In 1990, the World Wide Web was invented on Steve Jobs' computer. Steve ignored it.
This is the story I tell in my new book Steve Jobs in Exile. Here is what it should tell the rest of us about the moment we are in now.
Steve was running NeXT, an unsuccessful computer company. He had been pushed out of Apple five years earlier and was burning his fortune trying to build a successor to the Macintosh. The machine NeXT sold was a matte-black magnesium cube -- expensive and beautiful and not selling.
In October of that year, on the other side of the Atlantic, a British physicist named Tim Berners-Lee took delivery of a NeXT Cube at CERN, the physics laboratory on the Swiss-French border. He used it to invent the World Wide Web. The web ran on the Cube for its first year of existence. The revolution was happening on Steve's hardware, and yet Steve ignored it.
Here is the question I keep thinking about from my book.
If Steve Jobs, the most visionary tech mind of his generation, missed the Web, the most civilization-shaping tech of his lifetime, how are the rest of us supposed to see anything coming?
Berners-Lee had been asking his boss at CERN for a NeXT Cube for months. His boss finally signed off, hoping to test the exotic Cube. "He suggested that I should buy one of these NeXT machines I'd been talking about so enthusiastically," Berners-Lee later told Fresh Air. "And if we needed a sort of test project to run on the NeXT machine ... 'Why not just do this hypertext thing you're talking about?'"
The "test project" evolved into the World Wide Web.
The problem Berners-Lee was trying to solve was not a glamorous one. CERN employed thousands of scientists from over a hundred countries, most cycling through on short assignments and taking their knowledge with them when they left. Berners-Lee was trying to keep institutional knowledge from walking out the door. He wanted a system that worked the way human memory does, where any piece of information could connect to any other without permission or central control.
Through late 1990, he coded in his gray-floored office. The Cube's object-oriented system let him build in months what would have taken a year on anything else.
By December, the first website went online. The World Wide Web now existed, running on a single black NeXT Cube in CERN's Building 31. Berners-Lee scrawled a warning on it in red ink: "This machine is a server. DO NOT POWER IT DOWN!!"
Underneath the elegant interface he was building HTTP, HTML, and the server software that would deliver web pages. These three inventions would form much of the invisible plumbing of our modern connectivity.
When a colleague of Berners-Lee's brought a demo of the Web to NeXT's headquarters in California, he could not get anyone there to pay attention. Nobody even dared show it to Steve, afraid he would dismiss it. NeXT was busy with its own internet plans, which Steve eventually killed.
So back to the question. If Steve Jobs missed the web, how are the rest of us supposed to see whatever comes next?
The honest answer is that we cannot. Nobody can. The rest of us are not going to outpattern-match Steve Jobs.
But here is what I learned writing Steve Jobs in Exile. Transformations almost always begin in obscurity, on the margins, solving boring problems with boring tools. The web did not look revolutionary in 1990. It looked like a tool for sharing physics papers.
We are in another such moment now. AI is the obvious changemaker. But the biggest transformations are rarely the obvious ones. The next one is happening somewhere right now, and it is trickier to spot than any sweeping proclamation about AI. We will recognize it, if we recognize it at all, from the unglamorous work few people are focused on.
I will not speculate on what Steve would have made of AI today. But if he could miss the Web, the rest of us are going to have to look harder.
Photo of the original CERN NeXT Cube courtesy of Robert Scoble.
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Ein SpaceX-Ingenieur beschrieb einmal, was passiert, wenn Elon Musk einen Fehler in deiner Arbeit findet.
Der Ingenieur hatte eine thermische Analyse für ein Bauteil des Raptor-Triebwerks eingereicht. Das Dokument umfasste achtzig Seiten. Es durchlief die Prüfung von drei leitenden Ingenieuren. Es wurde genehmigt und für die Umsetzung eingeplant.
Zwei Tage später kam um elf Uhr abends eine E-Mail von Elon. Eine einzige Zeile. „Deine Berechnung des Wärmestroms auf Seite vierunddreißig geht von stationären Bedingungen aus, aber der Lastzyklus ist transient. Rechne es neu.“
Der Ingenieur sagte, er habe fünf Minuten lang auf diese E-Mail gestarrt. Nicht weil sie harsch war. Sondern weil sie stimmte. Die Annahme steckte tief in einer Teilberechnung, die keinem der drei prüfenden Ingenieure aufgefallen war. Elon hatte sie gefunden, in einem Dokument, das er gar nicht hätte lesen müssen, auf einer Seite, wo niemand von ihm erwartet hätte, dass er sie um elf Uhr abends an einem Dienstag gegenprüft.
Er sagte, genau solche Momente seien der Grund für die Kultur bei SpaceX. Nicht weil Elon Menschen mit Reden motiviert. Er hält kaum Reden. Die Kultur entsteht, weil jeder Ingenieur weiss, dass jedes eingereichte Dokument Zeile für Zeile von einem Mann gelesen werden könnte, der genau den einen Fehler findet, den alle übersehen haben. Nicht um zu bestrafen. Sondern um zu verhindern, dass der Fehler in die Hardware gelangt. Denn Fehler in Hardware führen zu Explosionen.
Die Angst gilt nicht der Kündigung. Die Angst gilt dem Gedanken, Arbeit einzureichen, die nicht das absolut Beste ist, und dass der CEO eines Sechs-Firmen-Imperiums genau den Fehler findet, den man selbst hätte erkennen müssen. Diese Angst erzeugt bessere Ingenieurskunst als jedes Motivationsposter es je könnte.
👉🏼 Eigentlich unglaublich, nicht?
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