Ask HN: Was anyone working at Apple during Steve Jobs' return in 1997? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Was anyone working at Apple during Steve Jobs' return in 1997?

#111

Post by gcanyon » Fri, Oct 21, 2022, 7:59 PM UTC

antidnan wrote: post #7

tejohnso wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anybody familiar with the Improv / Quantrix spreadsheets that he claims is 5X - 10X more productive than Excel? What's so special about them? Has that functionality found its way into Excel at this point?

https://instadeq.com/blog/posts/no-code-history-lotus-improv...

"Within a few months, Pito had come up with the fundamental idea at the core of Improv: that the raw data in a spreadsheet, the way that the user views the data, and the formulas used to perform calculations can all be separated from each other."

This is exactly what FileMaker Pro does.

You have the underlying data structure that is independent of calculations and presentation. It is sparse by definition, and can store far more data than any spreadsheet in existence. It can include defined relationships between the different kinds of data.

You have the calculations, that are stored with the data structure, but are functionally independent from it. They can transform, combine, and summarize the data in just about any way you like. They can store their results, increasing speed at the cost of storage, or they can be on demand.

You have the presentation, which depends on the data but is defined separately -- you can have as many different presentation forms as you like, hundreds or even thousands.

And you have actual code that can run on the data and validate it, modify it, organize it etc.

I think only momentum and lack of vision has prevented FM from eating spreadsheets' lunch.

Re: Ask HN: Was anyone working at Apple during Steve Jobs' return in 1997?

#112

Post by bredren » Fri, Oct 21, 2022, 8:05 PM UTC

w10-1 wrote: post #16

It's hard to overstate how bloated Apple was internally. Marketing had products for every conceivable niche. Engineering was all posturing: great hand-waving plans papered over nasty middle-management infighting. Hundreds of engineers in new glass-walled offices, producing plans. I wrote test code against a component that had been delivered months earlier only to find that it was just a stub. Even the debugger had bu…

> When considering a new job, I almost don't care about technology. Engineering culture makes all the difference.

This resonated with me. Whether you are recruiting or looking culture is incredibly powerful.

Re: Ask HN: Was anyone working at Apple during Steve Jobs' return in 1997?

#113

Post by bhawks » Fri, Oct 21, 2022, 8:10 PM UTC

duxup wrote: post #88

par wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Engineering was all posturing: great hand-waving plans papered over nasty middle-management infighting. Hundreds of engineers in new glass-walled offices, producing plans. Sounds a lot like a lot of FAANG companies today.

Sadly just sounds like ... human organizations often get.

The iron law of bureaucracy:

Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people:

First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration.

Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc.

The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization.

https://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html

Re: Ask HN: Was anyone working at Apple during Steve Jobs' return in 1997?

#114

Post by JKCalhoun » Fri, Oct 21, 2022, 8:16 PM UTC

yoda_sl wrote: post #28

I came on board with the NeXT acquisition (or rather reverse acquisition as ex-NeXT often refer to)… So I do recall seeing a few times after we relocated to Infinite Loop, that Steve at first was just working as a consultant, and not as an employee. Thus at the time he didn’t have a badge to enter in IL1 (Infinite Loop 1: hold Apple HQ); many times when he was coming in the morning, he had to wait at the glass door t…

The one that sticks with me was the demo to the engineering team of "Aqua". A small team had been developing the new "lickable" user interface that was called Aqua. Before the release of OS X with the new UI, Jobs assembled the engineers that worked on the OS that would be tasked with carrying the UI throughout with their frameworks/apps.

In typical Steve fashion he had a slide-preso for the reveal. He began with a kind of simplified history of the computer user-interface: starting with the command-line. His next slide showed the graphical user interface popularized, surprise, by his earlier Apple Macintosh.

The NeXt slide (ha ha) showed, perhaps unsurprisingly, the NeXT user interface. A "boo" from one of the engineers in the crowd.

Jobs froze and the showman tone of his voice was gone, "Who said that? Who booed?" He was clearly enraged. He stared into the audience, scanning the faces of the engineers. I think he followed that with some expletives and a claim that the NeXT UI was an amazing step in UI design but I was still kind of in shock myself.

Re: Ask HN: Was anyone working at Apple during Steve Jobs' return in 1997?

#115

Post by hot_gril » Fri, Oct 21, 2022, 8:17 PM UTC

hot_gril wrote: post #77

bombcar wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A culture of deprecation certainly helped; you couldn't iMac without it (everyone raged about it not having a floppy drive). And even so they support carbon or cocoa or whatever it was for longer than people expected.

They could have an iMac with a floppy drive. At the time, CDs were already popular enough, and external floppy drives were available. They didn't just drop the thing everyone's using. They were nice sometimes, like with Rosetta (and v2).

A hardware example of when Apple dropped the thing everyone's using: The 2016 MacBook Pro forced a cutover to USB-C when it was at about 0% adoption, and it was a mess.

Re: Ask HN: Was anyone working at Apple during Steve Jobs' return in 1997?

