NeXT (Live show at the GeekWire Summit)

The episode opens on a deliberately modest note — a joke about still using TextEdit, a relic of the NeXT-era codebase — before the hosts state the thesis. Ben Gilbert frames Apple's 1997 purchase of NeXT as "a cornerstone of technology today", and notes that the show's original tagline was about acquisitions that actually went well. This one, he argues, is the rare case that is "super, super true to our roots" rather than a detour into failures or recent deals.

David Rosenthal supplies the narrative shape: initial success, exile, return. He calls it "the hero story of Steve Jobs" — early triumph at Apple, roughly a decade in the wilderness at NeXT, then a comeback that ends with Apple as the most valuable company in the world. The stated scope is narrow on purpose: not the whole arc, but the stretch beginning with Jobs founding NeXT and ending with its absorption into Apple.

The live-show setting matters for how the material is presented. This is the first live recording, streamed on Facebook, with an explicit promise that the audience will "see how the sausage is made" before an edited version lands on iTunes and the website. That framing sets expectations: a working conversation with digressions rather than a polished documentary script.

The technical backdrop is established carefully, because the whole acquisition turns on a category most listeners have never used. Workstations were, in David's phrase, "personal computers on steroids for the time" — networked single-user machines used mainly for university and corporate research, distinct from the server mainframes of the previous era.

He defines the category with the "3M computer" test: one megabyte of memory, a megapixel display, and a megaflop of floating-point performance. A fourth M was sometimes added — "a mega penny" — because the machines cost around $10,000 each. That price point is the number the rest of the episode keeps returning to, since it is exactly what the NeXT computer eventually shipped at.

Against that backdrop, Apple had a structural problem: it was a personal-computer company with no workstation offering during the workstation era. Meanwhile Sun Microsystems, spun out of Stanford University Network, was "the darling of technology" — the fastest-growing company in America in the 1980s, going from founding to $1 billion in revenue in six years. The competitive pressure is concrete, not rhetorical.

In 1984 Jobs was placed in charge of a new SuperMicro division combining the Macintosh and the Lisa, with a mandate to enter the workstation market. The project, codenamed "BigMac", had a precise and aggressive goal: take a 3M workstation and "get rid of the fourth M", selling it for $500 so that students and individuals could afford workstation-class power.

It did not work. The stated reason is technical rather than personal: with the components available at the time, building workstation-class machines from off-the-shelf and cheaper parts was extremely difficult. That failure is what triggers the political sequence — Sculley and the board losing faith, and in May 1985 removing Jobs from the division.

The demotion is described in physical terms: an office moved across the street into what was essentially an empty building, the chairman's title retained, day-to-day responsibility removed. Jobs called it being in "Siberia". David notes the irony that the arrangement was meant to make him a figurehead, and instead gave him an unstructured summer to think — which is where the next turn in the story comes from.

The catalytic conversation is with Paul Berg, a Stanford chemistry professor and Nobel laureate. Berg's complaint is specific and economic: Sun workstations at Stanford were too expensive, undergraduates could not get enough machine time to model DNA computationally, and wet labs cost even more. The bottleneck was access, not ambition.

That complaint converted a vague frustration into a design constraint that Jobs restated as a pair of requirements held in tension: get powerful computers into students' hands, and get the price down, but "we can't compromise on the power". David's reading is that the story hit him twice over — once as an injustice and once as a product specification.

By the end of that summer Jobs resigned from Apple to pursue exactly that combination: an affordable workstation merged with a personal computer. The hosts add a competitive footnote — Apple's education business was already selling to students and computer labs, so the new venture would be aimed at a market Apple partly owned.