RIP Steve Jobs, a technology innovator and icon

Like the rest of you, I saw the sad news that Apple Co-Founder and longtime CEO Steve Jobs lost his battle to pancreatic cancer today at the age of 56.

The world has lost a technology pioneer and visionary. So many of the technologies that have changed our lives over the last three decades are due to him and his leadership at Apple and Pixar.

My first experience with a personal computer came almost 25 years ago when I was in the first grade. We used Apple IIe computers in the school computer lab that didn’t even have a hard drive; you had to boot every application off a 5 1/4-inch floppy disk. At the time, that  was revolutionary, and the Apple II series was the first commercially successful line of what we know today as Desktop PCs. Now most of us couldn’t get by without one of these.

When I was in middle school a few years later, we used Macintosh computers for design and photo editing. They’re still considered the top brand of computer for graphic design.

The iPod, which I first got while in college, changed the way we listen to music. The iPhone combined the features of the Blackberry with the iPod’s music playing features, allowing us to have both features on one device. And we’ve seen movies featuring Pixar animation.

Jobs’ inventions transformed not only computing and cell phones, but communication technology as a whole. Steve Jobs is responsible for so much of our communication technology today. Sadly, cancer, as it has to so many others, claimed Steve Jobs’ life way too soon.

RIP.