Steve Jobs in Exile is a great biography of the Jobs years at NEXT

I grew up in a Mac family, from the 128k to the Plus, Classic II, and more. Drawings. (One of my father’s friends gave me a Newton as a gift. Like Jobs himself, I found the experience of using it very confusing.)

By 1998 and 1999, we were all sporting Bondi Blue iMac G3s—my high school journalism class had a few! It was the dawn of the new millennium, and Y2K fears aside, things were looking pretty good.

At the time, I only knew exactly why Apple struggled to, well, suck it up – in the 90s. Why did Jobs start NEXT? What happened to the “computer for all of us”? What happened between Apple’s glory days in the early 1980s and its iMac revival in the late-90s? (And what counts as a “workplace,” anyway?)

Steve Jobs in Exile answers all these questions and more.

While the common story – Jobs left at NEXT but coming back to save Apple – is easy to see in retrospect, Cain’s telling brings innovation, detailed visuals, and three-dimensional characters in ways not previously recognized.

Three short passages show how much new knowledge Cain uncovered.

Near the middle of the book, Cain writes how in 1989, NEXT and Jobs hired Adamation, a two-year-old. A Black-based software development company in Oaklandcreating some of the first NEXT programs for the nascent platform.

Although the project of William Morris, a well-known Hollywood organization, was disrupted, Cain said that “Steve (Jobs) protected Adamation’s reputation. He did not publicly blame them for the failure, and NEXT continued to send (Adamation) high-profile clients: the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department and then a high-end real estate agent called Alain Pinel Realtors.”