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Comment by rootbear | Hacker News Reader

I was working at Pixar at the time and a couple of us went out to lunch when the news broke to figure out What It All Meant. We passed Steve's office on the way out and one of our party, who had worked with him since early Apple days, congratulated him. The big question was whether they would keep the Unix plumbing visible and useful, or would it be buried under some API layer of no use to us Unix graybeards. Fortunately, the plumbing wasn't hidden in the walls.

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Didn't Steve have an email that was in your mailbox by default when you got a new account on a NeXT machine? It had some embedded images and an audio file of him talking.

Anyway, I sent whoever it was, pretty sure Steve, an email with read receipt enabled and he bitched me out for invading his privacy. This was ~93 or so.

Looks like it was Steve https://www.flickr.com/photos/allardjm/480786084

Apple must have had lots of emails over the years with people wanting to return a 'Next' shirt or asking if they are going to restock such-and-such jeans again.

There must be someone at Next clothing (next.co.uk) dreaming that Apple sell that domain name to them one day.

Not so much.

mail.next.com goes to 127.0.0.6

haha, i can't believe you found a screenshot. That's hilarious, i was pretty sure it was Jobs but memory is hazy. Thanks!

You see, HIS privacy is (was) very important to HIM

Funny, that is the same guy that in his youth cold called a CEO asking for free samples and he got it.

I sent him an email from a NeXTStep configured PC in around 1996/97/98 stating I had some window GUI ideas that would give him a distinct advantage over Windows.

As I recall, his reply was terse, along the lines of:

~~~

What are they?

~~~

I was doubtful it was actually the man himself responding. I thought it was some email administrator trying to steal my ideas (I was 20yrs younger then). I proceeded cautiously and don't recall if he replied again.

A decade later I learned terse replies were his MO.

So you were okay with Steve Jobs personally stealing your ideas but not with his assistant doing so?

To my young mind, it was more about someone else taking credit for my wonderful ideas. My naive thinking was that Steve Jobs would be dazzled for sure. He'd probably want to hire me or pay me a million dollars, but some other person checking his email or administering the email server... how could I trust them? I was young and foolish and had spent too much time acquiring and configuring a NeXTSTEP compliant SCSI drive and SVGA card.

What were your dope gui ideas?

This is a little embarrassing.

Like most every idea I came up with at the time, it had the word “smart” in it.

Smart Windows.

What are “Smart Windows”? So glad you asked. At the time both NeXTSTEP and MacOS only had resizing handles on the bottom of windows(if I remember correctly). What I proposed was a full perimeter border on windows like what was seen in the Motif Window Manager, CDE, et al.

But wait there’s more...

If you double-clicked the border, the window would jump-move in that direction until it hit either another window border or the edge of the screen. If you held the shift key while double-clicking the window would instead expand in that direction. All together it was a precise way to quickly move and arrange a full screen panel of windows without ever having to drag a window or window border.

I eventually tested out the idea on Windows NT 4.0 inside a Visual Basic project. It was super dope. SJ missed out.

Honestly I find read receipt requests to be in very poor taste, if not a sign of outright hostility, and no, having them by default is not an acceptable excuse, no more than forgetting capslock on would.

Those things annoy me too, but thankfully it's been years since anyone sent me one (unless my mail clients have been silently reporting back to people other than the NSA, of course). I assume the read receipt request button has been made harder to find in newer versions of Outlook or something.

I reckon the correct way to handle these receipt requests is to configure the mail client to send a modified receipt email which also has a read receipt request, and keep replying in kind until your correspondent gets the message (or the mail servers break down due to two bots telling each other that they read the notification that they just read each other's mail telling them they read their mail, of course).

It has been a while but with Outlook there was an option to ignore all read receipt requests. Maybe you turned that on?

I don't use Outlook; what I mean is that it seems that other email users aren't sending so many read receipt requests for some reason (such as changes to Outlook's user interface). Either that, or I correspond with a better class of email user these days.

The funny thing is that I never even thought about it, it was my first real email account. But ever since then i've been a vigilant anti-read-receipt person and to this day disable clients from replying to them whenever possible.

That's great to hear. Have you read Jobs' biography and do you think everything said about Pixtar around those times are accurately portrait?

Sadly, I haven't gotten to it yet. That's embarrassing to admit, but my time for pleasure reading has gotten frustratingly short.

It actually reads like a solid fiction book, except that it isn't. You can skip a few dozen "romance" pages here and there and then it's really worth your while.

Thanks. Maybe I can get to it over the Holidays.

I found Becoming Steve Jobs by Schlender & Tetzeli to be a much more informative read than Isaacson's official biography, particularly on the intersection of Jobs/Next/Pixar/Apple.

Thanks, I'd like to read both.

Just wanted to second this, totally agree. Becoming Steve Jobs' authors interviewed Tim Cook, Jony Ive, Eddy Cue, Pixar’s John Lasseter, Disney CEO Bob Iger, and Jobs’ widow, Laurene Powell Jobs.

Can you please mention from which author since I imagine there are more than one?

Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson is generally considered the definitive biography.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Jobs_(book)

Definitely not true. As a concrete example disproving your fallacious post, I refer to Mr. John Gruber who called Becoming Steve Jobs "the book about Steve Jobs that the world deserves".

Johny Ives says of Isaacson's book, "My regard couldn’t be any lower."

So People involved with and around Apple didn't enjoy a book that was critical of Jobs?

I too liked Becoming Steve Jobs too, but I didn't think Isacsons book was as terrible as many people made it out to be.

No, it's 100% true. It's the book Steve Jobs had written as his official biography, so it's de facto the official biography. It doesn't matter if there is a better book, and your aggressive tone is not helping your argument.

"official" and "definitive" are not synonyms.

In this case they're, because he ain't reviewing and approving another biography.

Yeah, sure. I worked with Jobs (not for him) when he was at NeXT and I was at a closely affiliated company. I asked Jobs once in a meeting if he would ever consider moving the NeXT software onto non-NeXT hardware to give it more reach. He exploded, as was his way, and answered my question by pointing out that he drove a very expensive Porsche while my car was just a cheap econobox. That was his entire counter argument to me. Many of us had read his first biography "The Journey is the Reward" and knew that the guy thumping his chest about how his expensive car demonstrated his superiority had fathered and abandoned a daughter who had been living nearby on welfare checks that were paid for by us little people who paid taxes and drove economy cars.

Talk about "my regard couldn't be any lower".... I think Isaacson's book pretty much described the guy I remember.

Thank you for this. It is definitely good, in my opinion, not to forget all his flaws. He was an asshole. But he was also a genius. Most great people are like this, imperfect in some way, and I think it is naive not to recognize that.

You might want to read Pixar and Beyond, which seems to portrait a much more realistic view.

Consider reading relevant parts of 'Creativity, Inc.' by Ed Catmull if you want another side of the Jobs & Pixar events.

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