Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs was an American businessman and investor who helped drive the spread of personal computing in the 1970s and 1980s. Born in San Francisco in 1955, he co-founded Apple with Steve Wozniak in 1976, and the Apple II became one of the earliest mass-produced microcomputers to achieve broad success. He understood the market value of the Xerox Alto's mouse-driven graphical interface, which led to the Apple Lisa and then the Macintosh, the first mass-produced machine to use a graphical user interface. The Macintosh helped create the desktop publishing field in 1985, the year Jobs left Apple and founded NeXT. In 1986 he bought Lucasfilm's computer graphics unit, which became Pixar and released Toy Story (1995), the first computer-animated feature film. After Apple purchased NeXT in 1997, Jobs returned as CEO and guided products such as the iMac, iPod, iPhone, and iPad. He served on Gap Inc.'s board from 1999 to 2002 and received the Presidential Medal of Freedom posthumously.