Now that I’ve been retired for a couple of days, I think I can finally tell this story of how I was – very briefly – steve@next.com

And Steve 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 plain-text 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 every employee 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 …

that was a bad idea

well, suddenly a whole cavalcade of misdirected email was winding up in my inbox. People sent to steve@next.com who thought they were writing to Steve Jobs, and ordinarily it would have bounced back and they’d realize they’d mistyped the address. I’m getting email from reporters, from other CEOs, from finance people …

Of course I didn’t read any of it.

But I did start panicking. OMG I’m going to get fired, this was a terrible idea, I should have foreseen this, what am I going to do now? Once they find out, I’m done!

frantic backpedalling

As a last desperate gasp, I filled in the form AGAIN, but this time asking for steve@next.com to be forwarded to sjobs@next.com instead of me.

And that went through. Phew. I figured I better fess up and tell Steve Jobs what I’d done, so I sent him an email, saying approximately

Hi - I'm new here. I did something dumb and  
set up a mail alias so that steve@next.com  
would go to me.   
This was a bad idea, I'm sorry.   
I've changed it to steve@next.com goes to you,   
not to me. I think that makes more sense.  

My apologies.    
Signed, new guy.

a reply i will cherish

and I got this response. This was the only email I ever personally received from Steve Jobs.

From: Steve Jobs
To: Steve Hayman
Great idea, thank you.

I’ve often thought I should print and frame this email, and let people wonder what the Great Idea was. “We should merge back with Apple!” “How about a music player that fit in your pocket?” “We should build something with a touch screen.” no, nothing quite that cool, but still, it’s one of my favourite messages.

postscript

I started my career with an email from Steve Jobs, and I ended with one from Tim Cook. I’ve been a pretty lucky guy.