Steve Jobs

Steven Paul "Steve" Jobs (February 24, 1955 – October 5, 2011) was the co-founder and long-time chief executive of Apple Inc.; he co-founded the company with Stephen Wozniak in 1976 and would become the CEO and chairman of the corporation. He also co-founded Pixar Animation Studios, which was behind such animated films as Toy Story and A Bug's Life, and remained on the board of directors when it merged with The Walt Disney Company. Jobs, who served as Apple's CEO until shortly before his death, had fought pancreatic cancer for some years. He had received 317 patents for products he designed or co-designed.

Jobs was born in San Francisco to a Syrian father and German-American mother, but was adopted shortly after his birth. Jobs attended Reed College in 1972 before withdrawing that same year. In 1974, he traveled through India seeking enlightenment before later studying Zen Buddhism. He and Wozniak co-founded Apple in 1976 to sell their Apple I personal computer. Together the duo gained suuccess a year later with production and sale of the Apple II, one of the first highly successful mass-produced microcomputers. Jobs saw the commercial potential of the Xerox Alto in 1979, which was mouse-driven and had a graphical user interface (GUI). This led to the development of the unsuccessful Apple Lisa in 1983, followed by the breakthrough Macintosh in 1984, the first mass-produced computer with a GUI.

In 1985, Jobs departed Apple after a long power struggle with the company's board and its then-CEO, John Sculley. That same year, Jobs took a few Apple employees with him to found NeXT, a computer platform development company that specialized in computers for higher-education and business markets. In addition, he helped to develop the visual effects industry when he funded the computer graphics division of George Lucas's Lucasfilm in 1986, named Pixar.