“Until the video below was discovered by researchers working on Aaron Sorkin’s Steve Jobs, the only known recording of Jobs from his NeXT years was a PBS documentary called The Entrepreneurs that included footage from a 1985 offsite meeting shot shortly after Jobs was pushed out of Apple,” Philip Elmer-DeWitt reports for Fortune.
“The new video — recreated out of a pair of VHS tapes only their owner knew existed — has none of the documentary’s production values,” P.E.D. writes. “It’s too long (2.5 hours), too raw, and way too dark. But it will be treasured by computer historians for what it is: The only record, outside of contemporaneous journalists’ reports, of the gala unveiling of the NeXT computer in 1988.”
P.E.D. writes, “What struck me, watching the two videos back to back, is how clear it should have been that the machine was doomed.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Considering that Tim Berners-Lee used a NeXT Computer to create the World Wide Web, that NeXT employees saved some company called Apple Computer, Inc. when they took the place over, and that NeXTSTEP was the foundation for what became OS X which begat iOS, watchOS, and tvOS, calling it Jobs’ “biggest product failure,” pretty much says it all when summing up Job’s amazing, peerless level of success.
