Steve Jobs

Steven Paul Jobs, the Californian who taught a generation to expect beauty from a machine, died at his home in Palo Alto on October 5, 2011. He was fifty-six. His death certificate listed respiratory arrest; the long cause beneath it was a neuroendocrine tumor of the pancreas he had fought, quietly and then publicly, for eight years. He was born in San Francisco on February 24, 1955, and adopted as an infant by Paul and Clara Jobs, a machinist and a bookkeeper who raised him in Mountain View and Los Altos. Paul Jobs showed him how to finish the back of a cabinet as carefully as the front, even though no one would see it. The son never let that lesson go. He lasted one semester as an enrolled student at Reed College in Portland, then stayed on to audit classes, including calligraphy, which he later credited for the typefaces that arrived with the first Macintosh. With Steve Wozniak he founded Apple Computer in 1976, building early boards in the Jobs family garage. The Apple II made the company; the Macintosh, unveiled in January 1984, made the argument that a computer could be friendly. Pushed out of Apple in 1985, he started NeXT and bought a small Lucasfilm graphics group that became Pixar, which released Toy Story in 1995 as the first fully computer-animated feature film. Apple bought NeXT in 1996, and Jobs returned to lead the company he had co-founded. The iMac, the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad followed in a run of products that changed how ordinary people listened, called, read and photographed their lives. He underwent a liver transplant in Memphis in 2009 and stepped down as chief executive in August 2011, six weeks before his death. At Stanford's 2005 commencement he borrowed a farewell line from the last issue of the Whole Earth Catalog: stay hungry, stay foolish. He was survived by his wife, Laurene Powell Jobs, and four children. Notice Nearby records October 5 as the day the garage tinkerer from Los Altos went home for good.