The Rise and Fall of Steve Jobs’s Greatest Rival

On June 5, 1981, journalists from around the world gathered at NASA’s headquarters in Washington, D.C. to watch as the Voyager 2 spacecraft became the first man-made object to reach Saturn. In the aftermath of this historic event, the main attraction wasn’t NASA’s staff. It was fellow journalist Jerry Pournelle. Pournelle had something none of them had ever seen before: a portable computer, the first mass-market one in history.

“There were over 100 members of the science press corps packed into the Von Karman Center (the press facility),” Pournelle wrote in his regular column for Byte magazine a few months later. “Most had typewriters. One or two had big, cumbersome word processors…nobody had anything near as convenient as the Osborne 1.”

Just six years earlier, the Altair 8800 had been unveiled at the first meeting of the Homebrew Computer Club. There, Steve Jobs recognized that the future of computing lay in the consumer market, not the hobbyist. But Jobs was not alone. He stood alongside someone who would go on to become a “frenemy” of sorts. Like Jobs, he was intensely charismatic. Like Jobs, he had a near-supernatural ability to sense what consumers wanted before they knew it themselves. And, like Jobs, he knew how to sell his ideas to the world.