Benjamin franklin and albert einstein, this is the exclusive biography of steve jobs

The Launch, October 1988
Jobs had perfected the art of turning product launches into theatrical productions, and for the 
world premiere of the NeXT computer—on October 12, 1988, in San Francisco’s Symphony 
Hall—he wanted to outdo himself. He needed to blow away the doubters. In the weeks leading up 
to the event, he drove up to San Francisco almost every day to hole up in the Victorian house of 
Susan Kare, NeXT’s graphic designer, who had done the original fonts and icons for the 
Macintosh. She helped prepare each of the slides as Jobs fretted over everything from the wording 
to the right hue of green to serve as the background color. “I like that green,” he said proudly as 
they were doing a trial run in front of some staffers. “Great green, great green,” they all murmured 
in assent.
No detail was too small. Jobs went over the invitation list and even the lunch menu (mineral 
water, croissants, cream cheese, bean sprouts). He picked out a video projection company and paid 
it $60,000 for help. And he hired the postmodernist theater producer George Coates to stage the 
show. Coates and Jobs decided, not surprisingly, on an austere and radically simple stage look. 
The unveiling of the black perfect cube would occur on a starkly minimalist stage setting with a 
black background, a table covered by a black cloth, a black veil draped over the computer, and a 
simple vase of flowers. Because neither the hardware nor the operating system was actually ready, 
Jobs was urged to do a simulation. But he refused. Knowing it would be like walking a tightrope 
without a net, he decided to do the demonstration live.
More than three thousand people showed up at the event, lining up two hours before curtain 
time. They were not disappointed, at least by the show. Jobs was onstage for three hours, and he 
again proved to be, in the words of Andrew Pollack of the 
New York Times
, “the Andrew Lloyd 
Webber of product introductions, a master of stage flair and special effects.” Wes Smith of the 
Chicago Tribune
said the launch was “to product demonstrations what Vatican II was to church 
meetings.”
Jobs had the audience cheering from his opening line: “It’s great to be back.” He began by 
recounting the history of personal computer architecture, and he promised that they would now 
witness an event “that occurs only once or twice in a decade—a time when a new architecture is 
rolled out that is going to change the face of computing.” The NeXT software and hardware were 
designed, he said, after three years of consulting with universities across the country. “What we 
realized was that higher ed wants a personal mainframe.”

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As usual there were superlatives. The product was “incredible,” he said, “the best thing we 
could have imagined.” He praised the beauty of even the parts unseen. Balancing on his fingertips 
the foot-square circuit board that would be nestled in the foot-cube box, he enthused, 
“I hope you get a chance to look at this a little later. It’s the most beautiful printed circuit board 
I’ve ever seen in my life.” He then showed how the computer could play speeches—he featured 
King’s “I Have a Dream” and Kennedy’s “Ask Not”—and send email with audio attachments. He 
leaned into the microphone on the computer to record one of his own. “Hi, this is Steve, sending a 
message on a pretty historic day.” Then he asked those in the audience to add “a round of 
applause” to the message, and they did.
One of Jobs’s management philosophies was that it is crucial, every now and then, to roll the 
dice and “bet the company” on some new idea or technology. At the NeXT launch, he boasted of 
an example that, as it turned out, would not be a wise gamble: having a high-capacity (but slow) 
optical read/write disk and no floppy disk as a backup. “Two years ago we made a decision,” he 
said. “We saw some new technology and we made a decision to risk our company.”
Then he turned to a feature that would prove more prescient. “What we’ve done is made the 
first real digital books,” he said, noting the inclusion of the Oxford edition of Shakespeare and 
other tomes. “There has not been an advancement in the state of the art of printed book technology 
since Gutenberg.”
At times he could be amusingly aware of his own foibles, and he used the electronic book 
demonstration to poke fun at himself. “A word that’s sometimes used to describe me is 
‘mercurial,’” he said, then paused. The audience laughed knowingly, especially those in the front 
rows, which were filled with NeXT employees and former members of the Macintosh team. Then 
he pulled up the word in the computer’s dictionary and read the first definition: “Of or relating to, 
or born under the planet Mercury.” Scrolling down, he said, “I think the third one is the one they 
mean: ‘Characterized by unpredictable changeableness of mood.’” There was a bit more laughter. 
“If we scroll down the thesaurus, though, we see that the antonym is ‘saturnine.’ Well what’s that? 
By simply double-clicking on it, we immediately look that up in the dictionary, and here it is: 
‘Cold and steady in moods. Slow to act or change. Of a gloomy or surly disposition.’” A little 
smile came across his face as he waited for the ripple of laughter. “Well,” he concluded, “I don’t 
think ‘mercurial’ is so bad after all.” After the applause, 
he used the quotations book to make a more subtle point, about his reality distortion field. The 
quote he chose was from Lewis Carroll’s