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How Steve Jobs poached a Microsoft employee with a restaurant menu

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A successful Steve Jobs recruitment pitch came from an Il Fornaio menu. (It's an Italian restaurant in Palo Alto, California.)
"Do you want to eat pasta all your life, or join me and change the world?"
Photo: Lou Stejskal/Flickr CC

It’s not exactly breaking news that Steve Jobs was a great salesman. But a hilarious anecdote from Adam Fisher’s recent oral history of Silicon Valley, Valley of Genius, gives a great example of Jobs’ next-level skills.

Want to know how Jobs persuaded a product marketing expert from Microsoft to join his company NeXT? It turns out it involved little more than a bit of patented Steve Jobs charm — and a helping hand from a local Italian restaurant menu.

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Doom’s lead programmer recalls working with Steve Jobs

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John Carmack was one of the brains behind some of the biggest PC games of the 1980s and 90s.
Photo: Id Software

Id Software co-founder John Carmack was behind some of the most iconic computer game of the 1980s and 90s. This week, the legendary coder behind the smash hit games Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, and Quake shared some memories of working with Steve Jobs.

Writing on Facebook, Carmack described some of his interactions with Jobs over the years — for better and for worse.

Unseen Steve Jobs interview shares business secrets

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Who wouldn't want Steve as their instructor?
Photo: Deliberate Think

Who wouldn’t have wanted Steve Jobs to have visited their university class for a casual Q&A with the students? That’s what folks at MIT were lucky enough to experience in 1992.

Running NeXT at the time, Jobs stopped by to drop some wisdom on everything from his thoughts on leaving Apple to the state of computing to his thoughts on the right way to run a company. Excerpts from the discussion recently landed on YouTube. Check them out below.

Former Apple exec tapped to lead Computer History Museum

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Dan’l Lewin in NeXT’s Palo Alto, California, offices, 1986–1987.
Dan’l Lewin in NeXT’s Palo Alto, California, offices, 1986–1987.
Photo: Doug Menuez

The Computer History Museum named former Apple executive Dan’l Lewin as its new CEO and President today.

Lewin was one of Steve Jobs’ top guys back in the early days of Apple. He served in a number of marketing roles from 1981 to 1985 and was recruited by Jobs to join his new company, NeXT, after Jobs was fired from Apple.

Rare Steve Jobs-signed magazine goes up for auction next month

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Who wouldn't want their very own Steve Jobs autograph?
Photo: Ben Stanfield/Flickr CC

Do you fancy getting your hands on some Steve Jobs memorabilia, but can’t quite stretch to the high six figure dollar mark needed to purchase a big ticket item like an original Apple-1 computer? No problem if so — because an upcoming auction for a Steve Jobs autograph may be more in your ballpark.

The autography in question is on the front cover of a Newsweek magazine from October 24, 1988, features Jobs with his NeXT computer — the first of several computers he launched during his wilderness years outside of Apple.

Today in Apple history: Steve Jobs talks to Rolling Stone

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Steve Jobs during the NeXT years.
Steve Jobs during the NeXT years.
Photo: Doug Menuez/Fearless Genius

thursday16 There was, to put it mildly, a lot that was insanely great about Steve Jobs’ return to Apple. But one thing that always struck me as less than good from an Apple fan’s perspective was that he stopped giving revealing in-depth interviews.

As his ability to command the narrative increased, Apple’s CEO understandably shifted away from playing the media hound he’d been for the first part of his career, where he’d speak with often painful honesty to seemingly any magazine that would have him. One of his last such interviews? The one that appeared in the June 16, 1994, edition of Rolling Stone.

Apple officially makes one of Steve Jobs’ favorite projects obsolete

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WebObjects came to Apple when Steve Jobs returned from NeXT.
Photo: Ben Stanfield/Flickr CC

Twenty years after it was first released to the public, Apple has finally confirmed that its WebObjects Java-based web application framework is dead — at least as far as official Apple updates are concerned.

Never heard of WebObjects? You’re probably not alone, but back in the 1990s it was considered a breakthrough product, was one that Steve Jobs was incredibly high on, and officially came over to Apple as part of the historic deal to acquire Jobs’ former company NeXT. Even today, aspects of WebObjects are used to power its online Apple Store and iTunes Store.

Steve Jobs’s smelly old sandals just sold at auction

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These stinky old Birkenstocks from Steve Jobs's NeXT years sold for a pretty price at auction today.
These stinky old Birkenstocks from Steve Jobs's NeXT years sold for a pretty price at auction today.
Photo: Mark Scheff

An odd assortment of purported artefacts from Steve Jobs’s wilderness years – including a pair of his rated running sandals – were sold at auction today. And while it’s not entirely clear who bought them, all of the disparate items, dating back to Steve Jobs’s NeXT years, still ended up earning a pretty penny.

Long-lost video shows Steve Jobs launching his biggest failure

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Steve Jobs during the NeXT years.
Steve Jobs during the NeXT years.
Photo: Doug Menuez

Only a handful of products Steve Jobs introduced to the world became flops, but three years after he was kicked out of Apple, the tech visionary unveiled his biggest failure ever: the NeXT computer.

Video footage of Jobs’ first major public appearance since he left Apple in 1985 was lost to the world until researchers for Aaron Sorkin’s movie came across two videotapes of the NeXT’s gala unveiling at San Francisco’s Davies Symphony Hall in 1988.

Pinterest hires former Apple designer Susan Kare

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Early Apple designer Susan Kare.
Early Apple designer Susan Kare.
Photo: Photo: Ann Rhoney

As part of the original Macintosh team back in the 80s, Susan Kare created some of Apple’s earliest typefaces and icons, but now the famous designer is ready to bring her iconic skills to Pinterest, as the company’s newest design lead.