Rich Page

Richard Page is an engineer who was the Vice President of Digital Hardware Engineering at NeXT.

Early life and education
Page was born in Vallejo, California in 1951 and grew up in Belmont, near San Francisco. He received his bachelor's degrees in math and physics and master's degree in computer science from San Jose State University.

Career
Page first worked at Fairchild Semiconductor while still in college in 1972. He was then recruited by John Couch to work on the HP 3000 minicomputer at Hewlett-Packard.

Apple Computer
Page was recruited by co-founder Steve Jobs to join Apple Computer at the urging of Couch, who himself had joined Apple in 1978. Page became responsible for the decision to use the Motorola 68000 processor in the Lisa and the first Macintosh 128K. He became an Apple Fellow in 1983. Page then prototyped Apple's first portable computer and 68020-based system. The 68020 prototype, named "Big Mac", was used to develop MacPaint 2.0. However, it was passed over for a NuBus slot-based design that was used for the Macintosh II.

NeXT
When Apple co-founder Steve Jobs left the company in 1985, Page also left and joined Jobs as a founding member of NeXT. Page was responsible for developing the NeXTcube and NeXTstation. He left NeXT in 1992, shortly before its hardware division was closed.

After NeXT
Page became executive chairman of Chowbotics, a food preparation robotics company.