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

The Computer
During the early months of NeXT, Jobs and Dan’l Lewin went on the road, often accompanied by 
a few colleagues, to visit campuses and solicit opinions. At Harvard they met with Mitch Kapor, 
the chairman of Lotus software, over dinner at Harvest restaurant. When Kapor began slathering 
butter on his bread, Jobs asked him, “Have you ever heard of serum cholesterol?” Kapor 
responded, “I’ll make you a deal. You stay away from commenting on my dietary habits, and I 
will stay away from the subject of your personality.” It was meant humorously, but as Kapor later 
commented, “Human relationships were not his strong suit.” Lotus agreed to write a spreadsheet 
program for the NeXT operating system.
Jobs wanted to bundle useful content with the machine, so Michael Hawley, one of the 
engineers, developed a digital dictionary. He learned that a friend of his at Oxford University 
Press had been involved in the typesetting of a new edition of Shakespeare’s works. That meant 
that there was probably a computer tape he could get his hands on and, if so, incorporate it into the 
NeXT’s memory. “So I called up Steve, and he said that would be awesome, and we flew over to 
Oxford together.” On a beautiful spring day in 1986, they met in the publishing house’s grand 
building in the heart of Oxford, where Jobs made an offer of $2,000 plus 74 cents for every 
computer sold in order to have the rights to Oxford’s edition of Shakespeare. “It will be all gravy 
to you,” he argued. “You will be ahead of the parade. It’s never been done before.” They agreed in 
principle and then went out to play skittles over beer at a nearby pub where Lord Byron used to 
drink. By the time it launched, the NeXT would also include a dictionary, a thesaurus, and the 
Oxford Dictionary of Quotations
, making it one of the pioneers of the concept of searchable 
electronic books.
Instead of using off-the-shelf chips for the NeXT, Jobs had his engineers design custom ones 
that integrated a variety of functions on one chip. That would have been hard enough, but Jobs 
made it almost impossible by continually revising the functions he wanted it to do. After a year it 
became clear that this would be a major source of delay.
He also insisted on building his own fully automated and futuristic factory, just as he had for 
the Macintosh; he had not been chastened by that experience. This time too he made the same 
mistakes, only more excessively. Machines and robots were painted and repainted as he 
compulsively revised his color scheme. The walls were museum white, as they had been at the 
Macintosh factory, and there were $20,000 black leather chairs and a custom-made staircase, just 
as in the corporate headquarters. He insisted that the machinery on the 165-foot assembly line be 
configured to move the circuit boards from right to left as they got built, so that the process would 
look better to visitors who watched from the viewing gallery. Empty circuit boards were fed in at 

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one end and twenty minutes later, untouched by humans, came out the other end as completed 
boards. The process followed the Japanese principle known as 
kanban
, in which each machine 
performs its task only when the next machine is ready to receive another part.
Jobs had not tempered his way of dealing with employees. “He applied charm or public 
humiliation in a way that in most cases proved to be pretty effective,” Tribble recalled. But 
sometimes it wasn’t. One engineer, David Paulsen, put in ninety-hour weeks for the first ten 
months at NeXT. He quit when “Steve walked in one Friday afternoon and told us how 
unimpressed he was with what we were doing.” When 
Business Week
asked him why he treated 
employees so harshly, Jobs said it made the company better. “Part of my responsibility is to be a 
yardstick of quality. Some people aren’t used to an environment where excellence is expected.” 
But he still had his spirit and charisma. There were plenty of field trips, visits by akido masters, 
and off-site retreats. And he still exuded the pirate flag spunkiness. When Apple 
fired Chiat/Day, the ad firm that had done the “1984” ad and taken out the newspaper ad saying 
“Welcome IBM—seriously,” Jobs took out a full-page ad in the