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Steve Jobs, the visionary who led a mobile computer revolution with the creation of wildly popular devices such as the iPhone, was mourned Thursday by admirers and competitors as much of the world awoke to news of his death.

Jobs' death was announced Wednesday by Apple, the Silicon Valley company he co-founded with Steve Wozniak. He was 56.

"Apple has lost a visionary and creative genius, and the world has lost an amazing human being," Apple said in a statement on its website.

"Those of us who have been fortunate enough to know and work with Steve have lost a dear friend and an inspiring mentor."

The hard-driving executive pioneered the concept of the personal computer and of navigating them by clicking onscreen images with a mouse.

In more recent years, he introduced the iPod portable music player, the iPhone and the iPad tablet -- all of which changed how digital content was consumed.

More than one pundit, praising Jobs' ability to transform industries with his inventions, called him a modern-day Leonardo da Vinci.

"Steve Jobs is one of the great innovators in the history of modern capitalism," New York Times columnist Joe Nocera said in August. "His intuition has been phenomenal over the years."

Others championed his leadership skills..

"He was a historical figure on the scale of a Thomas Edison or a Henry Ford, and set the mold for many other corporate leaders in many other industries," wrote Walter Mossberg, a tech columnist for The Wall Street Journal.

"He did what a CEO should: Hired and inspired great people; managed for the long term, not the quarter of the short-term stock price; made big bets and took big risks."

Jobs' death, while dreaded by Apple's legions of fans, was not unexpected. He had battled cancer for years, took a medical leave from Apple in January and stepped down as chief executive in August because he could "no longer meet (his) duties and expectations."

Born on February 24, 1955, and then adopted, Jobs grew up in Cupertino, California -- which would become home to Apple's headquarters -- and showed an early interest in electronics. As a teenager, he phoned William Hewlett, president of Hewlett-Packard, to request parts for a school project. He got them, along with an offer of a summer job at HP.

Jobs dropped out of Oregon's Reed College after one semester, although he returned to audit a class in calligraphy, which he says influenced Apple's graceful, minimalist aesthetic. He quit one of his first jobs, designing video games for Atari, to backpack across India and take psychedelic drugs. Those experiences, Jobs said later, shaped his creative vision.

While at HP, Jobs befriended Steve Wozniak, who impressed him with his skill at assembling electronic components. The two later joined a Silicon Valley computer hobbyists club, and when he was 21, Jobs teamed with Wozniak and two other men to launch Apple Computer Inc.

"It's like there is a big hole left in you," Wozniak said on CNN's AC360 after learning of Jobs death. "And it's very hard to go back and ... reflect on the feelings ... and what it means."

It's long been Silicon Valley legend: Jobs and Wozniak built their first commercial product, the Apple 1, in Jobs' parents' garage in 1976. Jobs sold his Volkswagen van to help finance the venture. The primitive computer, priced at $666.66, had no keyboard or display, and customers had to assemble it themselves.

The following year, Apple unveiled the Apple II computer at the inaugural West Coast Computer Faire.

"Steven Jobs was, and still is, an inspiration to many individuals and companies all over the world. His passing is a loss to innovators and visionaries everywhere," said Jong-seok Park, president of LG Electronics.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer described him as "one of the founders of our industry and a true visionary."

Jobs was among the first computer engineers to recognize the appeal of the mouse and the graphical interface, which let users operate computers by clicking on images instead of writing text.

Apple's pioneering Macintosh computer launched in early 1984 with a now-iconic, Orwellian-themed Super Bowl ad. The boxy beige Macintosh sold well, but the demanding Jobs clashed frequently with colleagues, and in 1986, he was ousted from Apple after a power struggle.

Then came a 10-year hiatus during which he founded NeXT Computer, whose pricey, cube-shaped computer workstations never caught on with consumers.

Jobs had more success when he bought Pixar Animation Studios from George Lucas before the company made it big with "Toy Story."

In 1996, Apple bought NeXT, returning Jobs to the then-struggling company he had co-founded. Within a year, he was running Apple again -- older and perhaps wiser but no less of a perfectionist. And in 2001, he took the stage to introduce the original iPod, the little white device that transformed portable music and kick-started Apple's furious comeback.

Thus began one of the most remarkable second acts in the history of business. Over the next decade, Jobs wowed launch-event audiences, and consumers, with one game-changing hit after another: iTunes (2003), the iPhone (2007), the App Store (2008), and the iPad (2010).

