least today, you touch steve jobs. that is unique. you just don t have that with any other products. rob, the flag is now flying at half-mast outside of the headquarters at apple. a loss like no other company has suffered in recent memory that we re seeing today. you ve study his life. he packed as much life as you possibly could into 56 years. how did his illness change him? well, to some extent it humanized him. you certainly saw him waste away. have to wrap his mind around the fact he was going to past and it weakened him, though. to be clear, he held on to the job as long as anybody possibly could. he was tied to the company as tightly as walt disney was tied to disney. as tightly as any executive i ve ever seen. they were two halves of a whole
steve jobs, more than any other figure, shaped our digital era on his own terms and created hundreds of billions of dollars of value along the way. his story has an unlikely beginning. steven paul jobs was born in san francisco in 1955. given up by his birth parents, he was adopted by a family in the heart of silicon valley. he dropped out of college to pursue his ideas and teamed up with a friend to build a new kind of computer, one anybody could use. the company they founded was the first to make computers truly personal. at a time when pcs were green text on black screens. apple brought graphics and the mouse. at a time of beige boxes, it brought design. along the way, jobs reinvented music with a little gadget called an ipod. i have one right here in my pocket, in fact. there it is right there. reporter: and from there, went on to reinvent the phone.
everything you have been talking about. the iphone, the ipod. the mac. the apps. and so all of this, the creative genius of steve jobs, there s a powerful sense of just sadness here. even though that many people felt like this was coming. apple has been very quick to respond. go to apple.com and there is simply a picture of steve jobs in black and white with the dates of his birth and death. and apple within the last few minutes has issued a statement just expressing their sadness and what he has done for the world saying he has made it an immeasurably better place. and, of course, millions of his fans around the world, lawrence, would agree with that. but this campus where he had day-to-day contact with so many people for so many years, people who built this company with him, over a period of decades, there s very much a sense of sadness, lawrence. janet, we ve watched him publicly decline physically over
steve jobs and wasniak came and made these products unusually acceptable to individuals in ways we d never seen before. it was a quantum leap in the way the products developed but now have proliferated. you look at the people who have come after apple, whether with android phones, smart phones, whatever you want to call them or other types of tablet devices. they ve truly broken ground. as early as five or six years ago, people weren t really contemplating. he was continuously more than a step ahead of everybody else in his competitors. it was interesting he ultimately did open the company up and make it more user friendly than it was in the early days when it was considered an educational product or graphic arts product or part of a tight-knit community of apple users. it is now in many ways probably the most broadly recognized name in computing, which it certainly was not in the early days of its introduction. ron, there s a moment i
acceptable to individuals in ways we d never seen before. it was a quantum leap in the way the products developed but now have proliferated. you look at the people who have come after apple, whether with android phones, smart phones, whatever you want to call them or other types of tablet devices. they ve truly broken ground. as early as five or six years ago, people weren t really contemplating. he was continuously more than a step ahead of everybody else in his competitors. it was interesting he ultimately did open the company up and make it more user friendly than it was in the early days when it was considered an educational product or graphic arts product or part of a tight-knit community of apple users. it is now in many ways probably the most broadly recognized name in computing, which it certainly was not in the early days of its introduction. ron, there s a moment i experienced in college i will never forget. i was in a casual conversation with a college dean who was