With the passing of Steve Jobs yesterday at the age of 56 as the result of complications with pancreatic cancer, something he was diagnosed with in 2004. With his death the world lost the greatest inventor it has seen in a number of decades. He took something impersonal and made it not only user friendly, but elegant. Most important to his success, he made them desirable. Maybe desirable isn’t the right word, it’s much stronger than that. Who would of thought that a computer could be chic, a cell phone a necessity and a tablet enviable? Jobs did all these things, dreaming up innovations and pulling together the resources that made them realities. Perhaps his greatest ability was his knack for marketing, for building a product release into a newsworthy event. After dropping out of college, Jobs went to work for Atari, a company that had employed him while he was in high school. It was at Atari that he meet Steve Wozniak, who would later become the one of the founders of Apple. Together the two were the driving force behind the development of one of the first personal computers. Apple would go on to establish one of the first mouse-based graphic-driven operating systems. However, Jobs interest in computing started at much earlier age when the field was dominated by names like Atari and Hewlett Packard. In fact, at the age of 13 Jobs called up the head of HP and talked his way into free computer chips. This tenacity displayed at an early age is something that never left Jobs. It’s also something that caused under performing employees to fear him. Notorious for criticizing what he considered mediocrity to the point of humiliation, Jobs was also a task master of sorts. Combined with his passion for keeping tight control over the secrecy of his products, many found his ways unbearable. It is these traits that led Jobs to being dismissed as the head of Macintosh computers in 1984. Shortly after this he purchased The Graphics Group from Lucasfilm’s. This company’s name was later changed to NeXT and then again to Pixar, further proving that Jobs truly had a golden touch. This golden touch is something Apple realized after suffering slumping sales since the departure of Jobs. In 1996, Apple purchased NeXT for $429 million dollars, bring Jobs back to the company that he co-founded. Within five years he would bring the company to the height of the tech world. In 2001 Apple released the iPod and completely changed the world of digital music. Six years later came the phone that changed everything, followed shortly by the first tablet computer to be a commercially successful product. With nano technology and cellular abilities growing in leaps and bounds, it is a major blow to the industry that Steve Jobs’ visions will not be there to guide the future of work, communication and entertainment.