Description

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It seems unthinkable today-but a quarter-century ago, when personal computers were still new, Steve Jobs was cast out of Apple. The year was 1985. IBM and Microsoft dominated the computing world. The revolutionary Macintosh, launched with such fanfare the year before, was foundering. And Jobs, the guiding force at Apple from the beginning, seemed a threat to his own company. West of Eden-a national best-seller when it first appeared in 1989, now updated with a new introduction-tells how Jobs lured John Sculley from Pepsi-Cola to lead Apple into the future and then found himself pushed into exile. This kind of corporate intrigue was far from the entrepreneurial innocence of Apple's early years. But this is more than a tale of corporate upheaval. It's a story of America in the '80s, when computers seemed as much a threat as a promise, conformity ruled in the corporate suites, and a desire to change the world was almost automatically suspect. It is the story of a visionary's fall.

About the Author

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Frank Rose is currently writing a book about the future of narrative in the Internet age and posting on the subject at his Deep Media blog. He has been a contributing editor at Wired since 1999, writing about such topics as the Year Zero alternate reality game, Sony's gamble on the PlayStation 3, and the rise of Philip K. Dick in Hollywood. After the initial publication of West of Eden in 1989, he worked as a contributing writer at Premiere and wrote The Agency: William Morris and the Hidden History of Show Business, about the long rise and near-collapse of the oldest and for many years most powerful talent agency in Hollywood. He has also been a contributing writer at Fortune, a contributing editor at Esquire and Travel + Leisure, and a contributor to New York, The New York Times Magazine, Rolling Stone, and Vanity Fair. He lives in the East Village of Manhattan, where he got his start covering the punk scene at CBGB for The Village Voice.