"I'm pleased to report to you that Apple's back on track." It was May of 1998, and Steve Jobs was about 10 months into his second stint leading the company he'd cofounded more than two decades earlier. (It was also a bit more than a decade after that company forced him out.) Jobs took the stage at the annual Macworld conference in a white shirt and dark jacket, and told the audience the Apple team had been working harder than ever to finish up a new computer, one designed with the internet in mind. It was called iMac. "We think iMac's going to be a really big deal," he told the audience. He was right.
Apple interim CEO Steve Jobs introduces the five new colors of the i-mac computer Tuesday at MacWorld in San Francisco January 05, 1998 | Photo by John Green/Media News Group/Bay Area News via Getty Images' data-portal-copyright="Photo by John Green/Media News Group/Bay Area News via Getty Images">
When Jobs came back to Apple in 1997, h …
