Biography | Steve Jobs — The Palo Alto Rooms He Built After Apple Pushed Him Out

People date Jobs from the garage and from the return in 1997.

The decade in between was spent here.

On 12 September 1985 he told Apple's board he was leaving to start a new company. He took a handful of colleagues with him. Apple sued, then dropped the case.

The first paid rooms after his Woodside house were at 3475 Deer Creek Road, in Stanford Research Park. NeXT occupied the glass-and-concrete campus from 1986 to 1989 before moving to Redwood City.

The building had a staircase by I. M. Pei. Paul Rand was paid a hundred thousand dollars for a logo that folded from a cube into the word NeXT. Staff measured later extravagances in milli-logos.

Jobs put seven million dollars of his own money into the firm. Ross Perot later put in twenty million. Canon put in more.

The first machine, a magnesium cube aimed at universities, was introduced in 1988. Sales stayed thin. About fifty thousand NeXT computers shipped in the company's whole life.

What lasted was the software. The object-oriented system on that cube is what Apple bought in December 1996, and what became the base of Mac OS X.

The World Wide Web was first served from a NeXT workstation at CERN. That is a different pin. This one is the office where Jobs learned to run a company that was not already famous.

The lot is still an office park above Highway 280. It is not a museum. The visitor will find tenants, not a cube on a plinth.

Photo: Steve Jobs with a MacBook Air, 2008, via Wikimedia Commons