May 14, 1992: Steve Jobs’ company NeXT runs into trouble as it loses a crucial deal with Businessland after the giant computer retailer closes its stores.
It comes at a time when NeXT’s luck is going from bad to worse. The closure marks one of the lowest points in Jobs’ career — before everything starts to turn around again.
February 9, 1993: NeXT Computer, the company Steve Jobs founded after being pushed out of Apple, quits making computers. The company changes its name to NeXT Software and focuses its efforts entirely on producing code for other platforms.
In a mass layoff, 330 of NeXT’s 500 employees are made redundant in an event known internally as “Black Tuesday.”
Cruelly, many people hear of their fate on the radio.
Most Apple fans have heard Steve Jobs’ introduction of the original 1984 Macintosh. But far fewer are familiar with the initial public demonstrations of the NeXT Computer, the first of two NeXT machines Jobs launched during his years outside Apple.
However, 32 years down the line, an audio recording of one such speech, from the Boston Computer Society, has shown up online. Check it out.
Apple Park is a physical manifestation of Steve Jobs’ undying hubris, a monument to fussy perfectionism that’s as crazy as his NeXT Computer, the not-entirely-successful computer he launched after being booted from Apple in 1985.
That’s the premise of a new Bloomberg op-ed, which draws parallels between the new Apple campus and one of Jobs’ most notorious tech launches. It’s interesting, but ultimately wrong. Here’s why.
For many Apple fans who remember Steve Jobs only as the austere, turtleneck-wearing digital emperor he was during his CEO stint at Apple, Jobs’ NeXT years — referring to the company he founded after parting ways with Apple in 1985 — are something of a mystery.
In many Jobs biographies, NeXT is often largely skipped over. In fact, the company had its own fascinating trajectory — and one of its big turning points was a June 13, 1989 investment by Canon which (briefly) left Jobs’ would-be Apple beater flush with cash.
CERN has given us many things in our day, most notable among them recent proof of the existence of the so-called ‘God particle’, the Higgs Boson… one of the most elusive objects in particle physics. But like the Higgs Boson, most of CERN’s achievements are pretty exotic.
On April 30 in 1993, though, CERN gave us something it gave all of us something we all use to this day: the worldwide web, software and technology that anyone could use (and everyone did) to build what we, today, called the Internet.
Like many of the revolutions of the computing age, though, the Internet owes a debt of gratitude to Steve Jobs.
