Steve Jobs was not a businessman.
Steven Paul Jobs ( [ ˈdʒɒbz ] February 24 , 1955 -- October 5 , 2011 ) was an American entrepreneur , businessman , inventor , and industrial designer . Jobs and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak are widely recognized as pioneers of the microcomputer revolution of the 1970s and 1980s . Jobs and Wozniak co-founded Apple in 1976 to sell Wozniak 's Apple I personal computer . After leaving Apple , Jobs took a few of its members with him to found NeXT , a computer platform development company specializing in state-of-the-art computers for higher-education and business markets .