《时代》周刊封面上的八个乔布斯

Steven Jobs, 26, the co-founder of five-year-old Apple Computer, practically single handed created the personal computer industry. This college dropout is now worth $149 million.

The rebel flag is flying over Apple Computer, Inc., again, thanks to Jobs. The Silicon Valley visionary who co-founded Apple in his father's garage in 1976, who launched the wildly successful Macintosh only to be booted by the corporate pinheads in 1985, is back running his first love.

The popular caricature paints Jobs as a brilliant, driven man-child running around Apple in sandals and shorts, screaming at underlings while trying to build the perfect digital machine. By most accounts, this image remains more or less correct.

Right here, right now, sitting on a butcher-block table, bathed in the sunlight that pours in through spyproof frosted-glass windows, is--repeat after Steve Jobs now--the quintessence of computational coolness, the most fabulous desktop machine that you or anyone anywhere has ever seen.

Jobs has a great native sense of design and a knack for hiring geniuses, but above all, what he has is a willingness to be a pain in the neck about what matters most to him.

He has been Jobs the visionary founder, notably at Apple and Pixar. He has done time as Jobs the exile and even as Jobs the failure. Now he has a new role: Jobs the mogul.

He exists somewhere between showman, perfectionist overseer, visionary, enthusiast and opportunist, and his insistence upon design, detail, finish, quality, ease of use and reliability are a huge part of Apple's success.

Jobs did something that few people accomplish even once: he reinvented entire industries. He did it with ones that were new, like PCs, and he did it with ones that were old, such as music. And his pace only accelerated over the years.