Steve Jobs Talks About His Rise and Fall (1985)
newsweek.com
newsweek.com
Great people bounce back. Steve Jobs is like flubber -- he gains more momentum with each bounce.
It was Objective-C, Interface Builder, similar tools to what Cocoa is today. All the cool app building tools for the Mac were born on NEXTSTEP.
The NS prefix was adopted as part of the NextStep -> OpenStep transition around 1993, when Sun was planning to use OpenStep as their main desktop environment. That never happened because soon Sun got Java religion and dumped OpenStep.
We still have a bunch of old NeXT cubes gathering dust in a store room. I wonder what they would fetch on eBay these days..
Just for the history of the thing, I thought the NeXT together with the Acorn 'Unicorn' were some of the nicest machines made at the time. SGI was neat stuff too but overly massive (I can see why though, given the amount of gear in a 4D70 or personal Iris).
NeXT cubes in working condition still fetch $500 on ebay.
"I helped shepherd Apple from a garage to a billion-and-a-half-dollar company. I'm probably not the best person in the world to shepherd it to a five- or ten-billion-dollar company, which I think is probably its destiny."
The best part is they couldn't. They ended up buying NeXT to use NeXTSTEP as the basis for OS X (and later, iOS).
Q. Now that you're 30 and an estate owner, do you see a settled life for yourself, a family, big Silicon Valley parties, furniture?
A. Actually, I bought a few Eames chairs so I have a place to sit down and read a book, other than the floor.
I think it's interesting that people from Steve's generation had Hewlett and Packard as role models. I'd venture to guess many people from my generation would have Steve and/or Bill Gates. Given what has happened to HP over the years and the current state of Microsoft, I wonder if Apple can really maintain the spirit of Steve after he is gone.