Stephen Wolfram tells The Guardian the story of how he met Steve Jobs nearly a quarter of a century ago. Jobs was building his NeXT computer, and Wolfram was working on the first version of the Mathematica software system.
I met Steve Jobs nearly a quarter of a century ago when he had left Apple and was working on building his NeXT computer and I was working on building the first version of our Mathematica software system. Our first meeting was classic Steve Jobs. He explained that he expected that what he was doing would change the world and, by the way, make a lot of money too. And he told me he was picking all sorts of bold new hardware and software technologies for his computer and he wanted one of them to be Mathematica.
Steve took a great interest in the development of Mathematica; in fact, it was he who suggested the name. Although the NeXT was not a commercial success, it was a shrewd move that led to the batch of computers at Cern on which Tim Berners-Lee first developed the web.
He goes on to say one of the things he’d always admired about Steve Jobs was his clarity of thought, “Time and again, he would take a complex situation, understand its essence and use that understanding to make a bold and unexpected move.”
Wolfram remembers visiting Jobs in his office, and during a discussion about technology strategy, Jobs apologized for bring distracted. He said he was going out on a first date that evening, and he was lacking in confidence about the upcoming date. The date apparently went OK, the woman he had the date with became his wife and stayed with him the rest of his life.
“Over the years, Steve encouraged me in many ways, like when I asked him for a back-cover quote for my book A New Kind of Science that I’d spent a decade writing and he responded: ‘Isaac Newton didn’t have back-cover quotes; why should you?'”
Wolfram says Jobs always pushed him to use his latest technology, and was pleased when he followed his advice, “and even after he was quite ill, (he would) occasionally intercede with remarkably detailed emails and phone calls.”
