My Personal Demonstration to Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs stands outside our booth at NeXTWorld I found this old photo in with old NeXT things. A lot has gone on in the last 15 years. Steve is back at Apple, NeXT software now runs things like the iPhone, and I am older and less brassy. Wow, a photo I had to find a scanner to use in my blog, how quickly we change! I could have lost this old photo along with many other and better ones I'm sure. Now at least it is digital.

Ok, so the last time, and the first time I presented my own software directly to Steve Jobs was at NeXTWorld expo circa 1992, Check Out Old Google News of NeXTWorld Expo but still, it was like really hard and stuff.

Glory Days

"Hi Steve, I'm Jesse Tayler and I worked my butt off on this software and I'd like to show it to you"

Recently, a very old website I've had in my bookmarks "forever" was taken down! An old acquaintance, Scott Anguish, had taken down his NeXTSTEP and later, OPENSTEP oriented website, http://stepwise.com/

Turns out, Scott was in the midst of some troubling copyright problems and later put his wonderful site back up for all to see and enjoy. Thanks Scott!

This whole episode got me to thinking about old times. Old times that turn out to be about fifteen years ago!

Allow me to digress, just a moment.

Surviving the Kool-Aid

(if you are not sure about Steve Jobs and making you drink the kool aid, click here to learn more)

Before October 12, 1988 I felt that each computer had a place, at least one special capacity that others lacked. Then I saw the NeXT Computer and I said to myself "I want to write software that looks like that! - how did they do it?".

Within the year, I met a guy named Andy Stone, who had demonstrated his nifty NeXT program called TextArt to a computer society meeting held at MIT. Andy was clearly a great Engineer, but it was his creativity that turned me on. I thought, "with this NeXT computer, I can be totally creative while doing really technical things". In short, I wanted to be like Andy Stone!

Blinded, with cubes in my eyes, I set about moving to the West Coast, because that's where software was "kool-aid cool".

NeXT Engineers, were like a worldwide migration drawn to this special computer, akin to the subconsciously unavoidable draw Richard Dreyfuss's character in Close Encounters of the Third Kind .

From the outside world it seemed we had drunk poison kool-aid, or were under the influence of some 'reality distortion field' leading us astray from the common wisdom of the computer industry.

But NeXT Engineers invented cool things, like Tim Berners-Lee, who used his NeXT Computer to create the World Wide Web. Ok, in retrospect his invention had a larger impact on the industry, but at the time it was my invention, The Electronic AppWrapper, that was THE HOT technology.

Hot or not, Steve Jobs had a reputation for calling your life's work "brain-dead", I really should have been nervous.

Andy Stone, still runs Stone Design today. A younger Andy Stone grabs a bite to eat at NeXTWorld Expo Andy might be a bit older now, but he's still at it over at stone.com, you should check him out if you run Mac OSX he writes some great video software and maybe you can get him to tell you about TextArt!

Nobody sees the great Steve, not nobody, not nohow!

Oh, but he will. He must. We've come such a long way already!

We had flown in from Seattle and we had a software 'store' that today is likened to a fore-runner or "grandaddy", with uncanny resemblance to today's iTunes Music Store.

In May of 1994, nearly a decade before the iTunes store, Wired Magazine reported: "Copy... paste. Boom. You now have software. No [retail] store. No hassle". In those days, people had modems too slow to download large amounts of software, so our catalog came on CD-ROM bundled into a periodical magazine.

We needed to get our Multimedia CD-ROM Catalog into the box of every new NeXT Computer sold, but everyone important at NeXT was spending their time at other, often less deserving booths!

Frustration began to grow.

I had worked my butt off on this stuff, and it was revolutionary, and damn it, Steve Jobs should see it! It was just then I saw Steve across the trade show floor, I decided to just walk up and tell him what I thought.

"Hi Steve, I'm Jesse Tayler and I worked my butt off on this software and I'd like to show it to you" I said, looked up, and waited for my response...

After what was likely a short pause, a pause that seemed like watching an egg boil to me, and while a nearly deafening sort of silence fell over what I realized was a growing crowd around Steve's usual entourage I waited. Gulp!

"Ok, where is it?" he said, and that instant we were off. Walking back to my booth, my associates seemed to make way for me and Steve as we came into view.

"I like it..." - Steve Jobs

Just the two of us.... along with a tail comprising a small army of NeXT employees and onlookers following behind. I walked up to the demo machine. I grabbed the mouse. I figured "I've got two minutes of Steve's attention, go!" and with no time for further thought, I just did.

I knew every inch of every part of the software, and without a moment of wasted time, blazed through the concept from corner to corner and then just stopped, as abruptly as I had started.

Again, I shut my mouth, looked up and waited for my response.

Steve's palms were together, pointing to the screen in that kind of guru pose, brow furrowed with that carefully thoughtful look, again, the silence would make a pin drop sound as loud as a who concert.

After a short pause, Steve said only this one memorable quote:

"I like it..."

Nodding to me, he stepped back and then in an instant, he and his minions moved across the floor again, the crowds parted and it was all over.

Our booth was never empty of top NeXT people for the rest of the show, and I got all the free drinks I could devour that night.

I was just glad he didn't call me brain dead.