NASA had approached him about being the civilian astronaut on the ill-fated Challenger mission, but Jobs balked at the six months of intense physical training required.
To keep him occupied, Al Eisenstat invited Jobs to come with him to Russia, where Apple had recently secured permission to sell Apple IIs, but not Macs or printers (in fact, photocopiers were kept under lock and key in that era). It was in Russia, a country virtually untouched by the microcomputer revolution, where Jobs decided that he had to stay in the computer industry.
Jobs was amused by the Russian government's attempts to monitor him. A television repairman had showed up three times, even though his television was fine. Despite the government's paranoia, Eisenstat was awakened in the middle of the night by a shifty eyed engineer who thrust a disk into his hands, then disappeared. The man had created a handwriting recognition system, but he feared his software would never get on the market in Russia, so he wanted to see if Apple was interested. The software would eventually be implemented in the Newton MessagePad.
