2008 – Apple CEO Steve Jobs holds up the new MacBook Air after giving the keynote address at the Apple MacWorld Conference in San Francisco. (AP Photo/Jeff Chiu, File)
“Steve’s brilliance, passion and energy were the source of countless innovations that enrich and improve all of our lives,” Apple’s board said in a statement. “The world is immeasurably better because of Steve” (via AP)
Steve Jobs, co-founder and former CEO of Apple Inc., passed away on Wednesday, October 5th, 2011 at the age of 56. He is survived by his biological mother; his sister Mona Simpson; Lisa Brennan-Jobs, his daughter with Brennan; wife Laurene, and their three children, Erin, Reed and Eve.
Steve was born on February 24th, 1955 in San Francisco, California. Adopted as an infant by Paul and Clara (née Hagopian) Jobs, Steven Paul Jobs attended Homestead High School in Cupertino, California. He begain working as a high-school student, at Hewlett-Packard where he met Steve Wozniak.
After graduating from high school in 1972, Jobs attended Reed College in Portland, Oregon, but dropped out after one semester, returning to California in 1974. There he became a member of the Homebrew Computer Club with his friend Steve Wozniak, and also worked at Atari, where he and Wozniak created a circuit board for the video game Breakout.
Brash and innovative, Jobs changed the world as we know it. Bringing us fun films like Toy Story (Pixar Entertainment) and most notably, the personal computer as we know it now, the Mac, ipod, the iphone, the ipad … and so much more. He told us what we needed, before we knew we needed it. His history and biography are written in more places than I can count.
He was an icon, a hero to an awesome boy and geeks the world over. To me he was an awesome individual, well spoken, empathetic, compassionate, honest. I had the profound privledge of meeting Steve Jobs late in my grad school years. A two hour “interview” in which we discussed adoption, life and ethics. You see we were both born the same year, a continent apart, both adopted and been through many of the same experiences. Rattled by being in the same room (yeah I was a groupie) it wasn’t much of a true interview. It was so much better, a true conversation with the man, who had brought so much technology into my life, who’d changed my life with that technolgy, but with whom I shared so much life experience. The full discussion we had exists now only on some digital tapes, since lost, but the highpoints still exist in my heart and in my mind.
These words from Steve Jobs at Stanford’s Commencement in 2005 hold such meaning….
“Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything—all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure—these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.
Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma—which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice.”
By submitting a comment here you grant this site a perpetual license to reproduce your words and name/web site in attribution. We hold comments in moderation and we reserve the right to edit and/or delete your comment if it pertains only to keywords, is spammy or if it contains no viable reference to the article on which you are commenting. Thanks for understanding. 
