Steve Jobs dies

[Russ_Byth]

Apple co-founder, Chairman Steve Jobs dies

By: CNET News staff October 5, 2011 4:41 PM PDT

Apple co-founder and Chairman Steve Jobs died today, Apple said. He was 56.

Jobs had been suffering from various health issues following the seven-year anniversary of his surgery for a rare form of pancreatic cancer in August 2004. Apple announced in January that he would be taking an indeterminate medical leave of absence, with Jobs then stepping down from his role as CEO in late August.

Jobs had undergone a liver transplant in April 2009 during an earlier planned six-month leave of absence. He returned to work for a year and a half before his health forced him to take more time off. He told his employees in August, "I have always said if there ever came a day when I could no longer meet my duties and expectations as Apple's CEO, I would be the first to let you know. Unfortunately, that day has come."

One of the most legendary businessmen in American history, Jobs turned three separate industries on their head in the 35 years he was involved in the technology industry.

Personal computing was invented with the launch of the Apple II in 1977. Legal digital music recordings were brought into the mainstream with theiPod and iTunes in the early 2000s, and mobile phones were never the same after the 2007 debut of theiPhone. Jobs played an instrumental role in the development of all three, and managed to find time to transform the art of computer-generated movie-making on the side.

The invention of the iPad in 2010, a touch-screentablet computer his competitors flocked to reproduce, was the capstone of his career as a technologist. A conceptual hybrid of a touch-screen iPod and a slate computer, the 10-inch mobile device was Jobs' vision for a more personal computing device.


Read more: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-20116 ... 1ZxFFiPjeh

[PMC]

Sad day because of what he did and how he changed the world. The Henry Ford of computer technology etc.

Some broadcast trivia that some may not be aware of... in 1988 he worked for an FM station after being forced to leave the Apple Corporation. Some claim that the FM work is what gave him the idea for iTunes.

[Neumann Sennheiser]

Bob Rivers of KZOK pulled off the local coup of getting Steve Wozniak on the morning show today; the only local interview he's done or doing as far as I know. Everything else the co-founder of Apple is offering is big network national.

[jon]

Both Bill Gates and Steve Jobs took a lot of flak over the years for "commercializing" rather than "inventing" most of the technology in their most successful products, but so was Thomas Edison.

Steve Jobs did make a commercial success of a lot of state of the art technologies. My favourite still remains the "point and click/drag and drlop" (GUI = Graphical User Interface) environment of icons you click on with a mouse. While the Mac was the commercial success, its predecessor was the Apple Lisa, a $10,000 computer in 1982. The technology was invented at Xerox's PARC facility in California, where Steve Jobs saw it and asked a lot of questions. But Xerox pretty much junked the entire PARC technological output, so I cannot see claiming that Steve stole anything.

I think it is fitting that just weeks before his death, Apple became the largest company in the world, based on the total value of its stock.