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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?

#91

Post by MaintenanceMode »

I was there in 1999 as OS X was being developed, and the beta was just about to be released. I was building another product that was released at MacWorld in 2000 (and still exists today)!

I have a lot of funny stories. 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. That was my first day at work. And no, I'm not a datacenter employee, everyone on the team did everything, there were just very few of us.

We had to work from about 10am to about 3 or 4 am every day to make the deadline, we sometimes got Sundays off. There was a lot of rage and anger at many management levels.

Steve would get a question about a two button mouse at every company meeting, he was super pissed every time about the question. We enjoyed trolling him.

Steve's attention to detail was unbelievable. I once witnessed him make a team work overnight just to move an icon 10 pixels to the left.

The guy had a vision that seems unparalleled. He was able to figure out the concept of "cloud" well before its time, and make a shift towards that.

Of course, he was an supernatural presenter. I witnessed him present through some really messed up errors in live demos and no one I asked in the audience afterwards even noticed the errors.

It was an insane work environment, never seen anything like it.

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

#92

Post by georgemcbay »

Aperocky wrote: post #37
tester756 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You guys were creating Java? > ~1,000 classes in 1.1, ~10K in 1.2 the next year. 9K classes in a year sounds crazy as hell

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 touched it in many years at this point.

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

#93

Post by apeace »

MaintenanceMode wrote: post #91

I was there in 1999 as OS X was being developed, and the beta was just about to be released. I was building another product that was released at MacWorld in 2000 (and still exists today)! I have a lot of funny stories. 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. That was my first day at work…

> I was building another product that was released at MacWorld in 2000 (and still exists today)!

Wow! What was the product?

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

#94

Post by mavsman »

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…

> 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

I worked at Amazon for a bit and remember this kind of thing in preparation for a release/conference (Re:Invent). I don't miss it at all.

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

#95

Post by sfink »

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.

I think a better metric is to ask why the documentation isn't better. Nobody is ever happy with their documentation, whether they have too little or too much. But if the engineers think it's because they're being pushed too hard and there's no slack time available to write docs? Red flag. They have explicitly considered the question and realized that the effort to write the docs, compounded by the need to keep them up to date and/or the cost of allowing them to be out of date, is not worth it in their particular situation? Good sign. They feel kind of bad and guilty about the state of the docs? Too normal to be much of a sign, but still positive.

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

#96

Post by codexjourneys »

MaintenanceMode wrote: post #91

I was there in 1999 as OS X was being developed, and the beta was just about to be released. I was building another product that was released at MacWorld in 2000 (and still exists today)! I have a lot of funny stories. 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. That was my first day at work…

> 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?

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

#97

Post by MaintenanceMode »

apeace wrote: post #93
MaintenanceMode wrote: post #91

I was there in 1999 as OS X was being developed, and the beta was just about to be released. I was building another product that was released at MacWorld in 2000 (and still exists today)! I have a lot of funny stories. 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. That was my first day at work…

> I was building another product that was released at MacWorld in 2000 (and still exists today)! Wow! What was the product?

iTools, or as it's known today, iCloud. It was supposed to be a dial-up service, if you can wrap your head around that. But halfway through the project he realized that doesn't make sense and pivoted. A timely, brilliant move.

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

#98

Post by xrd »

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. It was such a pretty UI.

The story of the entire team for Claris quitting six months before they tried to release Claris 5 was recently documented on HN here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32271139

I was an intern the prior summer, and they called me when the team quit to join under a co-op at University of Washington and try to release the software.

Everyone was operating on a schedule that had bonuses tied to them. We hit the middle milestone and they got their bonuses.

Since I was only a co-op and not really a full fledged employee (even though I was there with the team until 11 pm on lots of Saturday nights) they didn't give me a bonus. They gave me a leather satchel with Claris Works written on it.

It was one of the most awkward moments in my life, the rest of the team looked mortified that we were at a fancy dinner and they were receiving big 5 figure checks and I was getting a recycled piece of swag. That probably speaks to the culture at Apple at the time.

I didn't really care. As a college student at the time, I thought I was as rich as I would ever get making an annualized $32k. After my internship where I was basically playing basketball in between two hours of coding, I thought the exit interview would be "You were the worst intern ever and we hope we never see you again." But, they hired me back and it was a fun time.

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

#99

Post by MaintenanceMode »

codexjourneys wrote: post #96
MaintenanceMode wrote: post #91

I was there in 1999 as OS X was being developed, and the beta was just about to be released. I was building another product that was released at MacWorld in 2000 (and still exists today)! I have a lot of funny stories. 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. That was my first day at work…

> 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.

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

#100

Post by coldtea »

StevePerkins wrote: post #79
Communitivity wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think much of the maligning Java gets is either due to people looking at badly written Java (2k LOC classes, factories of factories of factories, 15 arg methods, import * everywhere, etc.), or claims in error because they are not based on modern Java (claiming bad parallelism a la Hensen, citing a lack of modules, noting no functional support). I think Java is a good language if your problem space is ok with the GC…

I read comments like this all the time on HN and Reddit. But it's hard for me to separate real professional experience at day jobs, from hobbyist wishful thinking in personal side projects. All I know is that I attend a lot of Java conferences and meetups, and I'm STILL waiting to encounter a flesh-and-blood human in real life whose employer really wavers between Java and Rust. That's like choosing between a Humvee a…

>That's like choosing between a Humvee and a submarine, their optimal problem spaces barely overlap.

You'd be surprised. For a lot of stuff Rust is a good fit, aside drivers and OSes, Java is too.

There are succesful full text search engines written in Java (Lucene, and Elasticsearch on top of it), there are succesful event streaming platforms written in Java (Kafka), there are succesful distributed data processing tools written in Java (Hadoop, Spark), databases (Cassandra), and very very high performance trading engines (LMAX), very high performing servers (rapidoid, smart-servlet), and other such things besides, all categories of which have been quite big domains for C/C++ (and thus something like Rust).

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