Tuesday, October 11, 2011

RIP Apple CEO Steve Jobs (February 24, 1955 – October 5, 2011)






An American inventor and entrepreneur. He was co-founder, chairman, and chief executive officer of Apple Inc. Jobs was co-founder and previously served as chief executive of Pixar Animation Studios; he became a member of the board of directors of the Walt Disney Company in 2006, following the acquisition of Pixar by Disney.
In the late 1970s, Jobs—along with Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, Mike Markkula and others—designed, developed, and marketed one of the first commercially successful lines of personal computers, the Apple II series. In the early 1980s, Jobs was among the first to see the commercial potential of Xerox PARC's mouse-driven graphical user interface, which led to the creation of the Apple Lisa and, one year later, the Macintosh. After losing a power struggle with the board of directors in 1985, Jobs left Apple and founded NeXT, a computer platform development company specializing in the higher-education and business markets.
In 1986, he acquired the computer graphics division of Lucasfilm Ltd, which was spun off as Pixar Animation Studios. He was credited in Toy Story (1995) as an executive producer. He remained CEO and majority shareholder at 50.1 percent until its acquisition by The Walt Disney Company in 2006, making Jobs Disney's largest individual shareholder at seven percent and a member of Disney's Board of Directors. Apple's 1996 buyout of NeXT brought Jobs back to the company he co-founded, and he served as its interim CEO from 1997, then becoming permanent CEO from 2000 onwards, spearheading the advent of the iPod, iPhone and iPad. After resigning as CEO in August 2011, Jobs was elected chairman of Apple's board of directors and held that title until his death. On his death he was widely described as a visionary, pioneer and genius—perhaps one of the foremost—in the field of business, innovation, and product design, and a man who had profoundly changed the face of the modern world, revolutionized at least six different industries, and who was an "exemplar for all chief executives".
On October 5, 2011, Jobs died at his home in Palo Alto, California, aged 56. A copy of his death certificate, which was made public on Monday, October 10, indicates he died about 3 p.m. on October 5 and listed respiratory arrest as the immediate cause of death, with "metastatic pancreas neuroendocrine tumor" as the underlying cause. His occupation was listed as “entrepreneur” in the “high tech” business.

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