When Apple Computer co-founder Steve Jobs passed away in 2011, people around the world paid tribute to his vision and achievement. The Macintosh, the iPod, iTunes, the Apple Store, Pixar, iPhone and iPad, have transformed publishing, music and film creation and distribution, retail, computer animation, and mobile access to the internet. Job’s contributions revolutionized industries and reshaped popular culture.

Steven Paul Jobs, adopted son of a middle class family, was born February 24, 1955 in San Francisco. Jobs met brilliant computer hobbyist, engineer and programmer Steve Wozniak in 1976. Job’s recognized the potential for Wozniak’s primitive computer. And although the Apple I had no monitor or hard drive, the two Steve’s sold enough to finance and build the Apple II and found Apple Computer.

Jobs was a perfectionist, sometimes with mixed results. Before the Macintosh, there was Lisa that featured the mouse and graphical user interface (GUI) but was too expensive and failed to sell. The first Macintosh was overpriced and underpowered. It would be Jobs’ perfectionism which ultimately lost him his job at the company he created.

Job’s next venture was a computer company for the educational market called NExT. Again, Job’s perfectionism delayed his product launch and ultimately disappointed the market he wanted to reach. While building NExT, Jobs purchased a small computer animation studio called Pixar.

Jobs returned to Apple in 1997. The operating system he developed at NExT - the one Tim Berners-Lee used to create the first web browser and World Wide Web - became the crown jewel of the iconic iMac released in 1998.

Following the success of the iMac came the iPod. Introduced with less than stellar reviews in 2001, the iPod was the first successful digital music player. Models with more storage and a smaller form factor helped save the music industry from music pirating start-up Napster. Apple added music videos, TV shows, movies and made its iTunes Store available for Windows. The iPod sold over 300 million units.

It was the iPhone that would be Job’s ultimate legacy. Introduced in 2007, the iPhone replaced the real keyboard found on Blackberry and Nokia mobile phones with a virtual one and incorporated simple gestures and an intuitive GUI like the Mac. More than a billion iPhones were sold in its first ten years. Users opened 800 million iTunes accounts and as of February 2018 Apple Music, the companies music streaming service, had 36 million subscribers.

Apple became the first trillion dollar company in the world on August 2, 2018. Today the iPhone remains the standard Apple’s competitors hope to beat. And, while Jobs doesn’t have as many patents to his name as Thomas Edison, Apple has nearly 10,000.

Jobs, like the other inventors and innovators before him believe that there’s nothing humans can envision that they cannot build. It’s this spirit, which is as old as it is always new, and as disruptive as it is revolutionary, that has driven humans to dream, create, and transform the world.

We are living in a transformative time and to highlight that each month, we’ll introduce you to men and women who invented or created a new technology or business model that was revolutionary and that has shaped our current reality. Their stories start here, and continue by following the link. We hope you join us in being stimulated by these stories to take your own transformative or revolutionary approach to the home financing business! -James K. O’Donnell, President