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Is Steve Jobs America’s Greatest Living Inventor?

Wednesday, March 17, 2010 10:20 am

“Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower.” -Steve Jobs

Is Steve Jobs America’s Greatest Living Inventor? Here’s why it’s hard to argue against him.

Steven Paul Jobs was born to bi-cultural parents in Wisconsin who gave him up for adoption by Paul and Clara Jobs. His childhood was spent in the apricot orchards of California, later to be known as Silicon Valley. Jobs attended Reed College in Portland, Oregon but dropped out in 1972 after only one semester. While searching for his life’s work, he got a position with Atari being in charge of designing the circuitry for the computer game Breakout. Breakout became widely popular and was in large measure responsible for the commercial success of the Atari 2600. The Atari 2600 was the first microprocessor based game box for the home having interchangeable cartridges, the forerunner of the X-Box, PlayStation, Nintendo and the Wii.

After a brief period of travel in search of spiritual and philosophical enlightenment, Jobs returned to California and reacquainted himself with his former Atari colleague, Steve Wozniak. Wozniak had moved on from Atari to Hewlett-Packard, but Jobs convinced him to quit his day job and join him in the development of the personal computer. In 1976, Jobs 21 and Wozniak 26 changed the world forever with the founding of the Apple Computer Company. The personal computer industry for the masses was born.

A stock offering made Jobs and Wozniak multi-millionaires but answerable to Apple’s Board of Directors. Jobs with Apple pioneered the use of mouse-driven graphics for desktop computers in the early 1980s. After creating the personal computer industry with the Apple II and then expanding it with the graphic-rich MacIntosh and Lisa computers, Jobs lost a power struggle with Apple’s Board of Directors in May of 1985 and was relieved of his duties.

Immediately following his dismissal from Apple, Jobs founded NeXT Step Computers. NeXt was a computer platform development company specializing in computers for education and for business software development. Although not the commercial success of Apple, it is interesting to note that it was on a Jobs’ NeXT computer that Tim Berners-Lee is credited with developing the original World Wide Web.

Jobs turned his attention to animation with his 1986 purchase of the computer graphics division of Lucasfilm Ltd. The new acquisition was renamed Pixar Animation Studios. As time evolved, Pixar became the dominant producer of animated feature films for the motion picture industry. The movies include: Toy Story, Toy Story 2, A Bug's Life, Monsters, Inc., Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, Cars, Ratatouille, WALL-E, and Up, the 2010 Academy Award nominated Best Picture and winner of Best Animated Feature. Pixar and The Walt Disney Company merged in 2006 with Jobs joining the Disney Board of Directors.

Apple approached Jobs with a reunion proposition in 1997 resulting in NeXT buying Apple. Jobs had finally returned home to his roots as Apple’s CEO. Because Apple was in virtual survival mode, Jobs promised to reinvent the company for a salary of only $1.00 per year. What he accomplished with Apple’s reinvention is nothing short of amazing. In 2003, Apple revolutionized the way we buy and listen to music with the iPod and iTunes. A few years later, the iPhone gave us newly imagined capabilities for the cell phone. The iPad was introduced in January 2010 promising to save newspapers, magazines and book publishers.

History is always the final arbiter when it comes to deciding if Steve Jobs should be called the greatest American inventor of our time. His credentials seem overwhelming:
* beginning the home computer based gaming craze;
* creating the personal computer industry for both home and business;
* bringing computers into the classroom;
* being a vital conduit for the creation of the World Wide Web;
* setting a new standard for animated motion pictures;
* saving the recording industry;
* redefining the cellular telephone;
* and now, becoming the expected savior of all things print with the iPad.

It seems to this writer to be an extremely compelling argument for anointing Steven Paul Jobs as America’s Greatest Living Inventor.

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