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Apple visionary Steve Jobs dead at 56

CUPERTINO, Calif. - Steve Jobs, who sparked a revolution in the technology industry then presided over it as Silicon Valley's radiant Sun King, died Wednesday.

CUPERTINO, Calif. - Steve Jobs, who sparked a revolution in the technology industry then presided over it as Silicon Valley's radiant Sun King, died Wednesday.

The incandescent center of a tech universe around which all the other planets revolved, Jobs had a genius for stylish design and a boyish sense of what was "cool." He was 56 when he died, ahead of his time to the very end.

According to a spokesman for Apple Inc. - the company Jobs co-founded when he was just 21 and turned into one of the world's great industrial-design houses - he suffered from a recurrence of the pancreatic cancer for which he had undergone surgery in 2004. Jobs had taken his third leave of absence from the company in January, and on Aug. 24 resigned as Apple's CEO.

Jobs died only a few miles from the family garage in Los Altos, Calif., where he and fellow college dropout Steve Wozniak assembled the first Apple computer in 1976.

Jobs transformed the computer from an intimidating piece of business machinery - its blinking lights often caged behind a glass wall - to a device people considered "personal," and then indispensable.

He was the undisputed "i" behind the iMac, the iPod, the iPhone, and the iPad, and there was very little about his personality that was lower-case.

According to Fortune magazine, he was considered "one of Silicon Valley's leading egomaniacs," but Jobs also cultivated a loyal coterie of ergomaniacs - ergonomic designers who created the sleek stable of iHits, whose devotion to him was the centrifugal force holding Apple together. Shares of the company's stock plunged 22 points after Jobs announced his final medical leave on Jan. 17.

"A hundred years from now, when people talk about Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, Gates is going to be remembered for his philanthropy, not technology," said tech forecaster Paul Saffo, "the same way people remember Andrew Carnegie for the money he gave to education, not the fortune he made in steel. But what they're going to say about Steve Jobs is that he led a revolution."

It was a war waged on three fronts - computers, music and movies - and with each successive Apple triumph, Jobs altered the landscape of popular culture. With its user-friendly interface and anthropomorphic mouse, the Macintosh forever changed the relationship between humans and computers.

After acquiring Pixar Animation Studios in 1986, Jobs became the most successful movie mogul of the last half-century, turning out 11 hits in succession.

But it was with the iPod - originally released just six weeks after the cataclysmic events of Sept. 11, 2001 - that Jobs engineered another tectonic shift in the digital world. The transistor radio had untethered music from the home, and Sony's Walkman had made recorded music portable. With one of the world's premier consumer-electronics businesses, and a music label of its own, Sony was poised to dominate digital distribution for decades.

But it didn't happen. Jobs took a digital-compression format that had been around for a decade, synced it to Apple's new digital-download service, iTunes, and with the iPod changed a system for delivering music to consumers in place since Edison invented the phonograph.

It was Jobs' genius for simplicity that led to a pricing standard of 99 cents per song that remained unchanged for eight years, despite initial resistance from the music studios. And it was his irresistibility as a pitchman that brought the record labels so completely into line that iTunes now is the dominant player in digital music.

A man of sometimes confounding contradictions, Jobs once traveled to India and shaved his head seeking spiritual enlightenment. But he also brought a fierce urgency to his business dealings, often screaming at subordinates and belittling foes.

Feared and revered, Jobs commanded the respect of his competitors, loyalty from the engineers he goaded relentlessly, and loathing from almost everyone.

"It's not easy to like Steve close up - he does not suffer fools gladly," said Bob Metcalfe, founder of the networking giant 3Com and an old friend of Jobs. "But I like him very much. His energy, and standards, and powers of persuasion are amazing. He is the epitome of a change agent."

Whether by accident or design, Jobs created such an intense aura of mystery about what he was on to - and up to - that he developed a cult of personality. His appearances at the annual MacWorld Expo were often an occasion for the rollout of some new product that Jobs - with a rock star's sense of theatricality - had managed, until that very moment, to keep top secret. To his loyal fans, it seemed to matter little that Apple's new device inevitably cost far more than its competitors'.

Jobs insisted the products Apple brought to market not merely be great, they must be "insanely great." It was his focus on design that allowed Apple to maintain a hold on the imagination of the public that often was disproportionate to the company's market share.

Apple's product lines were a projection of his sense of style, transforming the boring, putty-colored boxes of computers sold by competitors like Dell Inc. and IBM Corp. into a compote of fruit and berry-flavored iMacs. Yet Jobs himself rarely deviated from a single, Mao-like uniform of blue jeans, black turtleneck and sneakers, turning that into a kind of meta-fashion statement: Think different. Dress the same.

