Jobs, easily the most successful, influential, and revered technology executive in American history, lost the battle of his life Wednesday surrounded by family. All you really need to know about Jobs is that he transformed three different industries during his years on this planet: personal computing, digital media, and telecommunications. The company he leaves behind is defining the modern era of computing.

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In the hours after his death Wednesday, Jobs was being compared to American business legends such as Henry Ford and Thomas Edison. Certainly within the technology industry, the dominant force in Jobs’ home of Silicon Valley, there was no peer: Jobs’ ideas and decisions influenced two separate eras of the personal computing industry and set the stage for an expansion in mobile computing that is still just getting off the ground.

Bill Gates of Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) built a huge powerful company that also changed the world, but failed to move as quickly as Jobs to embrace an era in which mobile devices took center stage. Larry Ellison, a dear friend of Jobs, built an empire based on enterprise software but had little impact on the average person. Larry Page and Sergey Brin of Google (NSDQ: GOOG) built the engine of the 21st century, but have had a harder time straddling the worlds of engineering, design, art, and marketing that Jobs oversaw with aplomb. Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook has clearly been studying Jobs, but has yet to run a public company.

Jobs was a figure that Silicon Valley will likely never see again, this industry’s version of Michael Jordan or Bob Dylan: prodigies that can’t be imitated and that grace our presence all too rarely. He was the only person that anyone took seriously as a representative of a company that changed our world time and time again, and despite his deserved reputation as an extremely difficult person to work for, Jobs was adored by his customers and those hoping to emulate his success.

A private man, Jobs saved most of his public thoughts for the meticulously rehearsed high-wire acts that redefined how technology companies present their products to the public. Those performances drew legitimacy from the body of work that Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) produced under the second era of his leadership, not to mention his ability to convince fish that they might want to purchase some extra water. But the Moses of this era of computing grew weaker before our eyes compared to the day he stood before Stanford graduates in 2005 and assured them that death was actually one of the greatest things about life: that death was “life’s change agent.”

As the news sunk in on a Northern California afternoon during which the sun finally broke through after a few days of unseasonable rain, the emotional reaction across the board was palpable when considering the life of a man who never settled for anything less than “insanely great.”