If there's one thing that differentiates us from other creatures, it is our ability to innovate and invent. From the first time we picked up a stick and used it as a club, we were top of the food chain.

Our creative ability changed our world.

Steve Jobs changed our world.

His death on Wednesday due to pancreatic cancer at the age of 56 has robbed us of the creative genius of our generation. And like the true geniuses that have gone before him, he will be remembered as a defining personality of our time.

He was a visionary who took a small little venture he set up with $1,300 in his garage with Steve Wozniak and turned it into, briefly during the summer, the world's most valuable company.

He was an inventor who's ideas were innovative and instantly popular.

He was a marketer who's management was inclusive and focused.

And he was a man who touched each and every one of us.

When you listen to music, you are touched by Jobs. Chances are the MP3 file came from iTunes. If not, then from any of the other music services that followed in Apple's footsteps.

When you turn on your computer, it's ease of use is thanks to a man who turned personal computing upside down, removed the mystery, turned binary code and DOS and all other sorts of specialised language and skills into obscurity with the simple click of a mouse.

Bold designs

The beauty of an Apple was its out-of-the-box simplicity. And its look. His designs were bold, innovative, a fashion statement that said your were cool, smart and were tech savvy enough not to be bothered by computing languages you never needed to understand.

When you read this newspaper, you are seeing the visionary ideas of Jobs in a single industry. The graphics used here, the photographs, the use of colour, the ease in which type appears, are all due to the influence of Apple MacIntosh computers giving free rein to graphic artists to be able to draw and design and create as never before.

When you watch television, the special effects on your movies are possible by the ease of use of computers which Jobs designed.

When you take a phone call, your phone is forever influenced by those who copy the style of Jobs.

The applications on your phone are possible because Jobs thought outside the box and believed that a simple four-inch device could contain music and movies and the ability to compute and communicate.

Those earphones are influenced by Jobs' belief that music was all around us and wasn't limited to a place where CDs or records had to be stored. Music was everywhere. It should be enjoyed anywhere. And Jobs made that possible.

Future life

And Jobs has changed our life in the future in ways we cannot now understand.

In decades time, you will not be reading these words on ink and paper, but off a device that is portable. The words will be embedded along with video, and speech will likely replace your need to read.

After the last three years, we are just seeing the initial advent of tablet technology. Who knows how it will evolve. But it was Jobs who set us all on this course of evolution.

Historians and academics will look back on this age and say that mankind embarked on an exciting digital journey.

We were freed from desktops, cloud computing enabled us to share and process information as never before. We have been revolutionised and empowered in ways we have yet to understand, set on a course of innovation and discovery by a man in a black sweatshirt who had the ability to wonder and plan and excite us as never before.

That's the true mark of a genius.