Observers marveled at Jobs' skills as a pitchman, his ability to inspire godlike devotion among Apple "fanboys" (and scorn from PC fans) and his "one more thing" surprise announcements.

Time after time, he sold people on a product they didn't know they needed until he invented it. And all this on an official annual salary of $1.

He also built a reputation as a hard-driving, mercurial and sometimes difficult boss who oversaw almost every detail of Apple's products and rejected prototypes that didn't meet his exacting standards.

By the late 2000s, his once-renegade tech company, the David to Microsoft's Goliath, was entrenched at the uppermost tier of American business.

Apple now operates more than 300 retail stores in 11 countries. The company has sold more than 275 million iPods, 100 million iPhones and 25 million iPads worldwide.

Jobs' climb to the top was complete in summer 2011, when Apple listed more cash reserves than the U.S. Treasury and even briefly surpassed Exxon Mobil as the world's most valuable company.

But Jobs' health problems sometimes cast a shadow over his company's success.

In 2004, he announced to his employees that he was being treated for pancreatic cancer. He lost weight and appeared unusually gaunt at keynote speeches to Apple developers, spurring concerns about his health and fluctuations in the company's stock price. One wire service accidentally published Jobs' obituary.

Jobs had a secret liver transplant in 2009 in Tennessee during a six-month medical leave of absence from Apple. He took another medical leave in January this year.

Perhaps mindful of his legacy, he cooperated on his first authorized biography, scheduled to be published by Simon & Schuster in November.

Jobs is survived by his wife of 20 years, Laurene, and four children, including one from a prior relationship.

He always spoke with immense pride about what he and his engineers accomplished at Apple.

"Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do," he said while delivering a 2005 commencement address at Stanford University.

"If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on."

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Steve Jobs praised as Apple's visionary, creative genius

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Steve Jobs, the visionary who led a mobile computer revolution with the creation of wildly popular devices such as the iPhone, was mourned Thursday by admirers and competitors as much of the world awoke to news of his death. Jobs' death was announced Wednesday by Apple, the Silicon Valley company he co-founded with Steve Wozniak.

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Who Was Steve Jobs?

Steven Paul Jobs was an American inventor, designer and entrepreneur who was the co-founder, chief executive and chairman of Apple Computer. Apple's revolutionary products, which include the iPod, iPhone and iPad, are now seen as dictating the evolution of modern technology.

Born in 1955 to two University of Wisconsin graduate students who gave him up for adoption, Jobs was smart but directionless, dropping out of college and experimenting with different pursuits before co-founding Apple with Steve Wozniak in 1976. Jobs left the company in 1985, launching Pixar Animation Studios, then returned to Apple more than a decade later. Jobs died in 2011 following a long battle with pancreatic cancer.

Steve Jobs' Parents and Adoption

Jobs was born to Joanne Schieble (later Joanne Simpson) and Abdulfattah "John" Jandali, two University of Wisconsin graduate students. The couple gave up their unnamed son for adoption.

Jobs' father, Jandali, was a Syrian political science professor. His mother, Schieble, worked as a speech therapist. Shortly after Jobs was placed for adoption, his biological parents married and had another child, Mona Simpson. It was not until Jobs was 27 that he was able to uncover information on his biological parents.

As an infant, Jobs was adopted by Clara and Paul Jobs and named Steven Paul Jobs. Clara worked as an accountant and Paul was a Coast Guard veteran and machinist.

Early Life

Jobs was born on February 24, 1955, in San Francisco, California. He lived with his adoptive family in Mountain View, California, within the area that would later become known as Silicon Valley.

As a boy, Jobs and his father worked on electronics in the family garage. Paul showed his son how to take apart and reconstruct electronics, a hobby that instilled confidence, tenacity and mechanical prowess in young Jobs.

Steve Jobs' Education and College

While Jobs was always an intelligent and innovative thinker, his youth was riddled with frustrations over formal schooling. Jobs was a prankster in elementary school due to boredom, and his fourth-grade teacher needed to bribe him to study. Jobs tested so well, however, that administrators wanted to skip him ahead to high school - a proposal that his parents declined.

After high school, Jobs enrolled at Reed College in Portland, Oregon. Lacking direction, he dropped out of college after six months and spent the next 18 months dropping in on creative classes at the school. Jobs later recounted how one course in calligraphy developed his love of typography.

