“There are plenty of ‘Steve’ stories that you haven’t heard around, and a year after Jobs’ death on Oct. 5 at the age of 56, a few friends and colleagues shared their memories of the technology industry’s most notable luminary,” Connie Guglielmo reports for Forbes. “Software engineer Randy Adams initially turned down Steve Jobs’ offer to work at NeXT, the computer company started by Jobs after his ouster from Apple. It was 1985. Adams wasn’t ready to go back to work after selling his pioneering desktop software publishing company. Within a few days Jobs was on Adams’ answering machine. ‘You’re blowing it, Randy. This is the opportunity of a lifetime, and you’re blowing it.’ Adams reconsidered.”

“Adams, using some of the cash he’d earned from the sale of his company, bought a Porsche 911 at the same time Jobs did,” Guglielmo reports. “To avoid car-door dings, they parked near each other–taking up three parking spaces between them. One day Jobs rushed over to Adams’ cubicle and told him they had to move the cars.”

Guglielmo reports, “‘“I said, ‘‘Why?,’ and he said, ‘Randy, we have to hide the Porsches. Ross Perot is coming by and thinking of investing in the company, and we don’t want him to think we have a lot of money.” They moved the cars around to the back of NeXT’s offices in Palo Alto, Calif. and Perot invested $20 million in the company in 1987 and took a seat on the board.”

Read more in the full article, including how Jobs purposely left Bill Gates waiting in the NeXT lobby for an hour, here.

MacDailyNews Take: We miss you, Steve!