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@ Design_r
2025-05-13 06:21:36Steve Jobs sent me an email saying “Great idea, thank you."
Wait, what? What was the great idea?
new guy at NeXT In October of 1991, I was a new Systems Engineer at NeXT. NeXT, of course, was the company Steve Jobs had founded after leaving Apple in 1985, and which eventually merged back into Apple in 1996. I was one of three employees in Canada, and I think NeXT had about 400 people total.
NeXTMail Mail on the NeXT Computer was pretty amazing in 1991. Multimedia! Fonts! Attachments! Sounds! It’s hard to overstate how cool that was compared to the command line email everybody was used to. Every NeXT user got this email from Steve when they started up their computer.
That message included an attachment of what NeXT called Lip Service, the crazy idea that you could embed an audio file inside an email message. Crazy.
i have an idea
NeXT automatically set everybody up with a first-initial last-name address in the usual way, so I was shayman@next.com, and the big guy was sjobs@next.com.
A few colleagues had somehow acquired cooler email aliases - single letter things, or their first name, or a nickname or an easier to spell version, or whatever. Turns out NeXT had set up some sort of form where you could request an email alias that would redirect to whatever your real email address was.
I also noticed that even though there were seven or eight people at NeXT named Steve, nobody was using the email alias steve@next.com.
So late one Friday night, two weeks into the job, I figured, naively, what the heck, nobody else seems to want it, so I filled in the form asking for steve@next.com to be forwarded to me, shayman@next.com.
In the back of my mind was a vague idea that maybe somebody would have to approve this. But no, it all got set up automatically, and …
Continue reading at https://blog.hayman.net/2025/05/06/from-steve-jobs-great-idea.html
originally posted at https://stacker.news/items/978825