I can still remember the day Steve Jobs showed me that first Mac in a small conference room on the Apple campus in Cupertino. Even then, he was convinced it would change the way people work. He never let the machine’s early limitations—which he well knew—get in the way of his vision of computing. He was right, even though it would be years until most computer users worked that way.

Jobs will be remembered for helping to create a series of technology revolutions with the Apple II, the Macintosh, the iPod, iPhone, and iPad. His greatest strength, however, was not inventing new technologies, but rather seeing the developing technologies and combining different parts to create new markets.

Personal computers existed before Apple, but Jobs recognized that PCs could target not just computer hobbyists, but the general audience. He urged his partner, Steve Wozniak, to create the first mass-market floppy disk drive. Even in the late 70s, he was concerned about the industrial design of Apple products, hence why the Apple II looked like a consumer product. The result helped to create the nascent PC industry.

The graphical user interfaces were created by Xerox PARC, but Jobs was the first to bring the concept to a mass market, initially on the Lisa, and then on the first Macintosh. He drove a small but dedicated team to take the concepts from much more expensive devices and apply them to machines that could be sold for a fairly reasonable price.

He had a similar vision at NeXT Inc., where he took concepts like object-oriented programming and a Unix-like operating system and created a sleek machine. The NeXT pretty much failed. It was ahead of its time, very expensive, and never gained much developer momentum, but the vision was nevertheless a compelling one.

In fact, NeXT set the mold that would lead to the revival of the Macintosh when Jobs returned to Apple in 1997. If the Lisa was the necessary precursor to the Mac, the NeXT OS was the precursor to OS X and the Mac revival of the past decade.

At Pixar, he saw the potential to use digital animation in movie production. He didn’t found the company, wasn’t the first to believe in digital animation, and wasn’t a movie director. Instead, over the years, he shepherded the technology and the movie creators, putting into place the processes that would create a new style of animated movies starting with Toy Story. He seemed to truly embrace the importance of telling a good story, not only in movies, but in introducing new technology.

Again, Jobs and Apple didn’t create the portable digital music player; a variety of smaller companies had products in the market long before the Apple had the iPod. Jobs looked beyond the mere hardware and combined a small, well-designed music player, software that made it easy to transfer music onto the device, and a single online store that let you legally obtain content. He created an ecosystem that forever changed the music business.

There were smartphones long before the iPhone. Some had touch screens and icons; others had application stores; many had browsers of a sort and LCD displays. Jobs saw how combining all these features, making them easier to use, and adding in a connection to iTunes would change mobile devices. The iPhone was a mobile connection to e-mail and the Internet first and a phone second. Soon it became even more of a platform for mobile applications.

And of course, there were tablets long before the iPad. Microsoft’s TabletPC concept had been struggling for nearly a decade. Amazon’s Kindle had already become quite successful as an e-reader. Jobs jumped on the opportunity to merge the falling prices of large multi-touch displays and flash storage with more powerful processors that still had great battery life, and the iPhone UI, creating much more than just a blown-up iPhone. It was a device he called “magical” because it took computing concepts and made them work in a much simpler form. Just as importantly, he convinced developers of the power of his vision, so they built lots of applications. Now, the iPad is changing not only how we compute, but also how we view books and magazines, Web sites, and media.

In all these cases, what stands out to me is how Jobs was able to see the technology and the trends that were around and combine them in ways others could not. He often fused technology, industrial design, and software that was advanced but appeared simple, producing products change the way we work, live, and connect.

Just as importantly, he always had a clear vision of what he wanted his products to do, and adamantly sold that vision. That was true internally; he was known as a very demanding boss, sweating the small details of products and services in a way few CEOs ever do. And, of course, it was true externally; his signature keynote presentations and the “Jobs reality distortion field” elicited comments from many journalists. Whenever I met with him, I was impressed by his passion for his products, his curiosity about their relevance, and his ambition to improve lives.

When PC Magazine decided to give him a Lifetime Achievement award in 1997, he called me and said he thought he was too young. He had many more things he wanted to do. He was right, of course. The iPod, iPhone and the iPad were still years away and would have been worthy of an award on their own grounds.

It’s easy to imagine all the great things he would have gone on to innovate, had he not passed at a young 56. But his legacy is clear. From the Apple II to the Macintosh to the iPad, he helped usher in the PC era, and helped see beyond it. With Pixar, the iPod, iPhone, and iPad, he drove the reinvention of entire industries. In short, Jobs didn’t just create products; he helped shape the world with the way we use them.

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