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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?

#251

Post by wmf »

ylee wrote: post #155
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…

>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 u…

System 7 came out in 1991 while Windows 3.1 wasn't even released until 1992. Apple had a huge lead but they squandered it on failed rewrites.

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

#252

Post by flomo »

shp0ngle wrote: post #152
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

I was going to respond they rebranded as FileMaker. But wikipedia says they went back to Claris in 2019.

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

#253

Post by zeruch »

One weird story I heard was some people who were there when Steve left and still there when he returned were called into his office to be berated for...lack of loyalty to his vision?

I've only heard it twice, and only once in any detail. It strikes me as both far fetched rationally but also weirdly possible with Jobs.

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

#254

Post by wmf »

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?

For example, the original 1984 Mac hardcoded the screen resolution to 512x384 black & white so they had to rewrite QuickDraw just three years later to add color, different resolutions, and multiple monitors. Classic Mac OS was easy to crash because it had no memory protection.

In 1996 Palm OS had hardcoded screen resolution with no color support. They had no memory protection. Palm also used already-obsolete DragonBall/68K processors when faster ARMs were already available.

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

#255

Post by trevyn »

dmix wrote: post #118
bhawks wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Cla…

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

Open Source?

Specifically, removing the power to coerce.

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

#257

Post by tobyjsullivan »

seabrookmx wrote: post #240
cloudking wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well he did cut Stadia, which had a sizable team working on it.

The fact that Stadia even launched was a failure. The most basic of market research would tell you that in gaming, content is king. And with Google's track record of cancelling products, nobody would trust what they offered even if it was vastly technically superior.

Honestly, I don't know if that's a totally fair take. I purchased exactly one game on stadia and have zero regrets (particularly since I'm apparently getting a refund - but that's a bonus, really). I was definitely the target market and it was, in theory, the perfect product for me.

The only problem is I may have been the only person in the target market so that wasn't going to work financially... And even I was going to have an exceptionally low LTV at maybe one game purchase per year (or less). And if they charged a monthly subscription, I'd never do it. So, yeah, terrible business.

But Google's track record wasn't a showstopper for me on a toy. It's different for business stuff like GCP.

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

#258

Post by sgerenser »

ribs wrote: post #166
KerrAvon wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, Gil and Ellen were incompetent. If they had understood how to separate the wheat from the chaff, a useful version of Copland could have been out in 1997. They were not willing to say no and fire people. The first thing Steve did when he took over? Mass layoff. It was absolute malpractice to buy NeXT for the OS, which was an obsolete, moribund, and expensive version of Unix. What they ended up getting was adult ma…

How could Apple could have gotten a real OS more quickly? The Mac OS of the time had no preemptive multitasking or protected memory, so software running on it was doomed to be made unstable by all the other software. NextStep, maybe it was what you say, but they needed to make a change.

BeOS was the other option being considered. It was arguably more advanced and powerful than NeXTStep. But Jean Louis Gassée played hardball thinking he had Apple on the ropes, and they went with NeXT instead.

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

#259

Post by abudabi123 »

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.

Compare the quality in the documenation from lawyers and engineers in the company. True experts tend to be excellent communicators. SJ adequately described the short comings of Flash the phoneys pushed back against without merit.

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

#260

Post by imoverclocked »

spaetzleesser wrote: post #127
tester756 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> ... pretty straightforward to design. String operations ...

Tell that to Haskell.

Also, I've seen some pretty gnarly use of String in Java.

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