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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?

#181

Post by perardi »

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…

Marketing had products for every conceivable niche.

Ah, the Performa era.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_Performa

Mind you, my first Mac was a Performa, as we sure didn’t know better.

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

#182

Post by prepend »

jimt1234 wrote: post #80
baby wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you look at in engineering culture?

I had a friend interview at "Big Nameless Corp" a few years ago. He said when he saw that the engineers interviewing him all had Windows laptops, he knew immediately it wasn't an engineer-friendly culture. I always thought that was funny.

I try to stay pretty open, but I work on an org with a lot of windows developers. It’s kind of interesting how it’s a totally separate world and the windows devs have their own equivalents to dot files and stuff.

The problem is when they insisted that everyone else must use windows and Mac and Linux machines weren’t allowed.

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

#183

Post by abraxas »

programmer_dude wrote: post #154
dboreham wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Explains why there are no production Java applications...

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

Yeah, other than Kafka, Spark, Cassandra, Flink, Hadoop, Elasticsearch what has Java ever done for us!

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

#184

Post by CharlesW »

scroot wrote: post #149
CharlesW wrote: post #10

I'm really thankful I had a chance to work at 1 Infinite Loop during that time. I worked with other Developer Relations folks in IL3, with near-daily trips to IL2 to either meet with folks on the QuickTime team or just hang out. Occasionally I'd get early glimpses at things like QTi and HyperCard 3. I vividly recall the day Steve introduced the iMac in the Infinite Loop quad. If I had to pick a day that telegraphed A…

The world needs to know more about HyperCard 3. I wish some kind person would throw a development version up online for us plebs to explore. It would be great to know and see what it was going to be all about!

I couldn't agree more. HyperCard changed the world, and it's a tragedy that it was abandoned.

The idea that QuickTime¹ would be the runtime for HyperCard 3² — or from a different perspective, that HyperCard stacks would be just another media type — was extremely clever. We'd³ previously experimented with specific interactive functionality, but QTi generalized interactive media capabilities in a technically-interesting way that would greatly amplify both what HyperCard and what QuickTime were capable of.

The 1996 WWDC session Hypercard 3.0: The Phoenix Rises was electric. Here's a report from that session, complete with a response from the awesome Kevin Calhoun. http://folkstream.com/muse/teachhc/hc3.html

> It would be great to know and see what it was going to be all about!

From an authoring POV, it was "just" HyperCard with super-powers. But from a distribution POV, the magic was that stacks would work anywhere that Movies worked — web pages, email, documents, applications (imagine GUIs composed of "micro-stack" controls), etc.

¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QuickTime#QuickTime_interactiv... ² https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperCard#HyperCard_3.0 ³ Royal "we", my specific role was evangelism

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

#185

Post by wvenable »

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?

Palm OS was designed for the hardware of the time. It was very simple but ran well. Compared to Microsoft's approach of building a stripped down clone of Windows NT that barely ran on the hardware of the era. But in the long term Microsoft's approach was more successful because as hardware improved they had an OS ready to take advantage of it.

Of course, what Microsoft wasn't ready for was the hardware getting so good that Apple could just port their existing desktop OS and software over.

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

#186

Post by mjhoy »

hot_gril wrote: post #35
simonh wrote: post #3

If you've not seen it, this video of Job' informal talk with WWDC attendees in 1997 is a classic. At the time he was only consulting at Apple after the Next acquisition and Gil Amelio was still at the helm. He talks quite a bit about how the company is re-engineering itself and refocusing on a narrower set of products, and deals constructively with some pretty hardball questions from the audience. https://www.youtube…

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…

I think so, at ~50:22.

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

#188

Post by chestervonwinch »

gorjusborg wrote: post #67
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.

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

The meat of the question is, "where do you go when don't know how to do a thing?".

The answer could potentially be "the docs", but that's not necessarily sufficient like you point out. However, you could ask follow-ups, e.g., whether the docs have multiple facets like user guides in addition to low-level API guides.

OTOH, where you go when don't know how to do something doesn't necessarily have to be the docs, and info here can still be valuable to understand. E.g., are questions typically discussed in public forums or is it discussed in private DMs? The former is typically a better signal in my experience.

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

#189

Post by nso95 »

spinlock wrote: post #125
MaintenanceMode wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Boy have times changed

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

#190

Post by alecbz »

bredren wrote: post #112
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.

This is hard though because culture often isn't very legible.

I'd easily trade pay (within reason) and any tech stack for a truly great culture where I felt driven and engaged and was doing meaningful work, but the latter is really hard to understand ahead of time.

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