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

It's interesting because he clearly has some vision, but he is also a master salesman and manipulator. He pretty adeptly dodges the question about "yea, this is good for Apple but what about developers", because he launches into a sales pitch that ropes you in but leads you to the time that we have today, where Apple uses its walled garden approach to bend and mold developers to their will. It's likely to me that, even at this time, Jobs probably had the whole 30% cream off the top model in his head. It also leads to where macOS and iOS-only developers are worn down by the siphoning and churn and sidelined by the prominence of cross-platform web and Electron apps.

https://youtu.be/qyd0tP0SK6o?t=1260

And god, Jobs just drips with a sort of icky confidence and condescension, and there's certainly a lot of cult of personality present in the audience members.

And how do you even "look" at it from the outside? Ask interviewers and they will always tell you that they have great culture, teamwork, etc

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 cover. You could do that with Macs but not quite yet with Windows. If memory serves, Linux got that ability before Windows did but don't quote me on that.

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. They were from what I understand cross compiling, and the Windows team could just do Windowsy things with a fifth of the staff.

So my experience of this era, through that lens, through learning to hate Macs at the hands of Mathematica, and also through rumor mills, was that 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 that NextStep was helping Apple route around.

I told my Mac loving friends to talk to me when Apple had a modern OS. So when NextStep merged my ears pricked up. My first Mac ended up being an anomaly. Apple briefly produced a 13" Mac with a discrete video card, which they haven't since. I had been struggling to get Linux drivers for a Fujitsu LightBook, which was ridiculously small, but was practically obsolete by the time I got everything working. That device is the sole time I've contributed to Linux, which was cool but exhausting. So I ran to a pretty UI, works out of the box, but ships with /bin/bash with open arms and never looked back.

You could still see the bones of NextStep in OS X for some time.

The university ended up with upward of 60 NeXT machines (which I later learned is a lot for one college), in 2 labs when I started, eventually in 3 that I knew of, one of which I ended up with after hours access to. On many occasions they were the only open machines. I had helped too many people who lost their papers to faulty disk drives and learned that the best way to write a paper was to keep my Unix account empty and mail myself copies, so it hardly mattered that I didn't have a floppy for the NeXTs. It didn't hurt that they never figured out how to meter the NeXT laser printer, so while it wasn't the best or fastest printer on campus, it was the only free one. "Your printah is out of paypah."

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 to enter the campus, until some kind soul was letting him in (despite the policy only badged employees could enter or visitors with a printed tag). I saw it happening more than once while grabbing a coffee at the coffee booth in the IL1 building.

Later on, after he came back officially as CEO (or iCEO), I remember clearly during a lunch with co-workers (at Café Mac, seating outside) watching at a distance Steve & Jony walking inside the campus, then seating at a bench and Jony opening some carrying case/luggage, and let Steve pull the content out of it, so he could look at it in the sun: it looked like a piece of plastic… at the time, we had no clue what it was, except the color was orange. Many months later, Steve introduced the first iBook (which was the first Mac with Wifi): when I saw the orange color of the iBook I made the connection with what we saw back that day; Jony was most likely showing to Steve the first shell of the future iBook.

Steve otherwise at work was truly laser focus at a time on different projects: I was working on backend web services development with public facing web site, so usually every 2 weeks our boss was presenting to Steve our progress (every week or even more while closer to ship): our boss usually was always coming back with clear feedback on what was good or terrible, which we obviously had to improve for the next presentation… stressful yes, but truly enjoyable. More than once, Steve did cut some projects that were close to finish and you just had to go along since no one had a say in it, except Steve.

Obviously I have a few more stories of that sort, since I spent close to 20 years at Apple (/NeXT).

It was quite something to get the hard work you did for months presented on stage by Steve… I still miss the excitement from it even if it is more than 15 years ago.

Edit: fixing a few typos

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 were rare but they paid a premium. This was before Apple started talking to BeOS and NeXT about an acquisition, so I thought he was crazy.

When the iPhone came out and mobile apps became a gold rush, I spent a lot of time wondering where he was now and whether he had a Scrooge McDuck room to swim in his money.