In the late 1990s, I was a precocious Mac nerd who pored over issues of Macworld, stayed up late chatting on IRC, and downloaded pirated software that I didn’t actually need. I came of age at the tail end of the dial-up modem and BBS era—and got to witness the early days of the World Wide Web.

I wanted to know where all of this had come from and how it had happened so quickly. The grown-ups around me seemed mystified at best and indifferent at worst.

So I turned to books. I read Fire in the Valley (1984), Where Wizards Stay Up Late (1996), Infinite Loop (1999) and Dealers of Lightning (1999). In my mind—and to a lesser degree, on my actual bookshelf—I had built a mental list of my favorite selections from late 20th-century tech journalism.

Despite its 21st-century publication date, Geoffrey Cain’s latest book, Steve Jobs in Exile, would make a comfortable addition to my old list. I already knew the basic beats: the origins of Silicon Valley, the establishment of ARPANet, the creation of Xerox PARC, the founding of Apple, its near-collapse and Jobs leaving the company to launch NeXT.

Cain reminds us in stunning detail that Jobs’ ‘exile’ era at NeXT was not only critical to his evolution as a man and an entrepreneur but mattered for the rest of us too. The technological innovations that came out of NeXT—notably, the NeXTSTEP OS—continue to live on in what we now call both macOS and iOS.

As Cain puts it, ‘NeXTSTEP was Steve’s attempt to make Unix taste sweet.’