I grew up in a Mac household, starting with the 128k and extending up to the Plus, Classic II, and several Performas. (One of my dad’s friends also gifted me a Newton. Like Jobs, I found the experience of actually using it quite confusing.)
By 1998 and 1999, we were all surfing Bondi Blue iMac G3 waves – there were even a few in my high school journalism class! It was the beginning of a new millennium, and except for the Y2K scare, things were looking great.
At the time, I was only vaguely aware of why Apple struggled – well, sucked – in the mid-90s. Why did Jobs start NeXT? What happened to “computers for the rest of us”? What happened between Apple’s glory days in the early 1980s and its iMac-fueled, late-’90s renaissance? (And what counts as a “workstation” anyway?)
Steve Jobs in exile Answers all these questions and more.
While the general narrative—Jobs left for NeXT but returned to save Apple—is easy to see ahead, Cain’s story brings new things, detailed textures, and three-dimensional characters to the table in ways that haven’t been fully realized before.
Three brief paragraphs highlight the amount of new information uncovered by Cain.
Midway through the book, Cain writes about how in 1989, NeXT and Jobs hired Admation, a two-member black-owned software development company based in Oakland, to create some of the first software for NeXT’s nascent platform.
While that project for William Morris, a notable Hollywood agency, ultimately failed, Caine notes that “Steve.” [Jobs] Protected the reputation of admission. He never blamed them publicly for the failure and continued to ship NeXT [Adamation] High-profile clients: the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department and then a luxury real estate broker called Alain Pinel Realtors.
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