File:Oral History of Rich Page

Interviewed by Hansen Hsu on 2018-11-07 in Mountain View, CA X8836.2019 © Computer History Museum

Rich Page was born in Vallejo, California in 1951 and grew up in Belmont on the Peninsula south of San Francisco. Page received Bachelor’s degrees in Math and Physics and a Master’s degree in Computer Science from San Jose State University. While still in college, Page got a full-time job at Fairchild Semiconductor in 1972 in manufacturing, testing memory chips, later moving into design. During his Master’s at San Jose State, he met John Couch, who recruited him to work on the HP 3000 minicomputer at Hewlett-Packard. Couch and Tom Whitney left HP for Apple in 1978, and at Couch’s urging, Steve Jobs recruited Page into Apple to work on the Lisa, which was originally planned to have a custom microcoded bit-sliced processor. Page convinced the team that it would be better to use the Motorola 68000 microprocessor instead. Page built a number of Lisa and later Macintosh prototypes (including a large screen Mac, a color Mac and a portable Mac), but spent most of his time leading a team working on development software for the Lisa and Mac, including object-oriented Pascal tools. Page became an Apple Fellow alongside Bill Atkinson, reporting to Wayne Rosing and Steve Jobs. When Jobs left Apple in 1985, he co-founded NeXT along with Page, George Crow, Susan Barnes, Bud Tribble, and Dan’l Lewin, all veterans of the Macintosh team, to create a “3M” machine for higher education, which became the NeXT Cube. Page led the hardware division, and in 1991, also took over manufacturing. Page discusses the incorporation of the DSP chip and the optical drive into the NeXT computer, as well as its custom single-chip Ethernet controller.


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Catalog Number: 102780988 Lot Number: X8836.2019