> It was only the good fortune of Apple management being utterly incompetent that gave him a second chance Not only: before that second chance, he set up its

> It was only the good fortune of Apple management being utterly incompetent that gave him a second chance Not only: before that second chance, he set up its sensibility, as he had the willingness to test the idea that there was a growing market for widespread unix 'workstations'. his hardware was too expensive for a huge hobbyist audience, which I know as I had one, but NeXTstep and its tooling and resulting apps placed a solid foothold in a somewhat grotesque early 90s (from 1988 or so to even get that foothold). I had one, had been using Suns before, and very early microsoft before that, and apple ][ and atari 800. I think his getting fired is something his brazen young self sublimed into a determination to prove an idea's viability such that an evolution of his NeXTstep effort not only brought him back to a hardware company better able to execute on the hardware portion, but such that his post-firing gamble is evolved into things ubiquitous now.