Happy Birthday, Steve Jobs! The Whole World Misses You.

Fifty-seven years ago today, Steve Jobs was born in San Francisco, California.

If he hadn’t been, none of us would be here. There’d be no Cult of Mac. It wasn’t just Steve Jobs who was born that day, but the iPod. The iPhone. The iPad. The Mac. Apple itself.

Without Steve Jobs, over 45,000 Apple employees would not have a job right now. Hundreds of thousands of jobs in Apple-related IT and product development wouldn’t exist, nor would the app economy that has created over half a million jobs since 2007.

Of course, we’d still have computers, but they’d probably still look like this. And yes, we’d have smartphones, but they would look like this. And we’d even probably still have tablets, but they’d be like this.

Without Steve Jobs making digital music profitable through iTunes, the music industry might well have collapsed in the face of piracy by now. Without Steve and Final Cut Pro, many of the films we enjoy would look very different.

Without Steve, the world would be a very different and substantially poorer place. Steve may be dead, but he gave us one last gift before he died: the gift of his legacy. It’s a gift that will make our world richer and more full of beauty for many decades left to come.

Happy birthday, Steve,

John Brownlee

John Brownlee is a writer for Fast Company, and a contributing writer here at CoM. He has also written for Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, VentureBeat, and Gizmodo. He lives in Boston with his wife and two parakeets. You can follow him here on Twitter.