Host of Userlandia. I write about old computers. https://www.userlandia.com
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Dan Vincent @ Userlandia
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Today: the summer New England vintage computer and retro games meetup at the Maynard public library! A great crowd with lots of attendees and volunteers.
I finished Geoffrey Cain’s “Steve Jobs in Exile” yesterday. If you’re familiar at all with the ups and downs of NeXT, you won’t be surprised by much. Maybe the biggest thing I didn’t know about was how the NSA killed NeXTSTEP’s encryption and digital signature features in the crib.
But it managed to put all of those stories and anecdotes into context with a bunch of additional research. Until now the main book was Randall Stross’ “Steve Jobs and the NeXT Big Thing” which didn’t have 30 years of hindsight since it was published in 1993. Stross’ tone is very different.
There’s also “The Second Coming of Steve Jobs” which is more Pixar-y than NeXT-y. The end of Jobs’ life and his performance at Apple post-return informs a lot of what went wrong at NeXT and Cain captures all that context very well.
