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Today we have lost a visionary, Steve Jobs died at the age of 56. He was the co-founder of one of the most popular and successful companies in the world. Lets take a look at his life and times.

Steve Jobs had a very innovative mind and he always tried to work on the futuristic products and technologies. He was the guy to introduce the world with one of the first personal computers, the Apple I. The PC revolution was not made by him alone, as Steve Jobs partnered with Steve Woznaik who was the incharge of technical aspects of the device and Jobs was focused on marketing the product.

Jobs early life also show us the highlights of his entrepreneur skills. In 1968 when he was in high school, he created a device named as blue box, with the help of a friend. The main purpose of the device was to allow users to make long distance calls by attaching it to the phone. In his high school years he also used to sell and repair stereos.

He was very much interested in counter culture. In 1974 he worked at Atari and earned money to travel to India where he sought spiritual enlightenment. In his 20s, he also dated a folk music icon Joan Baez. His favorite musician was Bob Dylan and he also used to wear informal attire to work from then. Jobs met and became friends with Woznaik at Hewlett Packard where they worked in 1971. The both built the Apple I computer in Jobs’ parents garage. To finance this little venture, Jobs had to sell his Volkswagen minibus and Woznaik sold his HP scientific calculator and raised $1750.

And in 1976, Woznaik and Jobs founded Apple Computer Co., and a year later they changed its name to Apple Computer Inc. Apple’s second personal computer named as the Apple II was very successful and it recorded $139 million sales in a period between 1977 and 1979.

In 1984 Apple introduced Macintosh which was the graphical user interface and it ran on 32 bit processor, as at that time other PCs were running on 16 bit processors. It was also very successful and Apple sold 400,000 Macs in the first year. In 1985, John Sculley, who was the Apple’s president and CEO at that time, had a conflict with Jobs over the differences about running the company. The conflict resulted in Jobs ousting out of a $150 million worth company which he co founded. After that Jobs started working on next computer which was moderately successful but it was the base of future Apple hardware and software.

After getting out of Apple, Jobs bought Pixar, a feature animation company, from George Lucas for $10 million. After that Pixar created five most successful animation moves of all times including, Monsters, Inc. (2001), Finding Nemo (2003) The Incredibles (2004) Up (2009) and Toy Story 3 (2010). Pixar was also able to collect more than 100 awards and nominations for these animation films. Jobs eventually sold Pixar to Disney in 2006 in a mega $7.4 billion deal.

In 1996, Jobs returned to Apple and was named interim CEO in 1997. He planned to revive the gradually decreasing financial position of the company. Jobs took the initiative to take Apple to music business and introduced the first iPod in 2001 and just two years later iTunes Music Store was released.

That same year, Apple announced PowerMac G5, which was the first 64 bit desktop computer and it gave a very tough competition to Intel AMD and its PC making partners.

In August 2005, Jobs entered the Apple into the world of Intel processors and announced MacBook Pro and iMac which were transitioned using Intel chips. After that in 2007, Jobs presented the first iPhone and Apple TV at Macworld Expo which was a major breakthrough in smartphone industry. Jobs health was increasingly getting lower and got public attention. In 2006 he was noticeably thinner and when he gave keynote in 2008 Macworld Expo, many observers speculated about his decreasing health. Apple reacted and stated that Jobs was suffering from a common bug and is taking antibiotics. As he survived from pancreatic cancer in 2004, this was not the return of cancer.

Jobs was never willing to share private details of his life but in January 2009, he said in a letter that, he is continuously losing weight due to a hormone imbalance. Just after two weeks, he took a six month leave from Apple for health purposes. Tim Cook who was then COO of Apple, was in charge of the day to day operations in Jobs’ absence. It was revealed later that Jobs had to transplant liver in his leave time period.

He was back to work on time in June, but he used to work from home part of the time. In 2010, first he launched the iPad in January and later in September he launched the new version of Apple Tv.

In January 2011, Jobs took another medical leave of absence from the company without stating the time period for the leave. But even on his leave, he came into spotlight and launched the iPad 2 in San Francisco in March. He also introduced the iCloud and iOS 5 at Apple WWDC 2011. In his last event, he looked very thin but he was speaking with enthusiasm about the iPad 2. Just two months later, in August, He resigned as Apple’s CEO and Tim Cook took charge of the company. We were expecting him to join us in the latest iPhone launch event but it seems like he was not able to make it due to his health and just two days later, today, we heard about his death. He was truly a legend and can easily be compared with business giants like Walt Disney and others.