In 1974, Jobs took a position as a video game designer with Atari. Several months later he left the company to find spiritual enlightenment in India, traveling further and experimenting with psychedelic drugs.

Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs

Back when Jobs was enrolled at Homestead High School, he was introduced to his future partner and co-founder of Apple Computer, Wozniak, who was attending the University of California, Berkeley.

In a 2007 interview with PC World, Wozniak spoke about why he and Jobs clicked so well: "We both loved electronics and the way we used to hook up digital chips," Wozniak said. "Very few people, especially back then, had any idea what chips were, how they worked and what they could do. I had designed many computers, so I was way ahead of him in electronics and computer design, but we still had common interests. We both had pretty much sort of an independent attitude about things in the world."

Founding and Leaving Apple Computer

In 1976, when Jobs was just 21, he and Wozniak started Apple Computer in the Jobs' family garage. They funded their entrepreneurial venture by Jobs selling his Volkswagen bus and Wozniak selling his beloved scientific calculator. Jobs and Wozniak are credited with revolutionizing the computer industry with Apple by democratizing the technology and making machines smaller, cheaper, intuitive and accessible to everyday consumers.

Wozniak conceived of a series of user-friendly personal computers, and - with Jobs in charge of marketing - Apple initially marketed the computers for $666.66 each. The Apple I earned the corporation around $774,000. Three years after the release of Apple's second model, the Apple II, the company's sales increased by 700 percent to $139 million.

In 1980, Apple Computer became a publicly-traded company, with a market value of $1.2 billion by the end of its very first day of trading. Jobs looked to marketing expert John Sculley of Pepsi-Cola to take over the role of CEO for Apple.

The next several products from Apple suffered significant design flaws, however, resulting in recalls and consumer disappointment. IBM suddenly surpassed Apple in sales, and Apple had to compete with an IBM/PC-dominated business world.

In 1984, Apple released the Macintosh, marketing the computer as a piece of a counterculture lifestyle: romantic, youthful, creative. But despite positive sales and performance superior to IBM's PCs, the Macintosh was still not IBM-compatible.

Sculley believed Jobs was hurting Apple, and the company's executives began to phase him out. Not actually having had an official title with the company he co-founded, Jobs was pushed into a more marginalized position and thus left Apple in 1985.

NeXT

After leaving Apple in 1985, Jobs began a new hardware and software enterprise called NeXT, Inc. The company floundered in its attempts to sell its specialized operating system to mainstream America, and Apple eventually bought the company in 1996 for $429 million.

Reinventing Apple

In 1997, Jobs returned to his post as Apple's CEO. Just as Jobs instigated Apple's success in the 1970s, he is credited with revitalizing the company in the 1990s.

With a new management team, altered stock options and a self-imposed annual salary of $1 a year, Jobs put Apple back on track. Jobs' ingenious products (like the iMac), effective branding campaigns and stylish designs caught the attention of consumers once again.

In the ensuing years, Apple introduced such revolutionary products as the Macbook Air, iPod and iPhone, all of which dictated the evolution of technology. Almost immediately after Apple released a new product, competitors scrambled to produce comparable technologies.

Apple's quarterly reports improved significantly in 2007: Stocks were worth $199.99 a share-a record-breaking number at that time - and the company boasted a staggering $1.58 billion profit, an $18 billion surplus in the bank and zero debt.

In 2008, Apple became the second-biggest music retailer in America - second only to Walmart, fueled by iTunes and iPod sales. Apple has also been ranked No. 1 on Fortune magazine's list of "America's Most Admired Companies," as well as No. 1 among Fortune 500 companies for returns to shareholders.

Steve Jobs and Pixar

In 1986, Jobs purchased an animation company from George Lucas, which later became Pixar Animation Studios. Believing in Pixar's potential, Jobs initially invested $50 million of his own money in the company.

The studio went on to produce wildly popular movies such as Toy Story, Finding Nemo and The Incredibles; Pixar's films have collectively netted $4 billion. The studio merged with Walt Disney in 2006, making Jobs Disney's largest shareholder.

In 2011, Forbes estimated the majority of Jobs' net worth at around $6.5 billion to $7 billion from his sale of Pixar to the Walt Disney Company in 2006. However if Jobs had not sold his Apple shares in 1985, when he left the company he founded and helmed for over a decade, his net worth would have been a staggering $36 billion.

