THE retirement of Steve Jobs is a milestone in American industry. Jobs belongs with the iconic pioneers of the automobile: the Dodge brothers, Walter Chrysler and Henry Ford. They put mobility in the hands of ordinary people. Jobs and a few other extraordinary visionaries put electronic intelligence in the hands of ordinary people.

Today Apple brings to mind the iPad and the iPhone. But the first product Jobs and inventor Steve Wozniak offered was the Apple II, in 1977. It was not the world's first personal computer, but for millions of Americans it was the first one they had their hands on. The fanciest model had 48 kilobytes of memory and cost more than $2,698. It was the first computer successfully marketed to Everyman, and millions of everymen loved it.

The story of Steve Jobs and Apple has some age-old lessons. The Apple II easily could have been developed by the corporate giants: IBM, Digital Equipment, Motorola or Xerox. But it was not. Motorola's people had the idea for the Apple II's processing chip, and Motorola didn't want it. Later a team from Xerox invented the mouse and Xerox didn't want it. Jobs took it for the Macintosh.

Jobs saw what people would want. That was his skill.

His story could not have been predicted or planned. The Mac's proportionally spaced fonts helped create desktop publishing. To hear Jobs tell it, their reason for existence was that years before, he attended Reed College in Portland. He became bored with classes and dropped out — but he hung around campus to audit classes that fascinated him. One was calligraphy and typography. It was fascinating to him but completely useless — until it came time to design the Mac.

He called this story "connecting the dots," but he said, "You cannot connect the dots looking forward."

For the individual, his lesson was: Do what you love doing.

That is a thought also for society. You cannot build the future with policy only — monetary policy, tax policy, regulatory policy, et cetera. Infrastructure may help — but a calligraphy class may help more. The economy is not a machine. It is organic. It is people, and the ideas that move them.

The greatest lesson from Jobs' career is to keep the doors open for people like him. America needs to be ordered and structured and regulated — but not too much. It needs to have opportunities for an adopted child raised by a working-class family. It needs to have second chances for people who drop out of college. It need not cast out someone who would take LSD and travel to India and become a Buddhist.

Jobs was, and did, all these things. And he helped create the 21st century.