The story of how Steve Jobs saved Apple from disaster and led it to rule the world, in 39 photos

Nowadays, Apple is the most valuable company in the world, thanks in huge part to the vision of the company's late cofounder and CEO Steve Jobs.

But if you only saw the movie, you got less than half of the story.

Once upon a time, Apple was a disaster, chewing through CEOs and delivering one bad quarter of financial results after another.

In 1996, knowing he had to do something dramatic, Apple's CEO at the time Gil Amelio negotiated a deal to buy NeXT, the computer company owned by an exiled Jobs, in hopes that he would bring some much-needed direction to the company.

Instead, Jobs manipulated the board into getting Amelio fired and decided that if Apple were to be saved, he would be the one to do it - even if it meant getting help from the company's rivals at Microsoft.

Here's what happened next.