May 8, 1988

GO, STEVE, GO! Things are zooming right along for Steve Jobs’ and his long-awaited NeXT computer. At an Apple analysts meeting last week, Apple CFO Debi Coleman said Apple had signed off on Jobs’ NeXT machine — you’ll remember that was part of the deal when Jobs left Apple and Sculley was suffering grave paranoia that Steverino was going to “steal” Apple technology.

That kind of lends a tone of imminence to the hotly rumored NeXT introduction. Lending a tad more urgency to the introduction was the anecdote that Coleman supposedly told the audience.

A longtime friend of Jobs’, she called to congratulate him and suggest a dinner date for celebration — June 16. Jobs gave a small cough. Steve’s usually a pretty healthy guy, so maybe he’s going to be a little busy on June 16….

….And it makes perfect sense when you look at the Monday, June 20, schedule of speakers for Usenix at the San Francisco Hilton. Avi Tevanian Jr., chief operating system scientist for NeXT, is on the boards to give a tutorial about the Mach operating system he helped design and implement at Carnegie-Mellon University. And — ta da! — Mach is widely rumored to be the OS for Jobs’ new machine. It’s pretty hard to believe someone would talk about something so personal to a machine as its operating system, without having said machine out of the bag.

–

RENAISSANCE WOMAN: The latest on my list of “Amazing Overachievers I Have Known” is one Patricia McFate, who was in town last week trying to raise $150,000 for a documentary she’s producing on Diego Rivera, the Mexican muralist who graced San Francisco with three of his works.

Though McFate’s undergrad degree is in TV and theater, she’s also a scientist and an engineer. In fact, she starts work in October as a senior scientist with System Planning Corp., a systems engineering company with a focus on national security systems and verification technologies, in Arlington, Va.

She’ll be joining her fiance, Sidney Graybeal, at the firm. They met five years ago while working on arms control and national security issues for the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Since her resume is about three pages long, I won’t try to condense it. Suffice it to say she is one of the renaissance women of our time, and her film on Diego Rivera can only reflect that.

“Diego Rivera, in addition to being a great painter and deep thinker, saw a future in which man would live in a better society based on the inventions of science and technology,” says McFate. “He could join the artistic world with the world of science, and interlink those two cultures in a way that no other artist has ever done. He believed that America’s greatest artists were engineers.”

CANNED COMPUTER SHOW: The Computer Show, which airs Tuesdays on Channel 26 out of San Jose, has laid off its on-air talent and will go into reruns for an undetermined period of time. Included in the layoffs were Ocean Communications/Computer Show founder Victoria Smith, Andy Goodman and Kevin Strehlo. The layoffs follow a number of pitches by investors Paragon Partners of Menlo Park to solicit either more funding or to sell off the show to a corporate investor.

Strehlo, a longtime industry journalist and author, says the layoffs were a surprise. “In fact, the very day that I was laid off was the day I was supposed to go full-time, and I’d wound down all my free-lance stuff so I could do that,” he says.

“Everything’s pretty much on hold until the company is sold,” says Peter Jacobus, a 15-year ABC network veteran and consultant to the show who became interim CEO after the layoffs. “We’ve gone into reruns, and we don’t need anybody (in the office) to do reruns.”

THE OTHER SIDE: Susan Kramer, project manager at Genentech, called to say she disagrees with reports that her company discriminates against women. “I’ve seen no evidence of discrimination,” she says. “I’ve been treated fairly since I’ve been here, and I don’t like it implied that there’s sexual discrimination at Genentech.”

Kramer is the only person I’ve heard from so far with that side of the story, and I have heard from a few.