The development of Newton became famously stressful. I mentioned 100-hour weeks; I wasn't exaggerating. The roughly 60-person main OS team on Newton (that's a ballpark figure; I could be exaggerating or lowballing it) were putting in serious hours to meet ship targets that were gradually solidifying and growing more fraught. Our little team (Matt Maclaurin christened our project "bauhaus") worked maybe even harder because, I think, we knew on some level that our work wasn't likely to be used, and we were trying as hard as we could to beat that fate through sheer effort.

Eventually management got us together and told us that we had met and exceeded every criterion for success, but that it simply didn't make sense to continue developing two OSes. We would need to archive the project and shut it down, and prepare for reassignment to other duties in Newton.

None of us was surprised. We had been aware of the likely outcome for months, and had been trying increasingly long-shot efforts to make the project appealing to someone in Apple. In those days (and perhaps nowadays, too, for all I know), Apple didn't really invent products by having some visionary leader invent a goal and directing engineers to fulfill the vision. Instead, it tolerated skunkworks projects hither and yon, and the visionary leader(s) cherry-picked the ones they thought most promising. Newton itself had been created as a means to keep Steve Sakoman from leaving Apple, rather than as a product vision. So you can perhaps forgive us for imagining that if we just made our project good enough, Apple would find a place for it.

It didn't happen.

As I said, none of us was surprised. We were let down, though, by the sheer intensity of our efforts followed by their sudden end.

I worked on the shipping Newton for a while, writing user-facing code mostly in NewtonScript.

A friend of mine whom I had met at Apple while working on another project had gone to work for NeXT. He was managing part of their software group. We socialized occasionally, and he noticed a change in my demeanor. I explained that Apple had finally shut us down and that I was feeling a little directionless. He said I should come to work for NeXT.

If I remember right, I sort of put him off. I had no ambition at that moment. I was still grieving for our lost project, and for the best programming language I had ever used (it's still my favorite to this day).

He persisted. A little while later I was invited by Steve Jobs to go up to the NeXT offices in Redwood City.

Perry was a big Steve fan. I wasn't particularly, but I did like the NeXT hardware and OS, and Perry knew it. He sold the visit on the basis of the cool hardware and software and getting to see how it worked at NeXT, where all the hardware was NeXT boxes. I bit.

My meeting with Steve was memorable. He carved out a fairly large chunk of time to give me the hard sell about how I should give up on Apple and come change the world with NeXT. I hadn't met him before. His famous charisma was real enough. It was a little odd, though, too. He tried a bunch of different angles to convince me, and he could tell really quickly when it wasn't working. In fact, nothing worked in that meeting. I was skeptical that NeXT would survive, and all of Steve's pitches were pegging my BS meters. It was kind of cool to see him start a pitch, recognize that it wasn't working, and instantly flip to a different one, as if changing channels on a TV. Eventually he gave up and ended the meeting.

I don't remember how long it was. Usually my sense of time is pretty good, but I guess I was too wrapped up in the experience to keep track.

Later (I think it was later) I was invited to be interviewed by several people from their software team. That was kind of weird. Some of those people tried to make it into the kind of hazing ritual that is currently popular in tech interviewing. I performed poorly in that part of it, as I always do, regardless of whether I'm any good for the job. The manager guy running the interview made them stop--I'm guessing because it didn't matter what those results were, Steve wanted to hire me.

I went home and thought it over. They offered me more money than I was getting at Apple. I would get to work on NeXT boxes. I liked NeXT boxes. I had a cube of my own that I had sprung for out of my own pocket. My friend had been right about networked NeXT boxes being cool. You could walk into any ofice on the NeXT campus and log in, and you would get your own familiar desktop environment. That wasn't possible at Apple. I liked Objective-C. I liked Allegro Common Lisp, which came with my NeXT box. I liked Interface Builder--I had learned to like it when it started out as an add-on for Expertelligence Common Lisp.

So, despite my misgivings about Steve's reputation as a jerk, and my mixed feelings about his high-BS sales pitch, and my estimation that NeXT was likely to wither away once Steve ran out of billionaires to soak for "investments", I ultimately decided that the technology was cool enough and NeXT's runway was still long enough that I could go to work for them for a while and have a good experience that would be educational and fun.

And I did.

I didn't stay very long. The thinking was that I would support BSD commands and libraries and several of the apps that shipped with Nextstep for a while, as I decompressed from two years of Newton. Then, when I was feeling perky again, they would let me design a new filesystem. They were intrigued by some of the thinking we did about storage for Newton, and they wanted to see if I could transfer some of it to make a filesystem for NeXT that could be simpler and more accessible for non-techie users while preserving the semantics of UNIX filesystems. That sounded challenging (especially since I was no filesystem expert) and fun.

But, alas, it was not to be. A colleague from the bauhaus project kept bugging me to go to work for his startup. It was a tiny little thing based in Santa Cruz doing contract development of multimedia projects for several clients. It was a bad idea to go to work for him. I had worked for him before and hated it. He was offering me a little more than half what I was getting at NeXT. I lived with my wife and small children in Santa Clara. His office was in Santa Cruz. He promised I wouldn't have to commute, that I could work from home, but he changed his mind soon after I started.

So why did I leave NeXT? One of my colleagues there was a project manager who later told me that Steve blamed her for my leaving, claiming that she had given me stuff to work on that was beneath me. That wasn't it. The truth is that I liked the Santa Cruz guy and wanted to make a collaboration with him work (that was a bad idea), and I was pretty sure NeXT was going to end up petering out, the way bauhaus had. It had nothing to do with the work I was given at NeXT, which I enjoyed tremendously.

In fact, I enjoyed pretty much everything about being at NeXT, except for the constant atmosphere of terror that surrounded Steve.