He took an afternoon's worth of product demos for half-realized concepts and intellectual exercises at Xerox's PARC , some going back more than twenty years, and forged them into a second computer revolution. Steve's not alone. Tim Berners-Lee, Larry Ellison, Admiral Grace Hopper and Linus Torvalds all stand on the shoulders of giants. Their genius is the vision, the ability to separate the wheat from the chaff and distill it into a perfect product that changes absolutely everything everyone knew about computers and the world. The trick is to see what's out there, discussed in the dry and dusty tones of computer science's academic formality, and make it real.
Innovators are like vintners.
They select the finest combination of grapes, and make them greater then the sum of the whole in the finest of wines. This mixing and melding of disparate and seemingly unconnected ideas is the seed to real revolution, and is why computers, and what they can do for the world, will continue to surprise and astonish in wave after rolling wave of innovation. It's not hard. Just take a peek at what people are doing now in laboratories and research theses and basements, and then imagine what things would be like if someone like Steve Jobs got ahold of them. It could even be a cell phone .