Part 1:  A few years after Steve Jobs was exiled from Apple and launched NeXT (his new computer company) he was invited to Ronald Reagan’s birthday party. He told us the guests were greeted with a row of trumpeters as they walked a red carpet to the entrance.

Steve said it was Reagan who introduced him to John Akers at the party. Akers was CEO of IBM, one of the largest and most respected companies in the world at the time.  They had been a fearsome competitor to Apple. Steve did what he loved to do: he laid into Akers about the dark future of his company. Steve’s team was building the future of computing and IBM would be left behind.

Akers suggested they work together. That led to what I understood to be a $60 million license of NeXT’s soon-to-be-finished (so they thought) operating system. A few years later, I was hired at NeXT to repair the IBM/NeXT relationship.

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