He’s seen as Mr. Apple but Steve Jobs has announced he’s standing down from the company on medical leave. He suffered a tumour in his pancreas in 2004 and had a liver transplant in 2008. Here’s the Steve Jobs and Apple story…

Steve Jobs, a college dropout, Buddhist and son of adoptive parents, started Apple Computer with his friend Steve Wozniak in the Jobs family garage in Silicon Valley in the late 1970s.

The company soon introduced the Apple 1 computer. But it was the Apple II that became a huge success and gave Apple its position as a critical player in the then-nascent PC industry, resulting in a 1980 IPO that made Jobs a multi-millionaire.

In 1983, Jobs famously lured John Sculley, then CEO of Pepsi, to lead Apple with the question: “Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water or do you want a chance to change the world?”

A year later came the Macintosh, the world’s first commercially successful computer with an easy-to-use graphical user interface.

Despite the success of the Mac, or perhaps partly because of it, the relationship between Jobs and Sculley soured, and in 1985 the board removed most of Jobs’s powers and he left the company, selling all but one share of his Apple holdings.

Apple’s purchase of NeXT — the computer company Jobs founded after leaving Apple — in 1997 brought Jobs back to Apple. Later that year he became interim CEO and in 2000 the company dropped “interim” from his title.

In 2001, Apple launched the iPod, whose elegant and simple design cemented Jobs’ legacy as an innovator able to marry technology and media.

In addition to his Apple pursuits, Jobs co-founded animation studio Pixar in 1986 with Edwin Catmull and Alvy Ray Smith, buying Lucasfilm’s computer graphics division for $10 million.

In 1995 came “Toy Story,” the breakout computer animated film. Academy Award winners including “The Incredibles”, “Ratatouille” and “Monsters, Inc.” have followed.

Jobs became a board member and the largest individual shareholder of Walt Disney Co when Disney purchased Pixar, now known as Disney-Pixar, in 2006.

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