Steve Jobs

Hello, this is Steve Jobs.

me: Uh, I'm at home. How did you get my number?

I called your office.

me: Yeah, but they're not supposed to give out my home number.

Well, I am Steve Jobs.

me: Point taken.

… [small talk elided; he called because he saw a demo of Executor/NEXTSTEP and liked it] …

So, how hard would it be to to turn the individual Mac windows into NEXTSTEP windows?

[small pause while I think about it]

me: That would be pretty hard.

OK. Bye. [hangs up phone]

The above, except for the last line, is mostly true. Were my memory better, it would be verbatim. SJ was very polite and although he did wrap up our conversation pretty quickly after I said "That would be pretty hard", he was much more polite than just saying two words and hanging up. The truth is I can't remember what he said in specific, because once I realized how badly I had botched the answer to his question, I forgot everything else (except the "How did you get my number?" portion.

Although it wasn't obvious to me at the time, the correct answer was "Steve, with your interest, I'll make it happen pretty darn quickly." I like to think that's how I would have replied, had I not been feverish in bed convalescing from pneumonia after having been treated (two bags of saline) at the hospital.

The backstory behind this is that I had undiagnosed sleep apnea that was interfering with my health for years, but working on documentation made it worse. My company had created Executor/NEXTSTEP, which allowed Steve Jobs's computers to run various Macintosh programs, including Microsoft Word and Excel. However, we were a tiny shop, so not only did I do much of the programming, I wrote all of the documentation, albeit after the programming, which was the style at the time.

In those days, software was delivered through the mail, on floppy disks and later CD-ROMs. Included was printed documentation. Printing documentation in bulk required offset printing and that required lead time. So, although I was clearly coming down with something, I figured it made sense to continue writing the documentation even as my health declined, because I'd have a lot of time to recuperate while waiting for the documentation to print.

At one point I felt bad enough to go to urgent care. After a cursory exam, I was back working. I don't even remember the diagnosis, but it wasn't anything major. I did finish the documentation and get it to the printer. I also sent out some copies of Executor/NEXTSTEP to various important people to get a little buzz going before we could release the product (when we got the manuals back from the printer). By then I was so sick I wound up in the emergency room where they examined my lungs, told me I had pneumonia, gave me antibiotics and told me to go to bed and stay there!

Executor/NEXTSTEP was a big hit. We ran a full-page ad in NEXTWORLD magazine and even though those ads were expensive, we were pulling in more than our expenses. However, before we got to making the Mac windows be native NEXTSTEP windows, NeXT stopped making hardware. For a while, NEXTSTEP was running on PCs and we did port Executor to run on PCs, but we never really recovered, in part because my apnea was holding me back considerably. Ironically, I actually came across apnea information while testing the Mac CD-ROM reading capability of Executor and that would wind up saving my life, but that's a different story.