He was there at the birth of the personal computer. He has had his second coming. He has healed one very sick company. And along the way he has changed the way we think about music and movies, telephones and computers.
Okay, so it's not exactly "The Greatest Story Ever Told," but it's still a script with surprising zigs, inspiring zags and plenty of satisfying pay-offs.
To call what Apple co-founder Steven Paul Jobs hath wrought a religion, of course, is easy. There are the adoring masses. There are the rituals of new product introductions. There are the signs and symbols: The famous Wired cover bearing an Apple logo enmeshed in thorns above the exhortation "Pray" comes to mind. And there is Jobs himself: the billionaire in a black mock turtleneck, the miracle worker in New Balance running shoes.
Those humble sneaks will be cherished relics one day. "One hundred years from now people will still be collecting black mock turtlenecks and blue jeans with a hole in the side," says veteran technology investor Roger McNamee. (Editor's note: McNamee is a partner in Elevation Partners, which is a minority investor in Forbes Media.)
After all, Jobs launched the personal computer industry as we know it with the Macintosh. He returned to Apple to lead a thunderous revival. He remade movies at Pixar. He led the creation of the iPod and the iPhone.
"He'll certainly be in the history books, and I would not be surprised if he is featured more prominently than Bill Gates," says Charlie Wolf, an analyst with Needham & Company who, like McNamee, has followed Jobs' career from the start.
After all, it was Jobs, not Gates, who made the computer personal--first with the original Apple he built with Steve Wozniak, and later with the Macintosh, which popularized the graphical user interface Gates would later rebuild Microsoft around.
And unlike Gates, Jobs has remade not just computers, but movies, music and the telephone.
Jobs has simply hustled his way into the middle of more of the most important technological moments of the past 25 years than anyone else. "He'll be for beginning of the 21st century what Thomas Edison was to the beginning of the 20th," McNamee says. "Edison was an inventor in an era of inventors, and Jobs is a product person in an era of products."
It's a comparison that fits Jobs as snugly as his signature shoes, putting his accomplishments in a very American context. After all, Jobs didn't invent the things that define the digital age any more than Edison invented electric light.
What the two men did was (rather lucratively) weave new technologies into systems that made them useful to the rest of us. Apple's iTunes software is to digital music what Edison's Pearl Street electric station was to the light bulb: the infrastructure that turned a technological artifact into a business.
The life stories of Edison and Jobs have neat parallels too. Edison was always a hustler, selling vegetables and candy while tinkering with technologies in his spare moments in trains and in telegraph offices. Likewise, Jobs and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak started out selling gadgets that would unlock free calls and cobbling together computers for hobbyists.
Later on, Edison would drive teams of technologists, rather than working as a lone tinkerer, founding companies such as General Electric along the way. Jobs is also known for recruiting engineers and driving them to build new things, building empires around them. Jobs' career is packed with what, for other men, would be once-in-a-lifetime creations--as is Edison's.
Even the so-called "War of Currents" between Edison's direct current system and George Westinghouse's alternating current scheme mirrors the rivalry between Apple's Macintosh operating systems and Microsoft's DOS and Windows software.
We can't know when the Jobs tale will end. Edison's story, however, tells us something. In the final few months of his life, Edison oversaw the construction of the electric train system between Hoboken and Dover, N.J. When the first train left the station, in 1931, Edison was at the throttle. He stayed there all the way to the end.
