Newton Poetry

The New York Times:

Mr. Jobs founded Apple in 1976 with Steve Wozniak, and built the company’s reputation with the Apple II and Macintosh computers. He left Apple in 1985 after a conflict with John Sculley, then the chief executive. The following year, with a small group of Apple employees, he founded NeXt Computer, which ultimately focused on the corporate computing market, without notable success. In 1986, he bought the computer graphics division of Lucasfilm and re-established it as the independent animation studio Pixar.

A decade later he sold the NeXt operating system to Apple and returned to the company. In short order he was again at the helm and set out to modernize the company’s computers.

And so ends a helluva run.

Lots will be said about Steve Jobs resignation, but it’s the above story that always moved me about Apple. Here was a company that kicked out its founder, struggled, brought him back, and went on to achieve greater things. If that’s not a archetype of a story, I don’t know what is.

“If Apple had sold even close to 30 million Newton OS devices in its first 18 months, Apple would not have been ‘beleaguered’, they would not have bought NeXT, and Steve Jobs never would have been brought back. Instead, IDG reported that Apple sold a grand total of only 60,000 Newton units in all of 1996, the Newton’s third year on the market. That’s about how many iPhone OS devices Apple sold per day — per day! — for the first 18 months after the iPhone went on sale.”

– John Gruber at Daring Fireball, on Apple’s too-intent focus on the Next Big Thing during the 1990s.