IT SEEMS UNTHINKABLE TODAY—but nearly 30 years ago, when personal computers were new and the World Wide Web had not yet been invented, Steve Jobs was cast out of Apple.
The year was 1985. IBM and Microsoft seemed poised to dominate the world of personal computing. The revolutionary Macintosh, launched with such fanfare just a year earlier, was foundering. And Jobs seemed not just expendable but a threat to the company he’d built. Apple, a company started in a garage by two California whiz kids who took as their emblem the "perfect fruit," would be run by a pin-striped East Coast marketing executive.
WEST OF EDEN—first published in 1989, now updated with a new introduction—tells how Jobs lured John Sculley from Pepsi-Cola to lead Apple into the future, only to find himself pushed into exile. Based on extensive interviews with Jobs, Sculley, Apple's vice presidents, the original Macintosh team, the co-founders of NeXT, and many others, it is a story of America in the ’80s—when computers seemed threatening, when conformity ruled in the corporate suites, when a desire to change the world was automatically suspect. It's the story of a visionary's fall.
