Looks like Leander Kahney over at wired.com is a lot cleverer than I, and managed to spot that today is a very special day in the history of Apple. Because, you see, on this day in 1985 Steve Jobs quit Apple over a leadership dispute, and on this very same day in 1997, he was officially elected CEO of the company after re-joining.

In the 12 years between between he founded NeXT, which was eventually taken over by Apple themselves (hence his return), as well as taking over Pixar and releasing their first independent feature film, Toy Story. In the meantime, popular opinion was that Apple were releasing poorer and poorer computers, struggling to keep Mac OS ahead of the curve, and barely surviving on the memories of their past glory.

In fact, if it weren’t for Apple’s board of directors taking over NeXT and giving Jobs leadership of the company, we wouldn’t have OS X (derived from the Mach and BSD-based NeXTStep, the OS he developed at NeXT), the iPod, or indeed the iPhone.

So all hail King Jobs on this, Jobs-day, the finest of public holidays!

(Now where’s my cash?)

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