his specification. they were his. he was a super craftsman scaling himself to the millions of users that they had. it was what made him different. when you touch an iphone, at 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
not exist when he was born. and then in effect created an industry, the home computer industry that very few others at the time he did it thought was possible. they thought that, sure, there s a market for home toasters and for television, but a home computer? sounded crazy. remember ibm rejected the notion of a personal computer years ago and decided there was no notion for individuals to own computers that sat on a desktop or on your lap or in your hand. when apple 2 came out, i remember a friend of mine in high school and bought one in early college. however clunky it seems in retrospect, remember that someone like me in college was typing on, if i was lucky, an ibm seletric, more likely a manual typewriter and using whiteout. my friend was typing on a dot matrix that took 20 minutes to page.
neck and his jeans. as there were those years in the late 80s and early 90s when steve jobs worked somewhere else. despite that, when you thought of apple, you thought of steve jobs. we thought of apple a lot. just as much as apple was and still is, it changed the way america consumes media and uses the power of commuting. it all began in 1984 with the company s first big press conference to introduce its macintosh computer. before that in 1976, there was apple 1. 1977, they had considerable success with apple 2. apple 3 didn t go so well in 1980. the big super bowl ad they ran in 1984 and the unveiling of the mac in 1984 was a big deal. and, i mean, if you can forget your ipad for a moment, you can forget how easy our technology is to use now. there was a time when unveiling an apple computer looked so radical, specifically because it
steve jobs, more than any other figure, shaped our digital era on his own terms and created hundreds of billions of tldolla 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. i think this is where the
i think this is where the world s going. reporter: apple s total market value recently reached about $340 billion. its valuation is neck in neck with exxonmobil at the top of the heap for public companies. the company has 47,000 employees. those are just numbers. by the time jobs was done, he set a new standard for geeks, dreamers and business schools everywhere. built silicon valley s most valuable company and brought industries to their knees. but it wasn t all glory and success for jobs. apple s board forced him out in the 80s and for years he struggled to regain his footing. during those middle years, he bought a tiny animation studio from george lucas and started another computer company that seemed to go nowhere. then one of the great american comebacks. a decade after he was shown the door at apple, jobs returned to save it. that other computer company he