Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs (February 24, 1955 – October 5, 2011)as an American computer entrepreneur and innovator. He was co-founder, chairman, and chief executive officer of Apple Inc. Jobs also previously served as chief executive of Pixar Animation Studios; he became a member of the board of directors of The Walt Disney Company in 2006, following the acquisition of Pixar by Disney. He was credited in Toy Story (1995) as an executive producer.

In the late 1970s, Jobs—along with Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, Mike Markkula and others—designed, developed, and marketed one of the first commercially successful lines of personal computers, the Apple II series. In the early 1980s, Jobs was among the first to see the commercial potential of Xerox PARC's mouse-driven graphical user interface, which led to the creation of the Macintosh. After losing a power struggle with the board of directors in 1985, Jobs resigned from Apple and founded NeXT, a computer platform development company specializing in the higher-education and business markets. Apple's subsequent 1996 buyout of NeXT brought Jobs back to the company he co-founded, and Steve Jobs served as its CEO from 1997 until August 2011.

In 1986, he acquired the computer graphics division of Lucasfilm Ltd, which was spun off asPixar Animation Studios. Steve Jobs remained CEO and majority shareholder at 50.1 percent until its acquisition by The Walt Disney Company in 2006. Consequently Jobs became Disney's largest individual shareholder at 7 percent and a member of Disney's Board of Directors. On August 24, 2011, Jobs announced his resignation from his role as Apple's CEO.

On October 5, 2011, Jobs died in California at age 56, seven years after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. The cause of death has not yet been officially confirmed, but is generally believed to be pancreatic cancer.

At the time of his resignation, and again after his death, he was widely described as a perfectionist, visionary,pioneer and genius—perhaps one of the foremost—in the field of business, innovation,and product design, and a man who had "profoundly" changed the face of the modern world,revolutionized at least six different industries, and an "exemplar for all chief executives". His death was widely mourned and considered a loss to the world by commentators across the globe.