Wife and Children

Jobs and Laurene Powell married on March 18, 1991. The pair met in the early 1990s at Stanford business school, where Powell was an MBA student. They lived together in Palo Alto, California, with their three children: Reed, Erin, and Eve.

Jobs also fathered a daughter, Lisa, with girlfriend Chrisann Brennan in 1978, when he was 23. He denied paternity of his daughter in court documents, claiming he was sterile.

Lisa Brennan Jobs later wrote of her childhood and relationship with Jobs in her book Small Fry, published in 2018. In 1980, Lisa wrote, DNA tests revealed that she and Jobs were a match, and he was required to begin making paternity payments to her financially struggling mother. Jobs did not initiate a relationship with his daughter until she was 7 years old. When she was a teenager, Lisa came to live with her father.

DOWNLOAD BIOGRAPHY'S STEVE JOBS FACT CARD

Battle with Cancer

In 2003, Jobs discovered that he had a neuroendocrine tumor, a rare but operable form of pancreatic cancer. Instead of immediately opting for surgery, Jobs chose to alter his pesco-vegetarian diet while weighing Eastern treatment options.

For nine months, Jobs postponed surgery, making Apple's board of directors nervous. Executives feared that shareholders would pull their stock if word got out that their CEO was ill. But in the end, Jobs' confidentiality took precedence over shareholder disclosure.

In 2004, Jobs had successful surgery to remove the pancreatic tumor. True to form, in subsequent years Jobs disclosed little about his health.

Early in 2009, reports circulated about Jobs' weight loss, some predicting his health issues had returned, which included a liver transplant. Jobs responded to these concerns by stating he was dealing with a hormone imbalance. Days later, he went on a six-month leave of absence.

In an email message to employees, Jobs said his "health-related issues are more complex" than he thought, then named Tim Cook, Apple's chief operating officer, as "responsible for Apple's day-today operations."

After nearly a year out of the spotlight, Jobs delivered a keynote address at an invite-only Apple event on September 9, 2009. He continued to serve as master of ceremonies, which included the unveiling of the iPad, throughout much of 2010.

In January 2011, Jobs announced he was going on medical leave. In August, he resigned as CEO of Apple, handing the reins to Cook.

Steve Jobs' Death and Last Words

Jobs died in Palo Alto on October 5, 2011, after battling pancreatic cancer for nearly a decade. He was 56 years old.

In a eulogy for Jobs, sister Mona Simpson wrote that just before dying, Jobs looked for a long time at his sister, Patty, then his wife and children, then past them, and said his last words: "OH WOW. OH WOW. OH WOW."

Movies

Jobs' life was the subject of two films: 2013's Jobs, starring Ashton Kutcher as Jobs, and 2015's Steve Jobs, with Michael Fassbender playing the Apple co-founder.

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Steven Paul Jobs was an American inventor, designer and entrepreneur who was the co-founder, chief executive and chairman of Apple Computer. Apple's revolutionary products, which include the iPod, iPhone and iPad, are now seen as dictating the evolution of modern technology.

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Steve Jobs, the visionary in the black turtleneck who co-founded Apple in a Silicon Valley garage, built it into the world's leading tech company and led a mobile-computing revolution with wildly popular devices such as the iPhone, died Wednesday. He was 56.

The hard-driving executive pioneered the concept of the personal computer and of navigating them by clicking onscreen images with a mouse. In more recent years, he introduced the iPod portable music player, the iPhone and the iPad tablet -- all of which changed how we consume content in the digital age.

His friends and Apple fans on Wednesday night mourned the passing of a tech titan.

"Steve's brilliance, passion and energy were the source of countless innovations that enrich and improve all of our lives," Apple said in a statement. "The world is immeasurably better because of Steve."

More than one pundit, praising Jobs' ability to transform entire industries with his inventions, called him a modern-day Leonardo Da Vinci.

"Steve Jobs is one of the great innovators in the history of modern capitalism," New York Times columnist Joe Nocera said in August. "His intuition has been phenomenal over the years."

Jobs' death, while dreaded by Apple's legions of fans, was not unexpected. He had battled cancer for years, took a medical leave from Apple in January and stepped down as chief executive in August because he could "no longer meet (his) duties and expectations."

Born February 24, 1955, and then adopted, Jobs grew up in Cupertino, California -- which would become home to Apple's headquarters -- and showed an early interest in electronics. As a teenager, he phoned William Hewlett, president of Hewlett-Packard, to request parts for a school project. He got them, along with an offer of a summer job at HP.

