A year ago I read the biography of Steve Jobs written by Walter Isaacson. Before that, I knew Steve Jobs as a great innovator, inventor, engineer and someone who make expensive products. Aghhhh…
I also know him as someone who has given a great commencement speech here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UF8uR6Z6KLc
His speech is motivational and inspiring. You should check it out.
After reading the book I know about his friend Wozniak. I also know about his fights with Microsoft leader Bill Gates.
You know they were fighting for over how the computer market should be controlled. Bill Gates was a little bit of open source kind of a guy. No like the inventor of Linux but someone who allow any hardware to run his Windows OS.
On the other hand, Steve jobs wanted the full control over the hardware, software, and accessories.
Anyway, the biggest turning point in the life of Steve job was when he came back to Apple after being fired. And the one key factor in this coming back was the object-oriented technology.
After being fired, as he mentioned in his speech, he started two companies. One company was the animation studio ‘Pixar’ that produced great movies like ‘Toy Story’ and ‘Finding Nemo’ and the other was the technology company named ‘Next’.
At Next he made high end/high processing power computer products which he sells only to research organizations and universities. You may be surprised to know that the flagship product of Next (NextCube) was a big flop.
But the technology that he developed at NEXT was his gateway to the Apple and one of that technology object-oriented technology.
He developed an operating system called NeXTSTEP at his company Next. This operating system has the capability for pre-emptive multi-threading, memory protection and last but not the least object oriented based application layer over the Unix Kernel.
This OS solved the problems faced by the Apple at that moment and this OS also became the basis for the Mac OS X.
Hence he used this OS at Next as leverage and provides the solution for problems of Apple.
Why there was a need for Object-oriented OS?
After Steve jobs being fired from the Apple in 1985, the Apple was facing fierce competition from Microsoft as well as other hardware competitors like Dell.
At Apple, they were facing major issues in Mac OS whereas Microsoft Windows was evolving(and copying MAC) fast and has all the new graphical features that were once the exclusive features of Mac OS.
Networking applications were coming into the market and to keep up with that Apple has to produce better OS. User’s applications were also more demanding and have become complex. To develop a complex application object-oriented technology was the principal choice.
Keeping in view the changing market the board members of Apple were searching for an O.S that can cater these market needs.
They outlined two OS before making the final decision. One was the Solaris operating system by the Sun Microsystem and other was the NeXTSTEP operating system produced by Steve’s company Next.
But Steve jobs with his great presentation where he shows 4 videos playing at the same time on his OS – win the bid.
He sold his company Next to Apple and became the consultant at Apple and afterward the CEO of Apple who created the cool products that inspired everybody in the tech field.