Steve Jobs

Steven Paul Jobs was born in San Francisco in 1955 and adopted by Paul and Clara Jobs, growing up in the orchards of what would become Silicon Valley. After briefly attending Reed College, he traveled in India, worked at Atari, and in 1976 co-founded Apple Computer with Steve Wozniak in his family's garage. The Apple II made the company a pioneer of the personal computer era.

In 1984 Jobs introduced the Macintosh, the first mass-market computer with a graphical interface, but left Apple the following year after a boardroom struggle. He founded NeXT and bought the computer graphics division that became Pixar, which redefined animation with Toy Story in 1995. When Apple acquired NeXT in 1997, Jobs returned to the near-bankrupt company and began one of business history's great turnarounds.

With the iMac, iPod, iTunes, iPhone, and iPad, Jobs reshaped whole industries around simplicity and design. Diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2003, he continued leading Apple until weeks before his death in October 2011 at fifty-six. His insistence that products be both beautiful and intuitive remains a standard against which technology is still measured, and his story endures as a parable of vision, exile, and return.