It seems unthinkable today — but more than two decades ago, when personal computers were still new and everybody listened to music on a Walkman, Steve Jobs was cast out of Apple. The year was 1985. IBM and Microsoft dominated the world of computing. The revolutionary Macintosh, launched with such fanfare just a year earlier, appeared to be foundering. And Jobs, the guiding force at Apple from the beginning, seemed not just expendable but a threat to the company he’d built. In West of Eden — a national best-seller when it was first published in 1989, now updated in a new edition available on Amazon — Wired contributing editor Frank Rose tells how it went down. In part two of this two-part essay, first excerpted from the introduction to the new edition in 2009, Rose explains how Jobs could be the fall guy one decade and Apple’s savior the next.

For Jobs, 1997 was shaping up to be a propitious year. Pixar, the little computer animation studio he’d bought a decade earlier, had had the second-highest-grossing film of 1995 with Toy Story, its first release. The year after that, Apple had bought NeXT, the computer startup he’d founded after John Sculley showed him the door, and brought him back as a special advisor. Now, with Apple’s latest CEO ousted and nobody left to challenge him there, he simply assumed power.

First he negotiated a truce with Microsoft, Apple’s one-time nemesis: To help keep its wounded rival alive, Microsoft agreed to buy $150 million in non-voting stock and to continue producing its all-important Office software for Macintosh. He put Jonathan Ive in charge of design and brought in Tim Cook, Compaq’s self-styled “Attila the Hun of inventory,” to run manufacturing, setting up the team that has run the company under his aegis ever since. (Cook is now interim CEO while Jobs is on leave.)

Jobs reconstituted the board, bringing in industry professionals like Intuit CEO Bill Campbell, an Apple veteran, and Larry Ellison, the CEO of Oracle. Then he allowed the board to name him “interim” CEO, but he accepted no pay and reserved the right to walk away at any moment. The message was clear: Apple needed him more than he needed Apple.

Over the next few months, more changes followed — each of them a repudiation of one Sculley initiative or another. The number of product lines was winnowed from 15 to four. The retail channel was streamlined: Instead of selling through competing chains in a misguided drive for “shelf space,” sales were unified through an exclusive national dealer.

Marketing was focused around a single message — the “Think Different” campaign from Chiat/Day, the newly rehired ad agency behind the unforgettable “1984” TV spot that had launched the Mac. The licensing deals that enabled other manufacturers to undercut Apple with Mac clones were terminated. Operating expenses were cut nearly in half. Within months, Apple was back in the black.

It was a stunning performance, made all the more so by the fact that in the time since then it has been repeated every year but one. But the numbers don’t answer the critical question: How did Jobs go from the out-of-control kid who lost a boardroom showdown in 1985 to the leader who took command in 1997 and has steered the company with uncanny precision ever since?

Various explanations have been offered, none of them terribly satisfactory. Jobs did pick up some experience during his years in exile. Running NeXT and Pixar, he acquired on his own the business education he’d hoped — naively, as it turned out — to get from Sculley. But even in the ’80s, he’d known more than Sculley and his lieutenants, most of them from a background in packaged goods rather than computers, were willing to admit.

The operational efficiencies Jobs began to introduce in the latter half of 1997 were for the most part the same tech-savvy changes he’d pushed for in the first half of 1985: slash inventory, shut warehouses, run manufacturing close to the bone. Nor has his style changed dramatically, though the gray in his hair may make it seem more palatable. Driven, obsessive, relentless, controlling, stubborn, messianic: Essentially, the Jobs you saw in 1984 is the Jobs you get today. It’s the rest of us who have changed.

A lot of it has to do with our attitude toward technology. Personal computers in the ’80s were exotic beasts, as pregnant with threat as with promise. As late as 1987 I had to tailor a magazine profile of Alan Kay, the computing pioneer, to satisfy an editor who didn’t “believe in” computers — whatever that meant.

Because of their obvious utility, PCs were becoming accepted in corporate America—not for senior executives, who had secretaries to do their typing, but at least for the white-collar worker drones who needed to manipulate spreadsheets and such. In order to be deemed “safe,” these machines had to be as clunky and dreary as possible, and until Compaq made clones acceptable they had to bear the IBM logo as well. To anyone in business or finance, Macintosh seemed at best a toy and Jobs weirdly erratic.

But it went deeper than that. Jobs liked to trumpet his ambition to change the world, and by the mid-’80s that no longer struck most people as reasonable or even desirable. Those were the Reagan years. Idealism wasn’t dead, but certainly it had changed its stripes. Faced with the choice, as the Mac team had it, of being a pirate or joining the navy, most of the population seemed ready to line up and enlist. As presented by Tom Cruise in Top Gun, the number-one box office smash of 1986, the navy didn’t even look half-bad. But in the end, as the music industry has learned to its chagrin, piracy is always more appealing.

We live today in an Apple world. Whether or not we use a Mac — and more and more of us do, to the point that Apple entered 2009 with nearly 10 per cent of the US personal computer market — we work and play in the environment that Jobs and his team defined a quarter-century ago.

Long before there was a blogosphere there was desktop publishing — a development so ground-breaking it’s difficult to conceive of the one without the other. The do-it-yourself revolution that began with the little 128K Macintosh and its PageMaker software has spread to graphics, photography, music, video, and nearly every other creative endeavor. Flickr, YouTube, Wikipedia, del.icio.us, almost the entire panoply of sites and services known as Web 2.0 — there is a tiny spark of Jobs in each of them.

The lesson of Jobs’s ouster and redemption is twofold. First, never count anyone out — certainly not anyone as determined and intelligent as Jobs. In pulling off one of the greatest second acts in American business, he has not merely confounded his critics, he has induced mass amnesia. Second, savor authenticity. The Jobs who led the Macintosh crew in 1984 was self-centered, imperious, arrogant, unyielding, and flawed in myriad other ways — but more importantly, he had genuine passion and the crucial ability to instill it in others. This made him far more compelling and ultimately more successful than the string of glossy-tongued managers who followed. Rough edges, it turns out, are there for a reason.

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