Skip to main content

Steve Jobs in Exile - Geoffrey Cain *****

Of all the big name IT people, none is revered in quite the same way as Steve Jobs was by Apple fans. But it's easy to forget that for a formative period in his career, Jobs was pushed out of Apple, starting NeXT, a startup to produce high power workstations.

Taking a handful of top people with him, Jobs faced a legal onslaught for a few months from Apple - but given they had no product, not even a design, he was able to continue with the production of one of the most remarkably brilliant failures in IT history. The NeXT box solidified what was great and awful about Jobs - his far sighted ideas and his obsession with detail that led, for instance, to spending $100,000 on the logo design alone, something no startup could afford.

Although the final product was brilliant, it was too expensive and too different from everything else to succeed. Geoffrey Cain gives us excellent chapter and verse on the whole episode that is often brushed over in Jobs' history. It's a reminder, apart from anything else, of how young he was - only just in his thirties when this happened. There are some excellent stories of just scraping through over everything from technical challenges to the difficulties caused by Jobs' personality. I was hooked. 

What comes across strongly is that the disaster of NeXT was what was needed to help Jobs grow up to become the more effective force he was when he returned to Apple. This was after the effective collapse of NeXT, though ironically Jobs had just become a billionaire thanks to Toy Story, a triumph for his other company, Pixar. Revivifying Apple, which ends the book, is just as interesting as the NeXT story - I hadn't realised what a dire state Apple was in at this point, and how NeXT's operating system expertise - the one part of the venture that was truly successful - was folded into Apple, making the brilliant new Mac operating system possible.

This is a double blast for the past for me. When I worked in IT in the 1980s and early 90s I lapped up the popular biographies of the likes of Jobs and Gates - or even biographies of the technology, such as Steven Levy's Insanely Great on the Mac. Steve Jobs in Exile is very much in this classic style of the tech bio. But I also attended Jobs' launch of the NeXT computer in London in 1990 and saw his reality distortion field in action. As soon as they were commercially available, I had a NeXT box on my desk (actually at home on the dining table for a few weeks, as we were moving offices).

It was a thing of beauty - just as Jobs wanted it to be - and though monochrome, the graphics were astounding when compared with anything we'd experienced on PCs or Macs. You could see in principle the potential of the object oriented programming features that were central to the NeXT's existence. But despite the enthusiasm of tech geeks, most people don't want to do their own programming - they want off-the-shelf tools to do a job and those were sadly lacking. The hardware was a beautiful failure, but a failure nonetheless.

There is sometimes too much detail here that we don't really need - especially as for several years developments were a constant, slow motion car crash, veering from one disaster to the next - but still it's a fascinating portrayal of a key step in both the career of Jobs and, when he rejoined Apple, in taking the steps resulting in the amazing Macs we see today.

Hardback:   
Kindle:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
These articles will always be free - but if you'd like to support my online work, consider buying a virtual coffee or taking out a membership:
Review by Brian Clegg - See all Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly email free here

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Who Invented the Computer? – Ian Watson

Ian Watson is the author of  The Universal Machine  and featured in a recent  Four Way Interview . Saturday June 23 2012 was the centenary of the birth of Alan Turing, the troubled genius who invented the modern computer. Why though do so few people recognize his name and his great achievements? In 1936 English mathematician Alan Turing, published a paper,  On Computable Numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem . This became the foundation of computing. In it Turing presented a theoretical machine that could solve any problem that could be described by instructions encoded on a paper tape. A Turing Machine could calculate square roots, whilst another might solve Sudoku puzzles. Turing demonstrated you could construct a single  Universal Machine  that could simulate any Turing Machine. One machine solving any problem for which a program could be written – sound familiar? He’d invented the computer. Then,  computers  were peop...
Post a Comment
Read more

Ignorance: How it drives science – Stuart Firestein *****

This is a delightful little book that really gets you thinking. I stress the ‘little’ part not as a negative, but as a good thing. There is nothing worse than fat, bloated popular science books where the author feels they have to get 120,000 words to be taken seriously. This is the sort of book that can be read in a couple of hours – but you will get so much more out of it than one of those tedious doorstops. The premise underlying the book is in once sense extremely simple, yet is fundamental to an understanding of what science is and what scientists do. And it is an understanding that is totally at odds with the typical way science is portrayed both in university lectures and popular science books. As Stuart Firestein points out, what is important is not the facts, but rather the area of ignorance. The interesting part and the fundamental heart of science is not about what we know, but about what we don’t know and where we want to look next. Take this lovely quote: ‘Working ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Star Book – Peter Grego ****

This attractive landscape format book combines an excellent introduction to the stars and basic astronomy with a set of star maps, plus in depth looks at some of the stars featured, with a  bonus section on the solar system. Amazon says it’s a hardback, but in fact it’s a paperback with a rather ingenious cover – you can’t tell from the photo, but the words ‘The Star Book’ are punched through as a series of holes that show the white paper of the next page beneath. Like many astronomy/space books, the cover lacks shelf appeal because it is mostly black, but at least there is some original thought here. Unlike many books in this format which tend to concentrate on the pictures, there is a good deal of excellent text by Peter Grego, so there was no feeling that you were only getting the star maps and star ‘biographies’, something these days much more suited to an iPad or smartphone app. Instead, the opening 30 or so pages give a very good introduction that would be valuable to ...
Post a Comment
Read more