I found this sheet of paper the other day.

In September of 1991 I travelled from my then-home of Bloomington, Indiana out to visit NeXT at their headquarters in Redwood City, California, for two days of job interviews for an SE position in Toronto. Here’s the agenda.

Back in 1990, proud new owner of a NeXT Cube at Indiana University, which was probably the first privately-purchased NeXT Cube in the entire state, I’d started to wonder about moving back home some day, getting ready to wrap up my big adventure of living in an Exotic Foreign Country.

And I had no idea how the computer business worked. But NeXT seemed pretty interesting. I loved my NeXT Cube and was starting to get good at, or at least fascinated with, NeXT software development with Objective-C.

Did NeXT even have a Canadian office? Did they have technical people out in the field or was everybody in California? I had no idea.

So I asked the local Indiana NeXT sales guy, Pat Wootan, if there might be an opportunity, and he put me in touch with Phil Hume, who was NeXT Canada’s sales manager in Toronto.

Over the 1990 Christmas break I met Phil and we had lunch at some place near YYZ. I’m sure I asked him nothing but dumb questions, but Phil encouraged me to apply for a Systems Engineer role in Toronto because the current SE was leaving.

It took months before this interview took place, and then … You know, I’m having trouble remembering the timeline. I guess they offered me the job pretty quickly because I started in October of 1991 but it sure took a long time for the initial interview. Pryce Harrison was NeXT’s manager for Canada - manager for a total of about four people - and showed me around, and at the end of the day I had dinner with Pierre Durand, who was the SE in Vancouver.

I remember all the other people I interviewed with too, including Avie Tevanian famously became VP of Software at Apple after the merger. Ali Ozer is still at Apple. The other names trigger fond memories too.

I don’t remember a whole lot about the Q&A though. My resume at the time - still stapled to this sheet of paper 35 years later - said that my career goal was A challenging software engineering position. Or a hockey organist.

so that’s how the best part of my career began.

Thank you to everybody on this sheet!

I don’t envy people applying for jobs (or interviewing candidates) these days. The process seemed much simpler then.

It could be that the main reason I got the job was that I mentioned to these folks that I’d spent $11,000 on buying my own NeXT Cube, just a month before the cheaper/faster/better $2,500 NeXTStation was released.

At least one person said “Um …. hang on, nobody told you to hold off for a bit? Nobody gave you a hint that something cheaper was coming? Geez, I’m sorry, can we make it up to you by offering you a job?”