Apple 2001
corecursive.com
corecursive.com
Smart idea...do a bunch of random input as if you were a confused user and see what happens.
As for perfectionism I think that’s overblown. I’ve read or listened to many people who worked with him and yes he was demanding but almost all oft gem had huge respect for him personally and professionally.
The thing is Jobs hired the absolute best engineers he could get, and worked with the best for his whole career. That was just the standard he was used to and expected.
If it was literally a nightly or something though then that's different and definitely an asshole move.
I personally hate the “it’s temporary” excuse we developers often have.
My goal is zero crashes, ever; at any time during development. The same with memory leaks or severely anomalous behavior.
It's an old-fashioned way of working that results in basically zero tech debt.
I'm allergic to debt, of any kind.
The nice thing about working this way, is you get incredibly well-formed UX, and you don't have that awful "QA surprise," at the end of the project.
It also goes a lot faster than you might think, as bugs get fixed close to the time of their creation.
> When the iPod shipped originally, it only worked on _max_ and it used the HFS plus file system, which was Apple’s file system. And then at some point they said most of the world uses Windows. And so we want to be able to sell a Windows version too. And so we added support for _Phat 32_ so that you could hook the iPod up to a Windows.
max = Macs I'd imagine, and Phat 32 is FAT32 :D
"You use one less gate, if you do it little NDN rather than big NDN and so Intel and I guess arm chose little NDN because it used slightly less hardware"
NDN obviously supposed to be 'endian'.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24188791 "The Case of the Top Secret iPod"
Kind of cool to daydream of that alternate reality
FWIW, the LaserWriter 16/600 PS (introduced 1994) uses an Intel 80168 as I/O processor for AppleTalk serving etc.
So Apple did develop for and ship little endian CPUs way before the iPod.
Most PPC chips would actually run both big or little endian and but im not sure weather MAC OS Clasic ever ran anything other then big endian.
EDIT, found it in this forum post on 6502.org http://forum.6502.org/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=6369&start=0
"I used to be a big-endian fan until I finally figured out why the 6502 designers switched to little-endian: it let them start the addition of an index to an address on the LSB before the MSB was read, whereas if you read the MSB first you need to wait for the LSB addition before you know if you need to add a carry to it."
Never went far though.
ARM was always little-endian by default. It has a big-endian mode, too, but now days it's virtually never used.
But did Apple actually use the big endian mode in the Newton, which shipped in 1993? Google hasn't been able to give me a clear answer on this.
00000000 ea 00 06 2c ea 68 00 01 ea 6c ff ef ea 68 00 00
00000010 ea 67 ff fc ea 67 ff fb ea 67 ff f9 ea 67 ff f7
There for sure could be some weird other piece of information I'm missing (like maybe the rom image is pre swapped for efficient emulation on big endian systems like Mac/PowerPC?), but barring that it really looks like Newton was a big endian system.
https://github.com/pguyot/DCL/blob/master/Sample_Code/Toolch...
MACHINEFLAGS := -march=armv3 -mbig-endian
A guy got paid actual money to work on a variant of iPod that works like a James Bond gadget, with the secret stuff hidden under a boring interface option and all.
Right now you can do -> "Podcast Player" -> "RSS", but I realize that is non-obvious.
Updated
I never understood how you get teams to work that much but one of the factors at least in this case is not wanting to let your team down.
I worked on one of the experimental Newton OSes before the product was shipped. I worked 100-hour weeks for nearly two years. Nobody ever told me or even hinted to me that I needed to do that. My motivation was purely internal, based on the slim chance that I might succeed in making something that millions of people would want, and that would make their lives better in some ways that I envisioned.
By the way, just because I did it, don't assume I think it's a good idea. I don't.
The sad thing is I'd wager 95-99% of startup employees put in work hoping for some kind of similar payout, only to never find it.
2500$ is 1M now
That 25k would be 10M now per year, or $40M in your example
But that's assuming they held onto all that stock for all this time, which is probably did not happen in the vast majority of cases. My guess is that most sold it for less than 10x within 10 years.
10years was 50x
I think Jobs was a special and good leader in many ways, but also a total jerk.
Imagine if Jobs were to have kept notes and been more coherent in his feedback i.e. "I don't like the menus. Don't distract the team now but analyze it, and I want a plan for adjust them in X weeks. Then, push it into the schedule".
There may actually be some benefit in keeping your devs. on a 1 or 2 weeks sprint dogleash but I doubt it. Keeping them on pace but not needlessly diverting them is good.
And Hardware leaders not understanding refactoring is bad. I mean, we never really estimate it well, but still.
I think it shows us how far marketing goes with respect to how we understand a company as much as it's products.
In fact, maybe it's gotten worse. When I worked for Apple in the 1980s and 1990s I lived in Cupertino and walked to the office every day. The last time they tried recruiting me, the offer was not enough for me to do that (Cupertino has gotten more expensive to live in). Maybe if the offer had been enough to do that, I would have bitten; I liked most of my time at Apple, and I loved living in Cupertino and walking to work. Some people I like and respect are reportedly still there.
I don't think big salaries are the draw at Apple. Some of what recruits candidates is moonbeams and fairy dust, just like in the games and movie and music industries. In the cold light of reason, that stuff shouldn't justify a discount on the payscale, but in the real world it apparently does.
This is what being passionate is all about.
Come on now, these are consumer products. And the technology already existed. If you want "special", then work for NASA, DoD, or CERN.