STEVE JOBS :The genius who changed our world - Time

Steve Jobs was one of the greatest American innovators. Like Thomas Edison or Henry Ford, he wasn't merely an inventor, he was a transformer. From the first Apple computers to the astonishing trio of devices ? the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad ? that he rolled out in his final years, he brought us things that revolutionized our lives and the society we live in.
Now join the writers and editors of TIME as they survey his life and legacy in words and pictures, including articles draws from three decades of TIME's close-up coverage of Jobs, his achievements, his occasional stumbles and his brilliant return to form.
It's quite a story. In April 1976, when he co-founded Apple with his friend Steve Wozniak, Jobs was a college dropout with an interest in the counterculture and a rare instinct for what it would take to make an exotic technology, the computer, into something much more inviting ? a truly ?personal computer.? Within just a few years, Apple was a major success, but by 1985 tensions between Jobs and his hand-picked chief executive had led him to depart. In the world outside, he continued to perfect the personal computer while also finding time to launch Pixar, the computer-animation company that would soon delight the world with Toy Story and all the films that followed. But by the mid ??90s, Jobs was back at apple, making the Mac an ever more beautiful machine and then launching that extraordinary stream of new devices.
Even in a life that was cut short, Jobs had enough time to change the world. TIME was there when he did it. This is how it happened.