#116

Post by hot_gril » Fri, Oct 21, 2022, 8:21 PM UTC

kitsunesoba wrote: post #109

hot_gril wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think the deprecation-happy policy helped them. I think they succeeded in spite of that because they made products that were great on their own. The iMac, iPod, and iPhone were so user-friendly, and that's orthogonal to the Mac dev experience. Also, iPhone OS was actually a great dev platform unlike Mac OS, which facilitated a huge app ecosystem at least initially (nowadays apps are less of a thing). People h…

I think the post-OS-X Mac dev experience varies a good deal depending on the type of software you're making. Are you building a Mac-first app using the most blessed toolkit (Cocoa)? You're probably fine, so long as you're not looking to toss out a binary and forget about it for 5+ years (periodically recompiling with newer SDKs and such). Even 20 years down the road getting old FOSS Cocoa projects building and runnin…

Many devs don't maintain their software the way you describe. I don't think they should need to.

If you look at what most software does, it's pretty static. Like you're telling the OS to draw windows with buttons and run your code in response to inputs. More complex with games, but still. The Mac user interface doesn't change much over time. The software should be a lot safer from OS changes. Microsoft showed that it's possible, and they even did it with third-party hardware. Same with the web. If Apple wanted compatibility with less burden, they could've provided better abstractions to devs. "Do things this one sanctioned way, and it won't break."

Mac OS was not good for games in the end. It was common for a minor OS release to break a good portion of your game library, sometimes permanently. If I understand correctly, Apple even intentionally let OpenGL go stale to push Metal instead. This was all on top of DirectX being Windows-only. Relying on WINE for an official software release is a kludge, and despite the common claim that it comes at no performance cost, somehow things tended to be much slower in it (not from the WINE translation layer itself but some other consequence of semi-incompatibility).

Re: Ask HN: Was anyone working at Apple during Steve Jobs' return in 1997?

#117

Post by streblo » Fri, Oct 21, 2022, 8:23 PM UTC

sfink wrote: post #95

gorjusborg wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think existence of documentation is a poor metric, personally.

I think a better metric is to ask why the documentation isn't better. Nobody is ever happy with their documentation, whether they have too little or too much. But if the engineers think it's because they're being pushed too hard and there's no slack time available to write docs? Red flag. They have explicitly considered the question and realized that the effort to write the docs, compounded by the need to keep them u…

These questions are ultimately just asking what the work culture is like, they don't really have anything to do with documentation. And in that sense they're good questions to ask during an interview. As you allude to though, I don't think you're going to get good information if you just ask surface level questions about docs.

Re: Ask HN: Was anyone working at Apple during Steve Jobs' return in 1997?

#118

Post by dmix » Fri, Oct 21, 2022, 8:24 PM UTC

bhawks wrote: post #113

duxup wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sadly just sounds like ... human organizations often get.

The iron law of bureaucracy: Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people: First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the fo…

I've always wondered what the Iron Solution to Bureaucracy looks like.

Usually it's smaller companies eating the big companies lunch via competition. But that usually takes a very long time (or competition is crushed by 'good intentions' aka gov policy). I know 'intrapenuership' and spawning isolated startups internally, where teams that are walled off from the middle managers of the larger company, was pushed by Clayton M. Christensen.

But the two areas that seem to be in a death grip with this problem are: modern western governments and monopolies (usually with market position enforced by said governments).

Whenever people push for reducing bureaucracy in gov they get accused of only wanting to help the rich or get crushed by the benefactors (lobbyists/NIMBYs/'local jobs' protection rackets/etc). And monopolies survive even when they are an organizational disaster internally, because where else can customers go?

Re: Ask HN: Was anyone working at Apple during Steve Jobs' return in 1997?

#119

Post by CyberDildonics » Fri, Oct 21, 2022, 8:26 PM UTC

m0llusk wrote: post #108

Yes. One of the more memorable things that happened went on when I moved my office to Infinite Loop. Steve Jobs was curious about everything, so he would walk the halls, knock on doors, introduce himself "Hi. I'm Steve Jobs." And then ask about what people were working on. I was jealous as I would have loved to point out the biggest challenges we were dealing with in the hope of getting more resources. To my astonish…

Steve Jobs comes by and every employee tells him that he can't ask what they're working on and they all quit the next day? That sounds a little hyperbolic.

Re: Ask HN: Was anyone working at Apple during Steve Jobs' return in 1997?

#120

Post by KerrAvon » Fri, Oct 21, 2022, 8:29 PM UTC

aasasd wrote: post #55

hinkley wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right before that era I worked on Mosaic for Windows, and the Mac developers sat across the stairwell from us. The Mac guys had a very love hate relationship with Macs. On the one hand the lead was infinitely proud of being able to have 2 (or was it three?) monitors on his desk, big CRTs on a desk designed during the Cold War, by a designer who had nightmares about nuclear blasts and wanted someplace safe to duck and…

> A lot of Apple's OS people ended up going to Palm, where they made pretty much the same set of tradeoffs. It was very weird watching subsequent Palm models start to bump up against the same ceiling. Didn't know about this. This is before ‘webOS’, right? What kind of OS problems are we talking here?

A long time ago now, but I vaguely recall that the original PalmPilot OS chose to replicate the mistakes of the original Mac. Data structures exposed all over the place, apps had to implement the basics of event handling rather than have most of it handled for them.