Volume III

The Road Not Taken

While Apple struggled through the 1990s, Steve Jobs was building something extraordinary just down the road. These two machines represent a parallel universe — the computing future that almost was, and eventually became macOS.

Chapter 01

The Workstation

The Narrative

NeXT's 'affordable' workstation was $5,000 retail. It ran UNIX, used Display PostScript for the screen, and proved concepts that wouldn't reach mainstream computing for another decade.

Chapter 02

The Cube

The machine Steve Jobs built after Apple fired him. It ran an OS a decade ahead of its time, on hardware that Apple would eventually buy the whole company to acquire.

Next Stop

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