A college dropout and a successful billionaire are two things many people don’t associate with one another.

Technological guru and one of the masterminds behind Apple Inc. Steve Jobs resembled both of those titles, but died on Oct. 6 six years ago of challenges and complications from pancreatic cancer. 

A Syrian immigrant, Jobs was born to a pair of unmarried graduate students in San Francisco, California, and was later adopted by a couple in Silicon Valley. He attended Reed College in Portland, Oregon, for one semester, but dropped out and began working for Atari, which was a developing video game company at the time, according to history.com.

Eventually, he traveled to India and began to study Zen Buddhism.

In 1976, however, a multibillion dollar company was born; in the basement of Jobs’ parent’s home, he and his friend Stephen Wozniak, a computer engineer, founded Apple Computer.

The Apple II was launched in 1977 and in 1980, Apple became a public company, making Jobs a millionaire at age 25.

In the original two computers Jobs’ created, you had to type commands into the device in order for it to perform given tasks. In 1984 though, they created the Macintosh computer, which contained a mouse and graphical user interface feature, stated history.com.

In competition for control with Apple’s board of directors, Jobs left the company in 1985 and went on to establish NeXT, a high-performance computer company. Although the company was too expensive to become extensively popular, Tim Berners-Lee, a British computer scientist developed the World Wide Web with a NeXT device, according to history.com.

As if Jobs hadn’t already been successful enough, he began working at a small computer-graphics studio, discovered by filmmaker George Lucas, that he later fixed up and renamed Pixar Animation Studios. Later on down the road, Disney purchased Pixar for about $7 billion, and Jobs was named the largest Disney shareholder, according to history.com.

After Jobs had left Apple, the company began to plummet. In 1996, states history.com, Apple offered to purchase NeXT and employ Jobs as an advisor of the company. Nearly bankrupt at the time, Apple transformed into a newly successful company after Jobs was named the interim CEO in 1997, and in 2000, he was named the permanent CEO, launching a variety of new events and devices.

Whether it was the iPod, iPhone or iPad, Jobs was said to have the rare ability to know what people wanted before they even actually knew it in themselves, as stated by history.com.

Additionally, Bloomberg News reported, “He had no formal technical training and no real business experience. What he had instead was an appreciation of technology’s elegance and a notion that computers could be more than a hobbyist’s toy or a corporation’s workhorse. These machines could be indispensable tools,” and they couldn’t have been more correct.

Jobs was the CEO of Apple until August of 2014, when he stepped down. In 2004, he received surgery to remove a pancreatic tumor and in 2009, he got a liver transplant.

Six months after he stepped down as CEO, the father of four died in his home.

Throughout his lifetime, he racked up a net worth of over $7 billion and will continually be known as one of the greatest businessmen of this time. According to Walter Isaacson, a biographer, “History will place him in the pantheon right next to Thomas Edison and Henry Ford.”

All facts and information from this article was obtained by history.com.

Jessica Ricard can be contacted at jricard@kscequinox.com