Steve Jobs died today, after a long battle with pancreatic cancer. He was 56.

Like Edison and Einstein and a handful of other visionaries, he changed our world, and improved it in ways we now take for granted and other ways we are just beginning to understand.

For more than four decades, Jobs rode out ahead of us, and sent back amazing tools that have changed the way we think, listen, talk, read, see, write, think and communicate, and revolutionized the world we inhabit profoundly.

I am writing now on a Mac. Since I traded my IBM Selectric typewriter for an IBM wheelwriter, and almost instantly traded it in for a Mac, I have written everything on a Mac. It is the simplest and most beautiful thing on my desk, and quite small.

Steve Jobs’ Apple tools are simple and beautiful and extraordinarily, profoundly smart — as simple, beautiful, and profoundly smart as Jobs himself. He concluded a commencement address at Stanford with some advice that he had read in the final issue of Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog: “Stay hungry. Stay foolish.”

We already miss him.