Steve Jobs founded NeXT in 1985 after leaving Apple; it sold few workstations, shifted to software, and Apple bought it in 1996 for its operating system, which became the basis of macOS. Investors read it as a commercial failure whose technology carried the acquirer for decades. Stross's book is the contemporary reported history of the hardware years.
Contemporaneous account of the NeXT failure.
Recommended by: Mohnish Pabrai, Keith Rabois