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

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

#121

Post by CyberDildonics »

xrd wrote: post #98

I was at Claris (subsidiary of Apple at the time, my paychecks were from Apple) up in Portland right before then. Everyone in the office was really excited about the BeOS (edit, not Steve Jobs, but a new company by former Apple employees). We had a few devices. I remember the demos where they would click on a button to turn off a processor in the GUI while rendering a mandelbrot image, and it would slow to a crawl. I…

> Everyone in the office was really excited about the BeOS (Steve Jobs' new company before he returned to Apple).

Are you sure it wasn't NeXT that you're thinking of?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeOS#History

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

#122

Post by oidar »

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…

So the people that were being interviewed by Jobs quit after he asked what they were doing? Or were there others hired to walk around and gather information that quit after interviewing employees? In either case, why were they quitting?

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

#123

Post by KerrAvon »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #114
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 k…

I heard about that meeting from someone who was also there -- supposedly Steve also said in response to the booing something to the effect that "what the hell has Apple done in the last ten years?"

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

#124

Post by m0llusk »

CyberDildonics wrote: post #119
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.

Admittedly I only saw Steve doing this like two or three times. The group that was next to mine was not large and was gone in about a week. Heard similar stories from others who observed Steve Jobs randomly talking to people who then left and also heard some of these people talking about these events. Morale was very low in many groups at that time and a lot of people working there had quite remarkable egos.

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

#125

Post by spinlock »

MaintenanceMode wrote: post #99
codexjourneys wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Steve didn't like our data center rack mounts being silver, we had to pull them all out and spray paint them black, because silver just wasn't acceptable, in a datacenter. This strikes me as funny because of all the canonically silver iMacs and Macbooks that came afterward. Is black even an option?

Somewhere in Steve logic somethings are black, somethings are silver, that's just the way it is.

I think this is a huge part of his success. That clarity makes buying simpler for customers. You get the color that your device is supposed to be. Period.

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

#126

Post by spaetzleesser »

par wrote: post #84
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…

> 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.

Probably like every large organization.

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

#127

Post by spaetzleesser »

tester756 wrote: post #66
StevePerkins wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A typical well-designed class will usually be a few hundred lines of code, tops. Often less than 100 lines. 9k classes * 100-300 == 900k-2.7m LOC Not TOO crazy for the most complete standard library ever developed, for a language meant from the beginning to take over enterprise business computing. How many LOC are in whatever meme language is hype this year? Hell, I feel like I see nearly that many lines of console o…

That's 36 classes per *day* (900/250 workdays) I don't know how many people were working on that but when developing standard library you do not really want to rush designs. You want to be very, very careful about it. Here's a book about it from one of the most experienced people in API/Standard lib design on the planet https://www.amazon.com/Framework-Design-Guidelines-Conventio...

I think the first part of a standard lib is pretty straightforward to design. String operations, math, standard protocols, I/O are petty well understood. It gets more tricky once you get to higher levels abstraction like UI.

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

#128

Post by baby »

Aperocky wrote: post #36
streblo wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Ask where the documentation is. I've had a reasonably long career and worked at a number of companies at this point, and I've never seen this 'documentation' that engineers are supposedly producing.

We really have the opposite problem, there are lots of documentations but they are not exactly organized or all up to date. Much easier to fix than not having any of them I would guess.

I feel like having too much doc is not really a problem :)

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

#129

Post by spaetzleesser »

Aperocky wrote: post #36
streblo wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Ask where the documentation is. I've had a reasonably long career and worked at a number of companies at this point, and I've never seen this 'documentation' that engineers are supposedly producing.

We really have the opposite problem, there are lots of documentations but they are not exactly organized or all up to date. Much easier to fix than not having any of them I would guess.

Welcome to health care. We produce a ton of documents that then disappear into a terrible document management system to never be found again.

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

#130

Post by aasasd »

KerrAvon wrote: post #120
aasasd wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I'm not sure what services PalmOS provided to the apps, but to my limited knowledge the apps themselves were non-multitasking, and had a standardized database per each app instead of the filesystem (i.e. something like proto-IndexedDB, but more oriented to documents or blobs). So it's kinda difficult to imagine them having the problems of quasi-multitasking and more complex MacOS. But perhaps things became involved by PalmOS 5.

Though the event handling part sounds like DOS' raw approach, versus Win95's abstraction—and I guess could plague any kind of a system.

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