May 2021
(c) Doug Meil
It was either 1993 or 1994 at Database and Client-Server World in Chicago. Steve Jobs was doing a demonstration of NeXTSTEP. After he finished he was on the floor next to the stage just standing there, barely anyone around him. I thought of the fastest question I could think of based on his presentation and walked up to him. He fixed me with his trademark stare and smirk and replied. “Yep, that’s pretty much what I thought he’d say,” I thought. Even in his wilderness period, after Apple and after the NeXT Cube, he was still loaded with attitude.
But let’s back up a bit.
I was an Apple fan of the original multi-colored logo variety. I started programming in 1981 in middle school on an Apple //+ with an old TV for a monitor. I was squarely in the education market so key to Apple’s early success. I was fortunate enough that my family bought an Apple //e for our home in 1983 and that was the computer I used all through high school and college to write my papers with an Epson dot-matrix printer on continuous paper. That’s the paper with tear-off strips on each side that had little holes so that the printer’s “teeth” could rotate it through the cylinder. I feel old just typing that, and still I never take laser-printing for granted.
I understood Apple //’s hobbyist-expandability benefits first-hand and I was quite comfortable with popping the top of the case. I added an 80-column card so that word processing was more effective and supported lower-case letters too. That card also boosted total system memory to a whopping 128k. I also added a modem and another 5 ¼” disk-drive, stacked upon the first floppy drive. One of my favorite 3rd party software companies was Beagle Bros. which sold a variety of interesting nerd utilities, one of my favorites being something that could renumber “REM” (comment) lines to 65535 so they couldn’t be changed. Apple was more than a company, it was a technical community. I was an Apple fan for certain, but arguably at heart I was a Woz fan. All of the technical attributes I liked about the Apple //-series computers were either designed or influenced by the “other” Steve – Steve Wozniak.
I even once saw an Apple /// computer on a tour courtesy of a local computer club. Most people know about the Apple Lisa via the insane paternity saga of the same name. As the story goes, the Lisa computer although technically advanced was a commercial failure. The Apple ///, however, managed to be technically problematic and a commercial failure. Seeing an Apple /// in the field is something of a rare and dubious honor as few people in the computer industry – much less teenagers of the era - could make the claim given how few were made. I was excited to get exposure to any computer back then irrespective of what it was.
Then came the famous Mac ad in January 1984. Macs were expensive and as we already had a functioning Apple //e there wasn’t a compelling argument to upgrade to an incompatible system, despite the fact that the Mac had a mouse and the neat graphics. A high school teacher brought in “In Search Of Excellence” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l3agg64LM88) which was filmed in the summer of 1984, and I still eagerly soaked up the Apple segment about the Mac. Despite not being a Mac user, I was still an Apple fan. The irony was that in a little more than a year after the filming of that propaganda coup the Mac would be lagging in the market and Steve would be out of Apple.
Colleges were squarely in the education market that NeXT was targeting, and this is where I saw The Cube my senior year. In one of the campus computer labs that I frequented I could see it sitting on a table. I must admit seeing a NeXT Cube up close and in person was visually impressive. I don’t ever remember seeing anyone use it. The login box would “shake off ” bad login attempts, which I found artful and hilarious, but since neither I nor anyone else I knew had an account on the Cube that’s all I ever saw it do. Granted, I could have pushed harder for access but at a list price of $8,000 in 1990 dollars if I was a campus computer administrator I would have been nervous to let undergraduates play with it as well.
A book that made a big impression on me was Accidental Empires by Robert X. Cringley (1992) which covered the development of the personal computing industry. Apple featured large in the book. The Lisa story is bad enough and doesn’t need to be repeated here, but of all the other stories what I found the next most horrifying was how Steve screwed over early Apple employees on stock options, and Woz stepped in to be the conscience of the company and to do the right thing out of his personal stake. For someone who claimed loudly that money wasn’t important, when it came down to it Steve Jobs didn’t want anyone else to have any if he could help it, even when they contributed to his success. This was technical robber-baron behavior, and then some.
So by the time I had a chance to meet Steve Jobs in 1993/1994 he was on the heels of a highly publicized exit from Apple and a highly publicized bust with the NeXT Cube. One could say the shine had worn off. He was already a part of computing history to be sure, although that history didn’t have a home yet as the Computer History Museum wouldn’t be created until 1996. And this was years before playing Steve Jobs became a sub-genre in Hollywood with “Pirates of Silicon Valley” (1999), “Jobs” (2013), and “Steve Jobs” (2015). He was at the time I met him effectively a very rich and famous has-been, who was promoting NeXTSTEP. I thought of one of the lines from Accidental Empires about how Steve Jobs would be “firing an Uzi into the sky and telling the rest of the world that it was full of shit” or something like that. I kind of admired the fact that he was still working. He didn’t need to. "This guy just won’t stop” I thought.
One of the last sections of the NeXTSTEP demo was how it had built-in support for direct database access to selected databases. This especially piqued my interest as I had been working with ODBC (Open Database Connectivity) since ODBC 1.0 was released in 1992. So I asked Steve whether NeXTSTEP would support ODBC for greater database support. I didn’t really care what he thought about ODBC, I just wanted to ask him a question relevant to his presentation. To poke him in a professional way and see what happened. He replied ”no, because it’s too slow” with absolute certainty. And he looked at me like he was expecting a short bus to pick me up from whatever adult day care center I had come from, seemingly amused I could get around the conference so well on my own. “Ahhh, I see. Thanks.” I replied. I didn’t come to the conference to argue about database connectivity with Steve Jobs.
He had a point. ODBC did have a bit of a rocky start but it improved and eventually became a productivity boon for both developers, analysts and tool vendors. The ODBC pattern begat JDBC, which had similar benefits for the Java community but that would come later as Java hadn’t been invented yet. Despite the early shortcomings of ODBC I would say Steve was strategically wrong on the pattern. And obstinate. But he didn’t come to the conference to argue about database connectivity either. He was there to be right.
Steve would go on to rescue Apple and re-invent multiple industries. And be generally right on a few things along the way. I think he got better at that during this period.
