Steve Jobs' amazing impact

Imagining the 2011 that would be had ailing Apple founder Steve Jobs never lived, dreamed and innovated is all but impossible.

Just as Henry Ford changed the world by making the automobile an achievable reality, Jobs huddled in a garage with partner and circuit-board savant Steve Wozniak and made the home computer a desirable, intuitive, and eventually, life-changing product.

Jobs would have been a legend had he stopped there, as Wozniak largely did. Instead, the man brought us the Apple Macintosh, which by popularizing the mouse and replacing typed commands with click-and-drag, helped bring the computer to the nongeek. Everything about the way we operate our computers today stems from these two adaptations.

And for an encore? Jobs introduced the iPod, the iPad, the iPhone and, through Pixar, the wonders of the "Toy Story" and "Cars" movies, "Finding Nemo" and more. Every one of the 11 films made by Pixar is among the 50 highest-grossing of all time.

How big an effect has he really had? Jobs created more than $300 billion in shareholder value since 1997, or $1,000 in wealth for every man, woman and child living in the United States.

Steve Jobs' dual insights, into human nature and technological possibility, have taken us to places we never realized we wanted to go. He's been seriously ill, on and off, for years, and has decided to give up much of the day-to-day responsibility of running Apple, at least for now. We salute the amazing ways he enriched the world and hope he's not finished doing so. hN