Saturday, January 3, 2015

"I was happy to take the photographs so we could use them for the annual report," Brown said. "I didn't realize I was archiving a really amazing time."

Photo by Doug Menuez - NeXT CEO Steve Jobs and Susan Barnes, NeXT VP and CFO, reacting to a joke told by an employee on the bus going back to the headquarters in Palo Alto, CA. The team was visiting the unfinished factory in Fremont in March 1987.

Rare photos shed light on Steve Jobs, and a young Silicon Valley - Julia Love/Mercury News

Scores and scores of photographs, captured by a deeply embedded photographer, offer an intimate portrait of Silicon Valley as it was translating the world from analog to digital. But at the whim of their brilliant and cantankerous subject, Steve Jobs, they were scarcely seen -- until now. KEEP READING

Doug Menuez, a photographer who has trekked to the North Pole and crossed the Sahara, is the man Jobs chose to document a make-or-break moment, when he was trying to launch his second company, NeXT, after being ousted from his first, Apple Computer. Menuez immersed himself in every aspect of life at NeXT in the late 1980s, staying up until 3 a.m. with the engineers and standing witness in the abandoned warehouse where former presidential candidate Ross Perot agreed to toss the computer company a $20 million lifeline. He even felt the sting of Jobs' famous stubbornness.
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Fearless Genius: The Digital Revolution in Silicon Valley 1985-2000.

WHAT: A book of rare black-and-white photographs of iconic Silicon Valley companies.WHERE TO FIND IT: Fearless Genius is available through bookstores like Barnes & Noble and online retailers like Amazon.