Tuesday, June 19, 2012

Jobs 2, NeXT

There's this wonderful alternate bio of Jobs on YouTube...

After he left Apple (here's my first post), Jobs went on to NeXT, which he envisioned as a high-end computer for the educational market. This video shows him at work, and shows all those young folks he had stolen hired from the Mac team to work with him on it. You also get to see the strikingly spare NeXT offices, and the high-priced designer of the corporate logo.



I love the start of this with Jobs picking carrots. He was a diet nut, vegan as often as not, and there's stories in Isaacson's book of Jobs thinking that his wonderful diet was a substitute for soap. Going by the smell emanating from his unwashed body, apparently it wasn't. You also get to see that he's already discovered the black turtleneck.

NeXT was ultimately a disaster. It was a striking black cube, horribly overpriced (if you wanted a printer and a disk drive, figure on spending about ten grand), proprietary, and more evolutionary than revolutionary. The logo was the best thing about it, in hindsight.

At that same time, Jobs bought a controlling interest in a company that George Lucas wanted to get rid of to help pay for his difficult divorce. That company had created a computer that rendered incredible images, which is why Jobs wanted in; the company was Pixar, named after that artistic rendering computer. Jobs intended to use its resources to sell Pixar-like computers and software. Animation was merely a demonstration medium for the company at the time. The lamp was still to come.
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