THE DRIVE SOUTH to Palo Alto is a trip through the history of Silicon Valley. From Route 92 in San Mateo over to Interstate 280, a “bucolic” eight-laner skirting San Andreas Lake and Crystal Springs Reservoir, which store drinking water for San Francisco piped in from the Sierras; past the blandly ostentatious venture-capitalist habitat along Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park and traversing the oblique, mile-long Stanford Linear Accelerator, which slashes like a hairline fracture through the landscape and beneath the freeway; past the “Stanford Dish” radio telescope, and the white-faced Herefords and ornate oak trees dotting the expansive greenbelt behind the university campus. The winter and spring rains had resurrected the prairie grass on the hills, turning them briefly as green as a golf course from their usual dull yellow, and peppering them with patches of orange, purple, and yellow wildflowers. I was so new to the Bay Area that I didn’t yet realize that this was the most beautiful time of year to make this drive.
My exit—Page Mill Road—was the home street address of Hewlett-Packard, early biotech pioneer ALZA Corporation, Silicon Valley “facilitators” like Andersen Consulting (now called Accenture), and the law firm Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati. But first you hit the university-owned Stanford Research Park, with its groves of low-slung corporate research-and-development labs situated with lots of grassy elbow room. Xerox’s famed Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), where Steve first saw a computer with a mouse and a graphical “bitmapped” screen interface, resides here. This was where he had chosen to headquarter NeXT.
A young woman from NeXT’s PR firm, Allison Thomas Associates, escorted me through the boxy, two-story, concrete-and-glass office building to a small conference room with a view of a half-filled parking lot and not much more. Steve was waiting there. He greeted me with a nod, dismissed the flack, and, before I could get seated, popped that first question.
I wasn’t sure if Steve wanted a monosyllabic answer, or if he was genuinely curious about who I was and where I came from. I assumed the latter, so I started ticking off the places and industries I’d written about for the Journal. Right after leaving graduate school at the University of Kansas, I’d moved to Dallas for the paper, where I’d written about aviation, airlines, and electronics, since Texas Instruments and Radio Shack were based there. Along the way I had won some notoriety for a profile of John Hinckley, the privileged son of a Texas oilman who shot President Reagan in 1981.
“What year did you graduate from high school?” he interjected. “Nineteen seventy-two,” I replied, “and I spent seven years in college but never quite got my master’s degree.” “That’s when I graduated from high school,” he interjected. “So we’re about the same age.” (I found out later that he had skipped a grade.)
I then explained that I’d spent two years each in Central America and Hong Kong writing and reporting on geopolitical issues for the Journal, and a year in Los Angeles, before finally wangling my dream job in San Francisco. At this point, it really was beginning to feel like a job interview. Except that Jobs wasn’t reacting much to any of my answers.
“So do you know anything about computers?” he asked, interrupting again. “Nobody who writes for the major national publications knows shit about computers,” he added, shaking his head with a practiced air of condescension. “The last person who wrote about me for the Wall Street Journal didn’t even know the difference between machine memory and a floppy!”
Now I felt on somewhat firmer footing. “Well, I was an English major, formally, but I programmed some simple games and designed relational databases on a mainframe in college.” He rolled his eyes. “For a couple of years, I worked nights as a computer operator processing the daily transactions for four banks on an NCR minicomputer.” He was staring out the window now. “And I bought an IBM PC the very first day they were available. At Businessland. In Dallas. Its serial number started out with eight zeroes. And I installed CP/M first. I only installed MS-DOS when I sold it before we moved to Hong Kong, because that’s what the buyer wanted.”
At the mention of those early operating systems and a competitor’s product he perked up. “Why didn’t you get an Apple II?” he asked.
Good question, but seriously … why was I letting this guy interview me?
“I never had one,” I allowed, “but now that I’m here, I got the Journal to buy me a Fat Mac.” I had convinced the big guys in New York that if I was going to be writing about Apple, I’d better be familiar with their latest machines. “I’ve been using it for a couple of weeks. So far, I do like it better than a PC.”
I had picked the lock. “Wait till you see what we’re going to build here,” he told me. “You’ll want to get rid of your Fat Mac.” We’d finally reached the point of the interview, the destination Steve had wanted all along—the place where he could tell me how he was going to outdo the company he had founded, and best the people, most notably Apple CEO John Sculley, who had effectively banished him from that kingdom.
Now he would take my questions, although he didn’t always respond to them directly. I was curious, for example, about his eerily empty headquarters. Were they really going to assemble computers here? It sure didn’t look like manufacturing space. Was he bankrolling the whole thing, or was he lining up some investors? He’d sold all his Apple shares save one, netting him about $70 million, but that wasn’t enough to fund a company this ambitious. At times he veered off into completely unexpected terrain. As we talked, he drank steaming hot water from a pint beer glass. He explained that when he ran out of tea one day, it dawned on him that he liked plain old hot water, too. “It’s soothing in the very same way,” he said. Eventually he would steer the conversation back to his main pitch: higher education needed better computers, and only NeXT could deliver them. The company was working closely with both Stanford and Carnegie Mellon—universities with highly respected computer science departments. “They’ll be our first customers.”
Despite his evasiveness and his determination to hew to a single message, Jobs was a vivid presence. The intensity of his self-confidence made me hang on his every word. He spoke in carefully constructed sentences, even when trying to answer an unexpected question. Twenty-five years later, at his memorial service, Steve’s widow, Laurene, testified to the “fully formed aesthetic” he possessed from a very young age. That confidence in his own judgment and taste came through in his answers. It also came through in the fact, as I realized over the course of our conversation, that he really was interviewing me, testing me to see if I “grokked”—understood—what was special about what he had done and what he planned to do at NeXT. Later, I came to realize that this was because Steve wanted whatever was written about him and his work to measure up to his own high standard of quality. At this stage of his life, he thought he could probably do anybody’s job better than they could—it was an attitude that gnawed at his employees, of course.
The interview lasted forty-five minutes. The plans he laid out for NeXT were sketchy; as it turned out, this was an early sign of the troubles the company would experience over the years. There was, however, one tangible thing he did want to discuss: the NeXT logo. He gave me a fancy brochure explaining the creative evolution of the snazzy corporate symbol Paul Rand had designed. The booklet itself had been designed by Rand personally, with expensive translucent leaves separating thick, creamy pages embossed with a step-by-step guide to how he had settled upon an image that spoke in “multiple visual languages.” The logo was a simple cube with NeXT spelled out in “vermillion against cerise and green, and yellow against black (the most intense color contrast possible),” and “poised at a twenty-eight degree angle,” according to the pamphlet. At that time, Rand was noteworthy as one of America’s leading graphic designers; he was famous for dreaming up the visual identities of IBM, ABC Television, UPS, and Westinghouse, among others. For this pamphlet, and for a single, take-it-or-leave-it draft of a corporate logo, Jobs had happily parted with $100,000 of his money. That extravagance, albeit in the pursuit of perfection, was a quality that would not serve him well at NeXT.