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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?

#151

Post by switchbak »

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…

> Swing was built in a year

Checks out. I'm still bitter towards Swing though. But impressive what they could put out in a year.

That said, I'm absolutely NOT a fan of the JWZ sleeping bag under your desk/get it done whatever the cost mindset that was everywhere in the 90's.

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

#152

Post by shp0ngle »

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…

Claris is STILL a subsidiary of Apple

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

#153

Post by ngc248 »

georgemcbay wrote: post #92
Aperocky wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds about right for Java..

Does the AbstractFactoryFactoryInterface and AbstractFactoryFactoryImpl count as two different classes...? Kidding aside, I always found Java as a core language (and the basic standard library for it) to be mostly fine, but the weird architecture astronaut cult that hovered around it and infected many of the commonly used libraries to be a real problem. Maybe things are different now for the language, I haven't touch…

Yeah it was never the language or the core libs which were the problem, it was mostly some of the frameworks which had the FactoryFactory problem

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

#154

Post by programmer_dude »

dboreham wrote: post #81
ComputerGuru wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Java has long been crippled beyond the regular GC limitations by lack of value types, but that’s finally, finally going away.

Explains why there are no production Java applications...

FTFY...

Explains why there are no high performance production Java applications...

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

#155

Post by ylee »

hinkley wrote: post #26
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…

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…

>On the other hand they were writing what is ostensibly a concurrent application on an operating system with no protected memory and no pre-emptive multitasking, so the whole thing was using hand-rolled cooperative multitasking via C longjumps. It's no wonder the Windows team had an easier time keeping up with Netscape for that golden year.

As one among your customer base for both versions, indeed. People who never used pre-Unix MacOS have no idea how unreliable it was. Windows 95 and 98 weren't great, but there was at least some hope of killing an errant application and continuing on. System 7? No hope whatsoever. It didn't help that Mosaic (and Netscape) wasn't very reliable regardless of platform, but the OS's own failings made things that much worse.

>a lot of Apple's OS people ended up going to Palm, where they made pretty much the same set of tradeoffs.

That makes sense, both from an attractive-new-startup view (I'm sure many within Apple c. 1997 was pushing for a small, inexpensive Apple PDA to respond to Palm), and from a familiar-feeling-OS view.

>So I ran to a pretty UI, works out of the box, but ships with /bin/bash with open arms and never looked back.

I figured this out on the day in 2003 when I first tried out OS X. I've been using Linux since 1995 and had tried every available desktop: CDE, KDE, Gnome, Enlightenment (The horror .. the horror ...), Window Maker/AfterStep, fvwm, and even older ones like Motif and twm. I'd used Mac OS 7 and 8 in college and hated it (as mentioned above), but OS X was a revelation.

I still use Linux as a server, but for a Unixlike desktop that actually works and runs a lot of applications, OS X is it. Period.

(I wrote the above on Slashdot ten years ago https://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2940345&cid=40457103>. I see no need for changes.)

>The university ended up with upward of 60 NeXT machines (which I later learned is a lot for one college)

I don't think my college ever deployed NeXTs in public student labs the way it did deploy HP workstations https://np.reddit.com/r/VintageApple/comments/ludshu/macinto...>, but I did use them in college as well. I still think NeXTStep did UI better than MacOS pre- or post-Unix.

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

#156

Post by scroot »

diskzero wrote: post #146

I have a fairly interesting perspective; I was there when Steve first returned, left after a few months and then returned in less than eighteen months. I initially joined as a refugee from Be, as it became obvious the PowerPC would no longer be a viable platform for BeOS. I joing the Final Cut Pro team, which has just joined Apple as part of an aquisition of the "Key Grip" video editor from Macromedia. The FCP team l…

ATG sounds like it was an incredibly creative little group, and it's a shame such a thing was more or less disbanded (along with letting HyperCard die, etc). SK8 in particular looks like it was very interesting. Someone needs to write a full retrospective of that group!

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

#157

Post by shp0ngle »

hinkley wrote: post #30
beefman wrote: post #14

I was at Apple 2006-2010 and worked with many who were there during SJ's return. It was drastic in both product and headcount cuts.[1] SJ was many things but above all, he was feared. [1] roughly 1/3 of the company https://www.mercurynews.com/2014/08/29/1997-apple-bites-the-...

I recall people of that era wondering why the guy who created NeXT, a cool idea with zero commercial success, was so arrogant as to think he knew how to make a winning product. What I don't think a lot of people knew at the time was the hand Jobs played in the birth of Pixar, which is definitely something to be cocky about. One of my coworkers decided he was going to specialize in ObjectiveC, because yes the jobs wer…

Now we are in LinkedIn era, it is easy to find out what are old coworkers doing

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

#158

Post by hot_gril »

Aperocky wrote: post #41
hot_gril wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree with what I call Java's OOP obsession, but I have to admire the drive behind that ecosystem.

I'm disgusted by it, but admire the ability for the system to run in spite of the mess that the pattern generate.

At least with lambdas and `var`, they yielded a bit on the old ways.

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

#159

Post by diskzero »

scroot wrote: post #156
diskzero wrote: post #146

I have a fairly interesting perspective; I was there when Steve first returned, left after a few months and then returned in less than eighteen months. I initially joined as a refugee from Be, as it became obvious the PowerPC would no longer be a viable platform for BeOS. I joing the Final Cut Pro team, which has just joined Apple as part of an aquisition of the "Key Grip" video editor from Macromedia. The FCP team l…

ATG sounds like it was an incredibly creative little group, and it's a shame such a thing was more or less disbanded (along with letting HyperCard die, etc). SK8 in particular looks like it was very interesting. Someone needs to write a full retrospective of that group!

I agree. Larry Tesler is no longer around to write such a retrospective. I am not sure who else might be able to do it. One of my favorite ATG project was the Dylan[1] programming language.

Larry was working a lot on what would become Stagecast.[2]

There was so much going on, but the way Steve saw it, nothing was shipping. I think he made the right choice shutting it all down. As I said above, it wasn't at all clear that Apple would end up turing into the Apple we have today.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dylan_(programming_language)

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stagecast_Creator

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

#160

Post by hot_gril »

KerrAvon wrote: post #131
hot_gril wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this the one with the loaded question/insult from an audience member about deprecating a framework? Cause I agree that Apple has been too developer-hostile on Mac OS for a very long time, even though I'm mostly on the user side (but have also done a little Mac dev). They unnecessarily break third-party software too often, to the point where many devs have given up on proper Mac support and just thrown things into…

No, you can't really draw that line from 1997 to today's Apple. (a) Deprecation of a framework is inaccurate. It was halting development on OpenDoc -- which had been sold as the future of software development on Macs and other OS's up to that point (sort of, you had to be there). There is no modern parallel; Apple halting all development on UIKit and removing support and tools for it tomorrow would be something like…

Thanks for the insight. As you can maybe tell, this was happening soon after I was born. I got into computers at an early age, and it was 90s hand-me-down stuff, so I got vague exposure to the old state of things.
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