The Inventor Of the Future

Diana Walker / Contour by Getty Images for TIME

Boston's 1997 MacWorld Expo listens to Jobs on stage.

Steve Jobs remade the world as completely as any single human being ever has, but he had no business doing it. He wasn't qualified. He wasn't a computer scientist. He had no training as a hardware engineer or an industrial designer. He had a semester at Reed College and a stint at an ashram in India. Jobs' expertise was less in computers than it was in the humans who used them.

If that were all he'd had, Jobs might have been a talented psychotherapist or maybe a novelist, like his biological sister. The genius of Jobs, and the paradox, is that...

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