I met Steve Jobs for the first time because I wanted to go to the introduction of the NeXT computer at Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco on October 12, 1988. I contacted some people I knew at NeXT and then I got a letter from Steve asking if I was the same John Barlow who had written songs for the Grateful Dead. I told him I was and he said, “And you want to write about the NeXT?” After I told him I did, Steve said he would get me a press pass.
At that point, Steve was scared shitless and for good reason. Apple had tossed him out on his ear, and with NeXT he was completely on his own. In many ways, he was actually totally on his ass but also being realistic. When I looked at that machine, I turned to him and said, “Jeez, this is the greatest technological tool ever devised. This completely blows all the competition out of the water. You’re going to do so well.” And he said, “In my experience, more companies have died of indigestion than starvation.” By indigestion he meant having more demand than he could fulfill, which of course was not a problem he had or was ever going to have with the NeXT.
In the end, Steve managed to sell only forty-two thousand of those things. Primarily, this was because they were too far ahead of their time and much too expensive. The company was also too slow in coming up with alternatives to the things that were wrong with it. Steve was convinced—and I don’t know where he got this idea—that the answer to storage in the future would be these big 650-megabyte read-write optical disks. You could plug them in and out and that was your world. It was the operating system and also held all of your documents. The company went on trying to get people to use those optical disks as the main means of storage a lot longer than they should have.
But the machines were incredibly practical and so much faster than anything else at the time. They also had a whole bunch of features that have not been seen in computers since. The NeXT had something called display postscript, which meant that it wrote postscript to the screen and to the printer so that whatever was on the screen was exactly what you would have on the printer. It was all written in Objective-C, which was not a popular computer language then, but now all the apps in iPhones are written in it; the iPhone is actually a NeXT, as is the MacBook.
What Steve had brought with him from Apple to NeXT was the operating system. If you go into the iPhone now and poke around, you’ll find a whole bunch of files that have the extension nib, which actually stands for NeXT Interface Builder. Back then, these files were an incredibly powerful leap forward.
I just loved that machine. Though, like Steve, it had some really astonishing flaws. Unlike Steve, the NeXT’s flaws were corrected. They were corrected pretty quickly but not until after they had already put a mark against it.
In 1991, I became the associate editor of NeXTWORLD, a magazine devoted exclusively to the NeXT computer. NeXTWORLD was not a direct extension of NeXT itself, but if I wrote something that Steve didn’t like, a seven A.M. phone call from him was something that could happen at least once a week. The magazine itself didn’t have a huge amount of subscribers but you talk about fanboys? I was definitely one of them.
Even then, Steve himself was kind of impossible to characterize. You would have this immediate strong desire to both hug him and slug him. You didn’t know which was stronger, but they were both pretty powerful. Steve was not like Dick Cheney or Bill Gates. They both had blazingly fast central processors, whereas Steve was also charismatic to the tits. Steve made you care about what he thought of you, and even though you could pretend that you didn’t, you were kidding yourself. It was a quality Garcia had as well, but the thing with him was that he didn’t want you to care about him like that. He really did not, but nevertheless you did.
On May 22, 1993, Steve asked me if I would host his celebrity roast at the NeXT convention at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. Roasts are usually meted out to people who are doing well, but the somewhat hollow quality of this roast might actually have been the nadir of Steve’s career. The NeXT was already failing as a hardware play, which was really sad because it was far and away the greatest computer ever made. The elegance of design was like UNIX by Armani.
The NeXT had been introduced at a time when Steve firmly believed he was going to make it a success. But then there was this era of darkness when Steve decided that what he really had was a software company, and he hated that. One of Steve’s main principles was that he wanted to integrate both software and hardware. Only by doing that could he control the entire user experience, which made really good sense.
My roast of him that night consisted mainly of gallows humor about the state of the company. I was aware of the pall hanging over the event, and I was trying to make light of it in a dark way. What I had completely forgotten about was that Steve had just married Laurene Powell, and so I now had a fierce contender for his interests. On the conference floor in the Moscone Center the next day, she came at me with both spike heels right down my throat and lathered me up and down. Like, “How dare you say that stuff? We thought you were a loyal partisan.” I said, “I am a loyal partisan, but if NeXT is still manufacturing hardware next year at this time, I will eat the column I wrote in which I claimed that it wouldn’t.”
She said, “Steve is not going to be happy to hear you said that.” I said, “I don’t care whether he’s happy or not.” The fact was that I did care. I couldn’t not care about what Steve thought. But Laurene in full dudgeon was nobody to mess with.
To his credit, Steve himself never came at me about it, because he wanted to have a good relationship with me. And he already knew the hardware wasn’t going to work because the model was too expensive. He also really cared about the Dead. In our conversation before the roast, I realized what a fanboy Steve was, because he was talking about dropping acid and how important that and the music of the Grateful Dead had been for him.
One aspect of Steve’s genius was his ability to surround himself with people like Bud Tribble, whom those at Apple used to call “the world’s smartest invertebrate.” Steve would fulminate and carry on and punch the wall and tell people what idiots they were and then flounce out of the room. And then Bud, who had been sitting there quietly all the while, would say, “Here’s what he meant.” He would pick up the pieces, like Jony Ive has done at Apple for the past twenty-five years.
At one point, the president of Volkswagen got in touch with me. He wanted me to introduce him to Steve because he had something important to talk to him about. I said, “What is it?” And he said, “Does that matter?” And I said, “Yes, it actually does because as important as this may seem to you, it may not be important to him.”
I had to go through a whole rigmarole getting the two of them together. By then, Steve was back at Apple. What the guy wanted to do was produce an iCar, but this was in 2004, just as Steve was beginning to create the iPhone. Steve said, “You know, I love this idea. I really do. But I’ve got this other thing I’m doing, and I’m not going to do anything else until I’ve gotten it right.” The Volkswagen guy was like, “But I’m going to be spending all the money on this.” And Steve’s thing was, “No, you don’t get it. I’m changing the world.” It probably set back the development of the self-driving car for a while.
On every level, Steve was a trip. He truly was, and I really miss him. After he started getting sick, I went to his office one day to talk to him about something. When some people are dying, it can be good for them to broach the subject and talk about it openly. But there was no way in hell Steve was going to do that. To his way of thinking, he was not dying. He was not. He had done some other challenging things in his life, and he was going to beat this as well.
I never think of people as being happy or satisfied. On a good day, Jerry Garcia was joyful and so was Steve. I saw him experience glee many times. He would give these demos introducing a product and somehow in spite of the fact that they were not ready to give the demo at all, it would work and he would be delighted. But there would be other times when it would work and he would still just be kicking himself all the way up the aisle.
In his fascist way, Steve imposed a lot of syntactic conventions that have made it a lot easier for users to interface with all the gnarly stuff that happens down close to the metal within their own devices. For Steve, that was a serious part of the proposition because he was a fanatic about design and didn’t ever think of it as a decal that you put on top.
For Steve, design was something that went all the way to the core, and he knew there weren’t many people who understood that. It’s hard to say where that came from, but what I do know for certain is that we will never see his like again.