Adams, Jayson oral history | 102792109 | Computer History Museum

Description

Growing up in Orange County, California in a middle class African-American family, Jayson Adams was first exposed to computers in 1979 when his parents got a TRS-80, on which Jayson became experienced at BASIC programming. Jayson majored in Electrical Engineering at Stanford in order to learn how computers worked, with the intention of starting his own company someday. Jayson got a Mac in college and idolized Steve Jobs, and after a college friend of his, Paul Hegarty, took a job at NeXT after graduation, Jayson also got an interview, eventually getting hired in developer technical support in 1990, eventually becoming co-manager of the team, which helped third party companies developing NeXT software by answering technical questions about the platform. While working for NeXT, Jayson developed a Usenet News viewer on his own time, which got him known around the company.
Jayson left NeXT in 1992 to pursue his dream of starting his own company, Millennium Software Labs, with a partner, Scott Love, also a former NeXT employee. Together, they developed Notebook, a notes taking app for the NeXT.
In 1993, Jayson founded Farcast, which created an email-based news service.
In 1995, Jayson began exploring web development, and not happy with basic HTML or the state of the existing Java UI toolkit (AWT) at the time, decided to write his own Java UI toolkit, called RevKit. This became the basis for the Internet Foundation Classes, when Jayson’s company Netcode was acquired by Netscape in March 1996. IFC was later renamed Java Foundation Classes, or Swing.

Jayson left Netscape in January 1998 to make his goal of retiring by 30, and wrote music for a while. However after NeXT was acquired by Apple and Mac OS X came out, Jayson was reinvigorated about computing and started a new company, Circus Ponies with a former NeXT colleague Elizabeth Statmore to create a new version of the Notebook application for OS X in 2002. When the iPad came out in 2010, he created a version for the iPad as well. After Statmore left in 2006, Jayson managed to keep Circus Ponies Notebook going until 2015, when he saw that he would no longer be able to compete with Microsoft OneNote, which was free.
Jayson then joined Google to work on the Mac version of the Chrome browser. Today Jayson works on Google’s open source Fuschia operating system project.

Date

2020-09-24

Participants

Adams, Jayson, Interviewee

Hsu, Hansen, Interviewer

Publisher

Computer History Museum

Place of Publication

Santa Monica, CA

Duration

02:52:42

Format

MOV

Collection Title

CHM Oral History Collection

Credit

Computer History Museum

Lot Number

X9362.2021

Artifact Details

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