Even more damaging were some of Steve’s aesthetic fiats about the inside of the machine. One in particular stands out. In a typical production sequence, engineers are told the specifications a computer must achieve; they design circuitry to meet those demands; and only then do they wrestle with the question of exactly what size and shape the computer’s circuit board must be. Steve reversed the process at NeXT. He told George Crow and his hardware engineers that the circuit board for the NeXT computer would have to be a square that fit exactly into the magnesium cube. A square was an odd configuration for the engineers. Insisting on the exact shape of the board, Steve severely limited the engineers’ ability to create something inexpensive that met the computer’s specifications. He added an unnecessary level of complexity, meaning yet more money spent for more engineers working more hours to accommodate a design that contributed nothing meaningful to the final product.

Again and again, Steve made choices that seemed justifiable in isolation but that damaged the company’s critical mission. Steve did a poor job of evaluating these ideas against one another. He couldn’t accept that it was impossible for him to have everything exactly the way he wanted it.

In part, this was because he believed his own press. He was a genius, according to the media and his investors. Ross Perot frothingly described Jobs as “a 33-year-old with 50 years’ worth of business experience.” Little did he know how wrong he was. President Ronald Reagan’s secretary of commerce, Malcolm Baldrige, called Jobs for advice. Editors of the most important publications in the land kept sending their reporters to the West Coast to find out what Steve was thinking about all kinds of subjects, not just computing and technology. (I once tracked Steve down for such an assignment, and listened to him confidently opine on industrial policy, competition with Russia, the drug war, and General Manuel Noriega of Panama.) The fascination with his new company, so out of proportion for a startup with no product entering a highly competitive industry, confirmed his own sense that he was destined to do great things. That sense of genius and destiny made it harder for Steve to sideline any of his own ideas. He acted as if each detail he advanced could make the difference between creating a breakthrough product and putting out the kind of dreck he thought was offered by other manufacturers. Years later, Perot admitted that he had been snowed. “One of the biggest mistakes I ever made was to give those young people all that money,” he said.

Also, Steve could not resist pursuing anything that would show up Apple. Since Apple had a logo that had become iconic, Steve needed one with the same potential and a great pedigree. Apple had a state-of-the-art factory, so Steve’s tiny company built an outrageously expensive factory that could handle as much volume as Apple needed. His obsession with Apple seemed to ooze out of his pores, despite the silence he’d imposed on his handlers. The first time that John Huey, then the editor of Fortune magazine, went to visit NeXT, Huey was waiting in the lobby when Steve returned from a lunch date with other visitors. Not recognizing Huey, Jobs sat down on another of those expensive lobby couches and spent fifteen minutes flipping through a set of magazines, excoriating Apple’s “stupid” advertising created by whatever “bozos” they had running the show over there now.

Some writers have tried to cast Steve’s obsessiveness, and his hunger for the spotlight and success, as a Freudian attempt to bring down the birth parents who “rejected” him by letting him be adopted. It always struck me, however, that at his childish worst Steve was really nothing more than a spoiled brat. Brilliant, precocious, and meticulous, he had always gotten his way with his parents, and had brayed like an injured donkey when things didn’t turn out as he planned. As a grown-up he could behave exactly the same way, sometimes exploding in a temper tantrum. At NeXT there was no one to keep that side of him in check. While more grounded and cooler-headed folks like Lewin and Barnes would disagree with him and weigh in with advice, he ignored them with impunity and, often, scorn. Talking about the days after the historic introduction of the Mac, Steve had told Joe Nocera, “I think I know what it must be like to watch the birth of your child.” Unfortunately for the team at NeXT, in many ways Steve himself was still the child, rather than the more mature and supportive parent.

STEVE’S ARBITRARY DECISIONS dumbfounded those under him at NeXT, and his micromanagement gave them no peace. He assumed they would work nights and weekends. He wouldn’t hesitate to call them at home on Sundays or holidays if he’d discovered some “urgent” problem. And yet hardware and software engineers still could not resist working for Steve Jobs.

Steve understood their sensibility. Engineers, at heart, are problem solvers. They thrive on digging their way out of sinkholes, especially the gnarly kind with no clear path forward. Steve challenged them in ways they had never imagined. No one else in the computer business had such radical goals and expectations; no one else seemed to care so much about their work. The idea of creating a computer that could transform the very process of education was cool; but to his incredibly talented programmers and gearheads, the idea of creating this particular computer for this particular boss was irresistible.

As the years went on, it became apparent that Steve’s goals for the NeXT computer went way beyond serving the university market. Lewin and his salespeople were courting customers in all kinds of businesses, thinking that the NeXT computer could transform the corporate workplace, blending the computing power to do 3-D modeling and to interpret copious data with the ability to connect with others easily on corporate networks. A machine like that, made available not just to the denizens of the ivory tower but also to the quants of Wall Street and the merchants of Main Street, truly would be revolutionary. So even as the company drifted from month to month, year to year without delivering a final product to the market, many of the engineers continued to do great work and viewed their jobs as both a noble mission and a labor of love. Engineers ruled the roost at NeXT. They had their own special wing at headquarters, equipped with a grand piano and locks that kept out all other employees. And indeed, Steve’s amazing collection of geeks at NeXT produced some genuinely great work.

Richard Crandall, a physics professor from Reed College, became the company’s chief scientist and was given enormous latitude to see just how far computing could expand the scope of high-level teaching in fields such as computational science. His work at NeXT carried over into decades of advanced research on cryptography; he later became the head of Apple’s Advanced Computation Group. Michael Hawley, fresh out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, worked with a group of folks to create the world’s first digitized library, which included the complete works of Shakespeare and the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations. And when it finally did appear, the NeXT computer would have easy multitasking, easy ways to attach documents to email, and an intuitive user interface to facilitate the networking it made possible.

Most important, Jobs convinced Avie Tevanian, a young software whiz from Carnegie Mellon University, to come to NeXT rather than join Microsoft. At CMU, Tevanian had worked on Mach, a supercharged version of Unix, the powerful operating system for workstations. At NeXT he became Bud Tribble’s key developer on the computer’s operating system, called NeXTSTEP. For years, Tevanian kept a calculator window open on his computer that tallied daily the total value of the stock options he gave up when he turned down Microsoft. But he loved the work, in part because Jobs recognized his genius and handed him enormous responsibility as soon as he walked in the door.