October 7, 2011 10:15 AM

Steve Jobs died too young and with a great deal of promise unfulfilled. Since the announcement of his passing — a shock, even though we should have been prepared for it — industry watchers, partners, competitors, friends and many, like me, who never met him, have offered tributes to the man who reshaped the computer industry.

Many of those tributes have been a variation on “Look around you to see what Jobs created,” and that is a fitting remembrance. I am writing this on a new MacBook Air, my iPhone 4 is (as always) right beside me, and there is an Apple TV and an iPad not too far away.

But look too beyond your desk and bedside, over to that shelf of DVDs. Because as much as Jobs was a computer visionary he was also hugely influential in Hollywood.

In 1986, Jobs saw the potential in the Graphics Group, a division of Lucasfilm that had been working primarily on animation technology. Jobs paid US$5 million for the group, added US$5 million of his own capital and called the new company Pixar. The following years were lean but a big break was coming in the form of Luxor Jr., a short which showcased Pixar’s animation abilities. (A preview version is available on Pixar’s site. Shortly after, a feature deal with Disney led to Toy Story, the first in a long list of Pixar hits.

Jobs will be best remembered for the first Macintosh, the iPod, the iPhone, the Air and the iPad, and that’s how it should be. But if your movie shelf contains Toy Story, Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, Ratatouille, WALL-E, Up or any of the others, then remember Jobs for that, too. His contribution to animated movies is almost as great as the vision he brought to the computer business.

Blogger Profile: Peter Wolchak

Peter Wolchak has been a professional print journalist for more than a decade. Starting as a news photographer at a community newspaper, Peter then worked as a staff writer at ComputerWorld Canada, a national trade magazine, and later served as the editor of that publication for four years. Peter then moved up to the national business magazine arena as the editor of Backbone. In addition to these journalism activities, Peter has also worked as a public speaker and discussion moderator, served as a judge for the McLuhan Festival’s Vortex awards, and sits on the E-Business Program Advisory Committee at Sheridan College.

Posted by Sue Ansell at October 7, 2011 10:15 AM

Categories: General Gadgets New technologies Trends

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