Both as the founder of the first successful personal-computer company and as the man who transformed a nearly-bankrupt Apple into one of the most successful companies on the planet, Jobs established himself as an American icon of business and technology.

If Steve Jobs had never returned to Apple after 1985, he'd still be remembered for the Macintosh.

Jobs didn't create the Mac project--it was started by Jef Raskin in 1979--but he took it over in 1981 and brought it to fruition. Jobs didn't write the code or design the circuit boards, but he was the one who provided the vision that made it all happen. As original Mac team member Andy Hertzfeld wrote, "Steve already gets a lot of credit for being the driving force behind the Macintosh, but in my opinion, it's very well deserved ... the Macintosh never would have happened without him."'

Apple's introduction of the Macintosh in 1984 introduced the graphical user interface to mainstream desktop computing. The Mac ran on a 32-bit processor (compared to 16-bit processors for other PCs at the time) and had 128K of memory. It was an immediate success: more than 400,000 Macintosh computers were sold in the first year.