At the very moment when Steve had convinced himself that he had won a richly deserved freedom from an oppressive, dull overseer, he was in fact slave to so much else: to his celebrity, to his unbalanced and obsessive desire for perfection in the most innocuous of details, to his managerial flightiness and imperiousness, to his shortcomings as an analyst of his own industry, to his burning need for revenge, and to his own blindness to these faults. He was immature and adolescent in so many ways—egocentric, unrealistically idealistic, and unable to manage the ups and downs of real relationships.

Steve was too self-centered to see how much of Apple’s success had depended upon a combination of perfect timing and the work of others. Nor did he recognize how much he had contributed to its many problems. He didn’t realize how little he had truly absorbed from his crash course in business. Steve had been the titular CEO of Apple for only a few brief months at its inception, before Mike Scott was hired, and actually knew quite little of the true demands of corporate leadership. He was smart enough to realize that a successful CEO must prioritize among his employees’ many projects and ideas, but it would take years for him to learn how to do so efficiently or without the ego that came with thinking that his own ideas were always best. Nor did he have any real knowledge of how to launch a company into a field crawling with competitors. And he was unaware of each and every one of these weaknesses.

One afternoon that fall, the wind kicked up outside the Woodside house during an early meeting. “The doors were slamming,” remembers Barnes, who served as NeXT’s CFO, “just opening and shutting, opening and shutting in the wind. It was driving Steve crazy. And I could see, there was a piece of him that wanted to turn on one of us and just take us out. But it was his house. I wasn’t in charge of facilities, like I was at Apple! So, hey dude, it’s your house, you’re the one who’s got the door-slamming problem, not me.” Jobs, it seemed to Barnes, had no clue about the hundreds of little things other people had been doing over the years to keep Apple afloat while he was dreaming up his big ideas. Now he had to learn. “When you’re the CEO and the funder,” she says, recalling that afternoon, “everything’s on your shoulders.”

UNLIKE IN 1975, when he and Woz had pioneered the personal computing industry, in 1986 Steve was trying to enter a hypercompetitive marketplace with such a wide range of offerings that any newcomer would be hard-pressed to offer anything truly unique. Computer technology, drafting on the amazing multiplicative power of Moore’s law, had made tremendous strides in a decade. Nineteen eighty-five was the year that semiconductor makers like Intel and NEC first boasted of cramming a million transistors on a single memory chip. (Of course, that pales next to today’s highest-capacity chips, which can hold 128 trillion discrete elements.) But that wasn’t the only technology that had improved so swiftly. Hard disk drives were finally cheap enough for consumers to afford: If you shopped around, you could find one that held 10 megabytes of digital storage for about $700. Back then that was enough space to hold all the essential software and applications you used for quick access and then some. (To give a sense of comparison, today, $700 will buy you 10 terabytes of storage, or roughly 100,000 times as much capacity—room enough to stockpile more than a thousand high-definition movies.)

As a result, the performance and capacity of reasonably priced microcomputers were improving by leaps and bounds, and would continue to do so in the foreseeable future. Steve understood this, and thought it was possible to find a perfect niche for his perfect new machine, right between the personal computer and a new category of desktop systems that had come to be called engineering workstations.

The “workstation” segment of microcomputers emerged in the early 1980s, around the time that Apple was working on the Lisa and IBM was gearing up to introduce its machines. Workstations were basically PCs beefed up with more memory, more data storage, faster processors, and, most visibly, gigantic, twenty-four-inch screens. They emerged mainly from computer science departments in academia and were designed to put as much raw processing power as possible in the hands of a single user—most likely an engineer or scientist whose institution could afford the machine, and who could write his or her own applications to perform heavy-duty calculations or mathematical models. Workstations had two other attributes that really made them stand apart. First, they were designed from the ground up to participate in networks with other workstations. Second, they employed the most advanced microcomputer software operating system of the time, which had been originally developed by computer scientists at AT&T’s Bell Laboratories, and then nurtured and improved by academic researchers and scientists in national laboratories. Called Unix, it was the operating system that enabled the first data “network of networks,” which later came to be called the Internet.

Sun Microsystems, a Silicon Valley workstation maker, got its start in 1982 making such machines for use on the Stanford University Network (hence its name). Sun set a record that still stands in the annals of American business for being the company that from a dead start reached the $1 billion sales mark faster than any other manufacturer—it took all of four years. In fact, Sun was nearing that heady milestone the year that Steve’s new venture opened for business. Sun was a no-nonsense company. Its powerful computers had no special flourishes other than their outstanding performance benchmarks. They delivered great bang for the buck, but their lack of aesthetics offended Steve; instead of seeing the utility of such computers, he saw only opportunity—of course, he assumed, the world would be partial to something easier to use and more attractive.

Meanwhile, personal computers sold by IBM, and by the growing number of “clone” manufacturers like Compaq and others, were perfectly serviceable machines for the thousands of businesses starting to make rudimentary computing a standard part of their office workflow. The workplace was a fast-growing market, with ferocious competitors serving business customers who focused on price, productivity, and return on investment. A startup out to make its mark would have to come up with a computer that stood out from the rest, that gave schools, businesses, or consumers something they really couldn’t find anywhere else.

Given this fierce competition, it’s easy to understand why Sculley and the Apple board sued Steve. With IBM and the makers of other MS-DOS-based clones dominating the market for PCs sold to corporations, Apple needed the school and university market more than ever. Workstations were quickly becoming the lab benches for many disciplines at research universities and in corporate R&D skunkworks. It was only natural that Apple would want to offer its own unique approach to these machines as well. Apple’s suit stalled Steve’s effort to move quickly, by making it difficult for NeXT to do basic things like arrange deals with suppliers, incorporate, hire employees, and so on.

But Apple withdrew its legal challenge in January 1986, in part because Sculley finally decided he didn’t have the stomach for the public relations fallout of a court suit against a popular public figure. In the meantime, Jobs had been able to use the fall of 1985 to study the education market. He, Lewin, and some of the other founders made several trips to universities to hear what professors and researchers really wanted. The founders would remember these treks as fondly as they would the gatherings at the Jackling house. Funded by Steve, who could still be a tightwad, the early employees operated on the cheap, with “that startup hustle,” as Steve put it. “We didn’t have a lot of money,” Bud Tribble told me. “All six of us would squeeze into a single rental car to go make our visits. We even shared hotel rooms. We developed a real pioneer spirit.” For a couple of months, NeXT had the feeling of a true startup. And the road crew actually learned something promising: academics truly did want all the power in those $20,000 workstations. But the crew also learned what the company’s challenge would be: academics absolutely could not spend more than $3,000 per machine. As he had done at Apple, Lewin created a consortium of schools to serve as consultants—and as pilot customers for the NeXT computer. It wasn’t just the allure of signing on with the great Steve Jobs that appealed to the university presidents; it was the fact that the great Steve Jobs had promised that he could indeed deliver the machine they craved for a mere $3,000. It was a promise he wouldn’t come close to keeping.