Technology: The Case of the Missing Machine

The news raced through Silicon Valley like a burst of electrons. Steven Jobs, 33, co-founder of Apple Computer and one of the world’s most famous entrepreneurs, was set to unveil the machine he had been laboring on since he stormed out of Apple nearly three years ago. The computer press, having first trumpeted the device’s imminent debut last October, then again in February, then March, then May, was crackling anew with anticipation. This time it was certain. On June 15, or at the latest June 16, the world would finally see the computer that Jobs has billed as the technological successor to the Apple II, the IBM PC and the Macintosh — a machine known only by the name of his new company, NeXT.

But as the due date approached, rumors of development problems began to leak out of NeXT’s Palo Alto headquarters. Last week company sources confirmed what many already suspected: Jobs would miss yet another deadline, by several weeks at the very least. The setback did nothing to allay the intense speculation surrounding the machine, but it did raise troubling questions about the computer’s ultimate chances for success and about the formidable reputation of its creator.

By all accounts, Jobs’ new machine is an engineering marvel. People who have seen prototypes describe a sleek, black magnesium cube with a space underneath where a keyboard can be neatly hidden away, a stereo sound system that rivals the crisp tones of a compact-disc player, and a jumbo 17-inch black-and-white display screen capable of visual pyrotechnics that are often characterized as “drop dead.”

The machine’s software is reported to be controlled by a powerful, versatile operating system called Mach, a variation on AT&T’s popular Unix system. (In addition to its other virtues, Mach is designed to allow computers that have been hooked together to share seamlessly one another’s processing power.) The core of Jobs’ computer is the Motorola 68030, the most advanced general- purpose microprocessor chip on the market. That device’s prodigious capabilities have been further enhanced by an array of custom-made chips that are not only state of the art but also artfully laid out. Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates has described the NeXT machine as the most beautiful computer ever built.

But engineering elegance cannot mask what may turn out to be fatal problems in conception and execution. Jobs’ original idea was to use mass-production techniques to make the power of $50,000 computer “workstations” like those used by top engineers and industrial designers available to anyone for the cost of a personal computer — from $2,000 to $5,000. He spoke movingly of creating low-cost “learning environments,” in which university students, using computer simulations, would have access to the world’s most advanced technologies. “You’d offer a physics student a personal linear accelerator or a ride on a train going the speed of light,” he told a group of educators in 1986. “You’d take a biochemistry student and let him experiment in a $5 million DNA wet lab. You’d send a student of 17th century history back to the time of Louis XIV. Next year we will introduce a breakthrough computer ten to 20 times more powerful than what we have today.”

Even if the machine arrived on time and performed flawlessly, it would face formidable marketing hurdles. The key to Jobs’ business plan was to develop a computer so easy to program that its users could create their own software — an untested proposition at best. Then, to break out of the university setting and into the larger and more profitable engineering and business markets, NeXT was counting on the enthusiasm of the programming community to do for the new machine what it did for the Macintosh: dress the computer up in software exciting enough to guarantee its success. But when Jobs introduced the Mac, it was the only machine of its kind. This time he is confronted with entrenched competition from such heavyweight firms as Sun Microsystems, Hewlett-Packard, Digital Equipment, IBM and Apple. “To stand out among the & superstars,” says Eugene Glazer, an analyst at Dean Witter Reynolds, “an upstart will need one dynamite machine.”

Unfortunately, the NeXT computer does not perform flawlessly. Industry sources familiar with the machine have told TIME that the most recent delay is directly related to the computer’s all-important video display. Images and text do not appear on the screen fast enough to satisfy Jobs, who has sent the control software back to the shop for further refinement. Delays and rising chip prices have already pushed the base price of the machine into the $4,000- to-$8,000 range. If the launch date slips much further, NeXT could miss out on the university market for the entire 1988-89 school year. “This is the reason Jobs is being so low key,” says an insider. “He is embarrassed.”

Much is at stake for Jobs, who has been stung over the past year by a series of unflattering books that portrayed him as an “accidental millionaire,” an enfant terrible who stumbled on fame and fortune and then nearly destroyed Apple through cruelty, arrogance and gross mismanagement. “Having his own company taken away from him was a big blow to him,” says Frank Rose, author of a forthcoming book on Jobs’ relationship with the man who engineered his ouster, Apple Chairman John Sculley. “He wants to redeem himself.” Others are less charitable. One industry leader dismisses the entire multimillion- dollar effort as “nothing but a childish pique to show Sculley what he can do.”

Still, no one is prepared to write off Jobs. He left Apple with stock valued at nearly $100 million and has since won the financial backing of two of America’s leading technical universities, Stanford and Carnegie-Mellon, and Billionaire H. Ross Perot. And, as the past few weeks have proved, Jobs has not lost his touch for capturing the attention of the computer industry.