His first brush with pancreatic cancer did nothing to slow Jobs down during the final years of his life. If anything, he seemed more driven than ever. Speaking to the Stanford University graduating class of 2005, a year after surgery to treat his illness, Jobs said, "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. Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life."

In a curious way, Jobs started his own life by living someone else's. He was given up for adoption by his biological parents - Joanne Schieble and Abdulfattah Jandali, a Syrian-born graduate student - shortly after his birth in San Francisco. His parents eventually married and had a daughter, but it was not until Jobs and his long-lost biological sister were both grown that he discovered she was the best-selling novelist, Mona Simpson.

Even growing up in the profoundly non-conformist '60s, Steven Paul Jobs always seemed different from his peers. His adoptive parents - Paul and Clara Jobs, a machinist and an accountant - took every utterance of their restless son seriously. When Steve declared he wasn't learning anything at his junior high school and told them he refused to return the following year, the family abruptly moved to Los Altos so he could attend Homestead High.

It was there that he telephoned William Hewlett, president of the electronics-manufacturing giant Hewlett-Packard Co., and asked him to donate parts for one of Steve's engineering projects at school. Hewlett was so impressed that he offered the teenager a summer job.

In 1974, he took a job with the computer-game maker Atari, but stuck around just long enough to save money for a pilgrimage to India. After tramping around in traditional Indian garb and a backpack - his shaved head and spectacles giving him a vaguely Gandhi-like appearance - Jobs returned to the San Francisco Bay Area, spiritually uplifted and flat broke.

He stumbled upon Wozniak in 1975, presiding over a geekfest called the Homebrew Computer Club in Palo Alto, Calif., and convinced him to join him in starting a company. Jobs would remain the man behind the curtain, creating Apple's razzle-dazzle, but unlike the Wizard of Oz, Jobs welcomed attention.

"Every time I designed something great ... he would say, 'Let's sell it,' " Wozniak recalled once at an Intel Corp. conference. "It was always his idea to sell it."

Jobs decided to name the startup Apple, after the Beatles' record company. From the outset, he made no secret of his appetite, conspicuously taking a bite out of the Apple logo.

He and Wozniak trumped Microsoft's early operating system by adding a mouse and a pioneering graphical user interface that allowed users to stop typing commands in bewildering DOS code. It took Microsoft until 1985 to counter with its clunkier Windows operating system. But in one of his rare miscalculations, Jobs refused to license Apple's interface to other computer makers, and it quickly became a Microsoft world.

As a business, Apple computers were a boom-and-bust operation. The sophistication of the engineering created a fanatical following for the company's products, but the Apple faithful remained a small, if vocal, minority. Jobs needed a businessman who could turn his ideas into gold, and found him in Pepsi CEO John Sculley. It was Sculley who rocked Jobs' world, outmaneuvering him in Apple's boardroom, and forcing him out of the company in 1985.

With the fortune he made on the sale of his Apple stock, Jobs immediately started another computer company. But NeXT - which started as a manufacturer of overpriced workstations, and ended as a designer of overpriced operating systems - represented for Jobs a decade of wandering through the wilderness.

He didn't make the journey alone, marrying Laurene Powell in a Zen Buddhist ceremony in 1991. The couple had three children - Eve, Erin and Reed - and Jobs had a fourth child from a previous relationship with Chris-Ann Brennan. Lisa Brennan-Jobs, now 33, was born around the same time as Apple's third-generation computer, which was marketed as the Lisa.

By 1995, NeXT still had not acquired the type of industry buzz that Jobs was accustomed to creating. The workstations had a sheen of technological sophistication, but were so expensive to produce that few companies could afford to buy them. Apple, meanwhile, was faring even worse. Its share of the personal-computer market had dwindled so alarmingly the company was even considering a switch to Microsoft's Windows NT operating system.

Apple was still teetering on the brink of extinction in 1997, with just a tiny fraction of the PC business, when Michael Dell, Jobs' PC doppelganger at Dell Computers, sneered that if he ran Apple he would "shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders."

Never one to back away from a fight, or to forget a slight, on the day that his company's market capitalization surpassed Dell's in January 2006, Jobs sent a congratulatory memo to Apple employees - though by that time, nine years later, he may have been the only one still keeping score.

Jobs' resurrection at Apple remains one of the most dramatic turnarounds in the annals of American business. Until his rebound was cut short by cancer, it stood as a near-perfect rejoinder to the F. Scott Fitzgerald aphorism, "There are no second acts in American lives."