The legacy of Steve Jobs

It is hard to over-estimate the impact that Steven P. Jobs had on the personal computer history.

In 1976, Jobs, then only 21 years old, founded Apple Computer, Inc. in a garage in Los Altos, Calif., along with his childhood friend, Stephen Wozniak. Eight years later, the company released the Macintosh, an iconic personal computer that set the company on its meteoric rise to the present day.

The two were an unstoppable team, with Wozniak being the original engineering brains behind the company, while Jobs provided the entrepreneurial and design brawn. Jobs was notorious for being a highly-demanding leader with exacting, precise standards.

Today, the company, now simply known as Apple, Inc., is worth more than $350 billion (266 billion euros) - one of the world's most influential and valuable firms. Over the last decade, the company re-defined not only computers, but more recently, the music and mobile phone industries, with the iPod, iPhone and most recently, the iPad.

"Apple has lost a visionary and creative genius, and the world has lost an amazing human being," wrote Tim Cook, the company's new CEO, in a message posted on Apple's website.

"Those of us who have been fortunate enough to know and work with Steve have lost a dear friend and an inspiring mentor. Steve leaves behind a company that only he could have built, and his spirit will forever be the foundation of Apple."

Early days of Apple

Apple's early computers were relatively crude - the Apple I, which debuted in 1976, didn't even come with a case, screen or power supply. The 200 models that were made sold for $666.66, or $2,654.28 (2,017 euros) in today's dollars.

Three years later, Jobs made a famous trip to Xerox's Silicon Valley laboratory, the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), where ground-breaking work had been done in the 1970s creating the world's first modern personal computer, the Alto. This computer was the first to feature a mouse, windows, and most notably, a graphical user interface, rather than a command line.

"It was one of those sort of apocalyptic moments. I remember within ten minutes of seeing the graphical user interface stuff, just knowing that every computer would work this way some day," Jobs told the Smithsonian Institute, in an oral history interview in 1995.

"It was so obvious once you saw it. It didn't require tremendous intellect. It was so clear."

Many of those elements worked their way into the original Macintosh, which was released in 1984.

Jobs' other corporate triumphs

However after a falling-out with the company's corporate leadership in 1985, Jobs left the company and founded NeXT, a company that focused on high-end business and education computers. The company, while never a great commercial success, had a significant impact on the industry for advancing the field of object-oriented programming.

The following year, in 1986, Jobs also acquired The Graphics Group, Lucasfilm's computer graphics division for $10 million. That company eventually became Pixar, which revolutionized the animated film industry through the production of films like "Toy Story," "Finding Nemo," and others.

Pixar was later acquired by the Walt Disney company in 2006 for $7.4 billion, with Jobs suddenly becoming Disney's largest single shareholder.

In 1991, Tim Berners-Lee, a British physicist and computer scientists working at CERN, in Geneva, Switzerland, famously used a NeXT computer to create and host the world's first Web server.

Apple bought NeXT in 1996, and Jobs was brought on as the interim CEO, or iCEO, the following year.

Reinvention of the brand

Under Jobs' return, the company returned to profitability, and began to shake up the computer industry. The original iMac, a colorful, sleek, all-in-one design, debuted in 1997, which set the company back on course for profitability.

By 2001, Apple unveiled the iPod, a portable digital music player. While it was not the first music device that could play MP3s and other audio files, it was the first that received widespread success.

Jobs was heavily involved in the iPod's design.

"The interesting thing about the iPod, is that since it started, it had 100 percent of Steve Jobs' time," according to a 2004 Wired.com interview with Ben Knauss, a former senior manager at PortalPlayer, the company Apple approached to help what became the iPod.

Knauss added that Jobs was "heavily involved in every single aspect of the project."

"They'd have meetings and Steve would be horribly offended he couldn't get to the song he wanted in less than three pushes of a button," Knauss said. "We'd get orders: 'Steve doesn't think it's loud enough, the sharps aren't sharp enough, or the menu's not coming up fast enough.' Every day there were comments from Steve saying where it needed to be."

Beyond the computer

Since the debut of the iPhone in 2007 and the iPad in 2010, the company has been on a dramatic rise, as many companies have tried to imitate these products, most notably Google's Android phones and Samsung's Galaxy Tab.

Jobs said at the All Things Digital conference last year that the idea for the iPad came before the iPhone, although the company took the idea of a multi-touch display and integrated it into the internal phone project.

"I thought, 'My God we can build a phone out of this,"' Jobs said at the 2010 conference.

His legacy

His iconic presence in the industry and ability to bring game-changing products to market eventually lent an influence to his name that entrepreneurs like Nikolaj Nyholm of Denmark would laud and aspire to.

"For 99 out of 100 entrepreneurs, Steve Jobs has a negative impact on their ability to create a successful business," Nyholm said in an e-mail sent to Deutsche Welle. "He is the card that entrepreneurs - myself included - pull out of the hat when we don't have any better argument for a certain product strategy than our own 'product vision.'"

Across Europe, those inspired by his creations left messages in his memory on Thursday.

"Rest in peace Steve. You redefined the world more than any current world leader alive," wrote Allan Martinson, an Estonian venture capitalist, on Facebook. "And you redefined mine - without access to the very first Apple II in (then-Soviet) Estonia in 1983 I would never have taken the career path that I did."

For Apple fans worldwide, the underlying question is whether the company can retain its innovative spirit in the absence of Steve Jobs.

"I think you won't notice an immediate impact, but in the long run he's going to be missing at Apple, definitely," said Sebastian Hirsch, the editor-in-chief of Macwelt, the German edition of Macworld magazine, in an interview with Deutsche Welle.

"Apple has always indicated that Steve Jobs' DNA is in Apple. His vision and his excellent taste - he knows what people want. I don't think there will be many people that can replace him."

'Death is the greatest innovation'

However, if Jobs' own words are any guide, he likely remained optimistic that Apple will be able to thrive without him.

"I've always felt that death is the greatest invention of life," he said in the 1995 Smithsonian oral history.

"I'm sure that life evolved without death at first and found that without death, life didn't work very well because it didn't make room for the young. It didn't know how the world was fifty years ago. It didn't know how the world was twenty years ago. It saw it as it is today, without any preconceptions, and dreamed how it could be based on that. We're not satisfied based on the accomplishment of the last thirty years. We're dissatisfied because the current state didn't live up to their ideals. Without death there would be very little progress."

Author: Cyrus Farivar
Editor: Stuart Tiffen