A few months ago I blogged about the upcoming book, Steve Jobs in Exile.

This week, the Computer History Museum hosted author Geoffrey Cain and a panel discussion to kick off the book.

I had mentioned I was excited about this book—as I had worked for NeXT from 1991 to 1996 and was there for the merger with Apple, and remained at Apple for another three decades.

I also wrote

The book probably doesn’t contain the I was steve@next.com story, though. If it does, expect a gushing followup post here!

HERE IS THE GUSHING FOLLOWUP POST

Imagine my excitement to open the book

and flip to the index

and see that I was just five people away from Ernest Hemingway.

Yep, author Geoffrey Cain managed to include my I was steve@next.com story in the book!

I know you’re going to buy your own copy, and you really should; it’s an excellent read, documenting some rarely told stories of what happened to and transformed Steve Jobs after leaving Apple in 1985 and returning in 1996.

The book has tons of great stories and behind the scenes info; I certainly recognized a lot of the names, but many of the tales were new to me.

But of course my favourite was this part on page 180.

Steve's relationship with his own technology revealed itself in unexpected ways. When a new Canadian engineer named Steve Hayman noticed that nobody at NeXT had claimed the email alias steve@next.com— despite seven or eight Steves working there —he figured he could take it. Late one Friday night, two weeks into the job, he filled out the form to redirect steve@next.com to his own address, shayman@next.com.

The system approved it automatically. Then the avalanche began. Emails from reporters, CEOs, financiers-all thinking they were writing to Steve Jobs-flooded Steve Hayman’s inbox. “Of course I didn’t read any of it,” he later wrote on his blog. But panic set in immediately. In a desperate attempt to undo his mistake before anyone noticed, Steve Hayman filled out the form again, this time redirecting steve@next.com to sjobs@next.com. Then he sent Steve a confessional email: “I did something dumb…This was a bad idea, I’m sorry.”

But Steve didn’t rip into him. “Great idea, thank you”, he responded.

(The full story is here, and author Geoffrey Cain did let me know he was including it, which is OK by me!)

It’s been a pretty good couple of months. I’m 2 for 2 in getting mentioned in books about Apple.