Tuesday 05/26/2026
In the morning I paid my estimated tax, and did some paperwork re a tour we are planning, and tidied the apartment for the housekeeper. And then wrote a short essay for the writers group. After lunch I had a good long session with the guitar.
Then at 4pm I attended the meeting of the Common Areas Advisory Group, residents reacting to Rhonda’s plan for the building upgrade. Today we talked mostly about the plans to add both a bistro/coffee shop and a bar, where they would be in the building, what they would serve and how that would affect dining services in general.
I left the meeting while it was still in progress at 5, to meet with Joanne. We went straight in to dinner and managed to get served and finish eating by 5:30. Then we headed for the car and drove down to the museum for an event. That started with a reception, a couple hundred people not one of whom did I know, milling around in the big meeting space. As I had sort of supposed they had food, a sushi bar and a slider bar, we could have skipped supper at CH and eaten here. But actually it was less awkward the way we did it. Walking around with a plate of sushi looking for a table with open seats among strangers? Nah.
We heard some congratulatory talk by the museum CEO — they passed $100M of donations this year — and then went into the big auditorium for the evening’s event. This was the author of the book Steve Jobs in Exile: the Untold Story of NeXT, Geoffrey Cain, moderating a panel of three people who worked with Jobs at NeXT. Those were,
- Dan’l Lewis, most recently the CEO of the Computer History Museum, but in the 80s, the head of marketing for NeXT,
- Avie Tevanian, head of software at NeXT and then at Apple where he helped create both MacOS and iOS,
- Bud Tribble, part of the original Mac design team, software lead at NeXT and later at Apple.
That’s three heavyweight computer people, all of whom worked along with, or reported to, Steve Jobs for many years. So it was a fun presentation hearing the inside stories of the rise and fall of NeXT and its reincarnation as MacOS.
One story: the NeXT cube (see above) was made out of magnesium for lightness. It was difficult to cast and technically, magnesium metal is flammable, although there was never a problem with a NeXT burning up. The contractor who made the cubes had to sand them to remove mold marks, and the magnesium sanding dust is definitely and easily flammable and they had problems with fires. Also magnesium is hard to paint, and it was difficult to get a good coating of that nice black color. The original budget was that the case would be a $50 part, but it ended up costing more than $50 just to paint it.
I knew the general outline of the story. One item that I had never heard, was that when Tim Berners-Lee was developing what became HTML, he did the programming work on a NeXT cube.
My own story of the NeXT is this: When I was working as a tech writer at Informix, Steve Jobs cane and did a personal sales job on the VP in charge of documentation, and sold him on the idea that his writers and editors should use NeXTs. I remember vehemently telling him, “No, it’s the wrong decision!!” He ignored me, and our department of maybe 8 people got NeXTs to make manuals with. Of course, all the development engineers and everyone else in the organization was using Sun workstations. So we couldn’t run or test the software they were making. Not to mention the NeXT was slow.
Codgerville 