The myth of Steve Jobs is huge and his name seems to be forever linked with Manzana. However, the boy has some additional achievements that few recognize him, such as the fact of having contributed to creating the Internet.
The web, as we know it today, would not have been the same if not for a device that the Apple co-founder created during his brief period in exile from his own company.
There Jobs was forced to “think outside the box” (as he always did, even for simple things, like a work meeting) and began working on a brutally ambitious project that ended up representing the basic bet for his triumphant return.
But, curiously, incidentally, it also ended up becoming a key and instrumental piece for the creation of the protocols that constitute the foundations of the Internet as we know it.
This is the story of how a product developed under the vision of Steve Jobs ended up being one of the fundamental bases for the creation of the web as we live it today.
The day Steve Jobs helped create the internet
The name of Tim Berners-Lee may not be as familiar to many as Steve Jobs, Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg. But in reality, we owe much of our daily experience when surfing the net to this subject.
Berners-Lee, as recounted in their diariesessentially developed in the year 1990, between March and December, the internet as we know it today, from the CERN Institute, in Geneva, cementing what we know today as the HTTP protocol.
The work, considering the year we were in, sounded like a titanic thing that required too much data processing and a lot of coding work. But Tim convinced his bosses to invest in something that would make his life a lot more streamlined: a NeXT cube developed by Steve Jobs’ new company.
“It was a great computing environment overall. In fact, I could do in a couple of months what would take more like a year on other platforms, because on NeXT a lot of those things I needed were already done. There was an app builder to set up all the menus as fast as you could dream of them.
Programming the WorldWideWeb client was remarkably easy on the NeXT. There was already a software module, the Text Object, which was an editable multi-font editor. I just had to subclass it to make a hypertext object and add the internet code. Designing the application menus was trivial: just drag and drop with InterfaceBuilder. The application code framework was automatically generated.”
It is what recounts Tim Berners-Lee on the role Steve Jobs’ company hub played in the creation of the internet. The NeXT was, according to the friends of AppleSphere, strictly speaking a Morotola 68040 CPU at 25MHz speed and 8MB of RAM.
It also featured removable optical storage, Objective C, DSP for sound and movies, Mach kernel, UNIX for PC, Screen Postscript, and InterfaceBuilder.
But it was something that in terms of hardware sounds ridiculous by today’s standards, however in that year it was a beast of almost USD $8,000, which helped the engineer to do in just two months what would have taken him a full year.