Jobs became the most successful movie mogul of the last half-century, turning out 11 hits in succession.
