¹ Only to have Steve take it away. Jef left and created the Canon Cat, an opinionated computer that eschewed the WIMP interface in favour of anchoring n incremental search. Steve would also leave and create NeXT, and Canon would invest in NeXT as well.
More accurate to say that he was forced out. We (Mac nerds) were shocked when he came back. My father told me that I was super excited talking about his return, though I don't remember that. I do remember having a Mac Addict magazine with SJ portrayed as a priest on his return. Internet Archive ftw.[0]
When there is a boardroom battle over control, I think almost any take is fair. Sculley kicked him off Macintosh. Steve then tried to oust Sculley, who gave him a "window seat."
Sculley had the Board's support, and Steve resigned rather than quietly sit in the corner playing with "New Product Development" toys. The Board refused to accept his resignation and encouraged him to rescind it, but no they didn't give him meaningful authority, so he carried on to Plan B and negotiated the right to make "Education" computers.
Did he jump? Was he pushed? Yes!
And back to the point I was making... His trajectory had something in common with Raskin's trajectory, right down to raising money from Canon.
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p.s. Fellow OG Mac developer here. I still have the SE/30 I used to write a classified ads app for QuarkXPress and Aldus PageMaker back in the day. I would describe classified ads software in the 90s as, "faster horses about to be eclipsed by automobiles."
“Intuitive Equals Familiar,” a classic from Jef Raskin, the man who started the Macintosh¹ project at Apple:
https://www.asktog.com/papers/raskinintuit.html
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¹ Only to have Steve take it away. Jef left and created the Canon Cat, an opinionated computer that eschewed the WIMP interface in favour of anchoring n incremental search. Steve would also leave and create NeXT, and Canon would invest in NeXT as well.