(I am not an expert on anything.) At this stage Sun was already selling networked workstations and trumpeting that "the network is the computer". DNS ramped up

(I am not an expert on anything.) At this stage Sun was already selling networked workstations and trumpeting that "the network is the computer". DNS ramped up in 1985, while SMTP was already a few years active, and from a user's POV the good ole modern IPv4-on-Unix-machines Internet was already a reality if still not open to all comers. Speaking of Gibson, Neuromancer was already out, too. Basically Jobs was, for someone in his position—and for someone who iirc was in regular contact with Apple employee Alan Kay at this stage—more or less up to speed here, not really visionary. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8317553 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8317553 Speaking of Sun workstations though, remember that at the time of this 1985 interview Jobs was about four months from being fired from Apple. The Big Mac project he'd been pushing at the time looks very much like his attempt to do basically a NeXT—a networked Unix workstation with a new GUI layer and Mac/Apple fairy dust—inside Apple as the next Macintosh, and he founded NeXT by the end of the year in response to Gassée's termination of Big Mac after he (Jobs) left (basically in favour of the more incremental Macintosh II, it seems).