I grew up in a Mac household, starting with the 128k and extending to the Plus, Classic II, and many more. interpretations. (One of my father’s friends even gave me a Newton. Like Jobs himself, I found the experience of using it quite confusing.)
In 1998 and 1999, we were all surfing those Bondi Blue iMac G3 waves; In my high school journalism class there were even some! It was the beginning of a new millennium and, year 2000 fears aside, things were looking pretty good.
At the time, I only vaguely knew why Apple had struggled (well, it was a disaster) in the mid-90s. Why did Jobs start NeXT? Whatever happened to a “computer for the rest of us”? What happened between Apple’s glory days in the early ’80s and its iMac-fueled renaissance in the late ’90s? (And what is considered a “workstation” anyway?)
Steve Jobs in exile answers all these questions and more.
While the overall narrative (Jobs left for NeXT but returned to save Apple) is easy to see in retrospect, Cain’s narration brings new details, detailed textures, and three-dimensional characters to the fore in ways that haven’t been fully realized before.
Three brief passages highlight the amount of new information discovered by Cain.
About halfway through the book, Cain writes about how in 1989, NeXT and Jobs hired Adamation, a two-man company. Black-owned, Oakland-based software development companyto create one of the first programs for the nascent NeXT platform.
While that project for William Morris, a notable Hollywood agency, ultimately failed, Cain notes that “Steve (Jobs) protected Adamation’s reputation. He never publicly blamed them for the failure, and NeXT continued to send (Adamation) high-profile clients: the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department and later a luxury real estate broker named Alain Pinel Realtors.”
