Steve Hayman, “freshly retired” after 32 years at Apple (and a former colleague), on Saturday:

On this day in 1996, I was summoned to a phone call - which I took at a pay phone at the Steamtown Railroad Museum for complicated reasons involving new baby - in which we learned that Apple had agreed to buy NeXT.

My immediate reaction was: "wait, WHO is buying us? Apple? They're the only company going out of business faster than WE are."

It worked out pretty well.

Longtime Apple watchers like to joke that NeXT bought Apple for negative $400 million. It’s hard to argue against that. The NeXT merger remains the most consequential in Apple’s history. It is singular in its downstream effects; entire businesses and industries would not exist without it. The NeXTSTEP operating system became the foundation of Mac OS X, and thus, over time, of iPhone, iPad, Apple TV, Apple Watch, and HomePod. And, of course, the return of Steve Jobs set the stage that transformed a moribund business into a $4 trillion behemoth.

Steve wrote an expanded version of his post that offers more detail of that day, including this charming anecdote:

Two weeks earlier, I’d got a call from a former NeXT colleague Barb, who’d gone to work for Apple. She wanted to know if I wanted to come along.

“No thank you”, I replied politely, when what I was really thinking was “What, that bunch of losers? Why would I go there? They’re the only company going out of business faster than WE are.”

But the merger happened anyway, and Barb called me about a minute after it was announced to say “Well, we really wanted to hire you, so this is the only plan we could think of.”