Jobs dropped out of Oregon's Reed College after one semester, although he returned to audit a class in calligraphy, which he says influenced Apple's graceful, minimalist aesthetic. He quit one of his first jobs, designing video games for Atari, to backpack across India and take psychedelic drugs. Those experiences, Jobs said later, shaped his creative vision.

"You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future," he told Stanford University graduates during a commencement speech in 2005. "You have to trust in something: your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life."

While at HP, Jobs befriended Steve Wozniak, who impressed him with his skill at assembling electronic components. The two later joined a Silicon Valley computer hobbyists club, and when he was 21, Jobs teamed with Wozniak and two other men to launch Apple Computer Inc.

It's long been Silicon Valley legend: Jobs and Wozniak built their first commercial product, the Apple 1, in Jobs' parents' garage in 1976. Jobs sold his Volkswagen van to help finance the venture. The primitive computer, priced at $666.66, had no keyboard or display, and customers had to assemble it themselves.

The following year, Apple unveiled the Apple II computer at the inaugural West Coast Computer Faire. The machine was a hit, and the personal computing revolution was under way.

Jobs was among the first computer engineers to recognize the appeal of the mouse and the graphical interface, which let users operate computers by clicking on images instead of writing text.

Apple's pioneering Macintosh computer launched in early 1984 with a now-iconic, Orwellian-themed Super Bowl ad. The boxy beige Macintosh sold well, but the demanding Jobs clashed frequently with colleagues, and in 1986, he was ousted from Apple after a power struggle.

Then came a 10-year hiatus during which he founded NeXT Computer, whose pricey, cube-shaped computer workstations never caught on with consumers.

Jobs had more success when he bought Pixar Animation Studios from George Lucas before the company made it big with "Toy Story." Jobs brought the same marketing skill to Pixar that he became known for at Apple. His brief but emotional pitch for "Finding Nemo," for example, was a masterful bit of succinct storytelling.

In 1996, Apple bought NeXT, returning Jobs to the then-struggling company he had co-founded. Within a year, he was running Apple again -- older and perhaps wiser but no less of a perfectionist. And in 2001, he took the stage to introduce the original iPod, the little white device that transformed portable music and kick-started Apple's furious comeback.

Thus began one of the most remarkable second acts in the history of business. Over the next decade, Jobs wowed launch-event audiences, and consumers, with one game-changing hit after another: iTunes (2003), the iPhone (2007), the App Store (2008), and the iPad (2010).

Observers marveled at Jobs' skills as a pitchman, his ability to inspire godlike devotion among Apple "fanboys" (and scorn from PC fans) and his "one more thing" surprise announcements. Time after time, he sold people on a product they didn't know they needed until he invented it. And all this on an official annual salary of $1.

He also built a reputation as a hard-driving, mercurial and sometimes difficult boss who oversaw almost every detail of Apple's products and rejected prototypes that didn't meet his exacting standards.

By the late 2000s, his once-renegade tech company, the David to Microsoft's Goliath, was entrenched at the uppermost tier of American business. Apple now operates more than 300 retail stores in 11 countries. The company has sold more than 275 million iPods, 100 million iPhones and 25 million iPads worldwide.

Jobs' climb to the top was complete in summer 2011, when Apple listed more cash reserves than the U.S. Treasury and even briefly surpassed Exxon Mobil as the world's most valuable company.

But Jobs' health problems sometimes cast a shadow over his company's success. In 2004, he announced to his employees that he was being treated for pancreatic cancer. He lost weight and appeared unusually gaunt at keynote speeches to Apple developers, spurring concerns about his health and fluctuations in the company's stock price. One wire service accidentally published Jobs' obituary.

Jobs had a secret liver transplant in 2009 in Tennessee during a six-month medical leave of absence from Apple. He took another medical leave in January this year. Perhaps mindful of his legacy, he cooperated on his first authorized biography, scheduled to be published by Simon & Schuster in November.

Jobs is survived by his wife of 20 years, Laurene, and four children, including one from a prior relationship.

He always spoke with immense pride about what he and his engineers accomplished at Apple.

"Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do," he told the Stanford grads in 2005.

"If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on."

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Steve Jobs, the visionary in the black turtleneck who co-founded Apple in a Silicon Valley garage, built it into the world's leading tech company and led a mobile-computing revolution with wildly popular devices such as the iPhone, died Wednesday. He was 56.