One of the things that I admire Steve Jobs the most is his good taste. He had a great ability of recognizing talented individuals and adopting some of the best ideas computer science had to offer at the time. For example, the Lisa and the Macintosh were heavily influenced by the work Xerox PARC did on the graphical user interface. The original Macintosh team had many excellent people; off the top of my head, I'm thinking of Jef Raskin (RIP), Bill Atkinson (RIP), Joanna Hoffman, Andy Hertzfeld, and Susan Kare. Larry Tesler (RIP) and even Alan Kay were both brought in from Xerox PARC to join Apple. When Steve Jobs left Apple in 1985 and started NeXT, he not only brought some original Macintosh team members with him, but he hired other brilliant people such as Avie Tevanian. NeXT also looked to Xerox PARC for inspiration, this time adopting PARC's work in dynamically-typed object-oriented programming (Smalltalk, but in the form of Objective-C) and networking. When Apple purchased NeXT in late 1996, NeXT's operating system became the foundation of the next-generation Mac OS, Mac OS X, which fused a visually updated Macintosh interface with NeXT underpinnings.

Mac OS X under Steve Jobs was a truly excellent desktop operating system, with excellent technical underpinnings and a well-considered user interface with strong usability guidelines.

I miss Steve Jobs, and I wish the computer industry still had champions of personal computing.