|
I came on board with the NeXT acquisition (or rather reverse acquisition as ex-NeXT often refer to)… So I do recall seeing a few times after we relocated to Infinite Loop, that Steve at first was just working as a consultant, and not as an employee. Thus at the time he didn’t have a badge to enter in IL1 (Infinite Loop 1: hold Apple HQ); many times when he was coming in the morning, he had to wait at the glass door to enter the campus, until some kind soul was letting him in (despite the policy only badged employees could enter or visitors with a printed tag). I saw it happening more than once while grabbing a coffee at the coffee booth in the IL1 building. Later on, after he came back officially as CEO (or iCEO), I remember clearly during a lunch with co-workers (at Café Mac, seating outside) watching at a distance Steve & Jony walking inside the campus, then seating at a bench and Jony opening some carrying case/luggage, and let Steve pull the content out of it, so he could look at it in the sun: it looked like a piece of plastic… at the time, we had no clue what it was, except the color was orange.
Many months later, Steve introduced the first iBook (which was the first Mac with Wifi): when I saw the orange color of the iBook I made the connection with what we saw back that day; Jony was most likely showing to Steve the first shell of the future iBook. Steve otherwise at work was truly laser focus at a time on different projects: I was working on backend web services development with public facing web site, so usually every 2 weeks our boss was presenting to Steve our progress (every week or even more while closer to ship): our boss usually was always coming back with clear feedback on what was good or terrible, which we obviously had to improve for the next presentation… stressful yes, but truly enjoyable.
More than once, Steve did cut some projects that were close to finish and you just had to go along since no one had a say in it, except Steve. Obviously I have a few more stories of that sort, since I spent close to 20 years at Apple (/NeXT). It was quite something to get the hard work you did for months presented on stage by Steve… I still miss the excitement from it even if it is more than 15 years ago. Edit: fixing a few typos |
In typical Steve fashion he had a slide-preso for the reveal. He began with a kind of simplified history of the computer user-interface: starting with the command-line. His next slide showed the graphical user interface popularized, surprise, by his earlier Apple Macintosh.
The NeXt slide (ha ha) showed, perhaps unsurprisingly, the NeXT user interface. A "boo" from one of the engineers in the crowd.
Jobs froze and the showman tone of his voice was gone, "Who said that? Who booed?" He was clearly enraged. He stared into the audience, scanning the faces of the engineers. I think he followed that with some expletives and a claim that the NeXT UI was an amazing step in UI design but I was still kind of in shock myself.