Joining Apple Computer (2018)
folklore.org
folklore.org
It’s always wild to me how many of the people that are the beginnings of these large prodigy companies and the connection to other powerful rich people. You look up some of these people and see the relationships and it’s wild. Like the name Porat rang a bell so I look up Marc and oh? That’s Ruth Porat’s brother. The ex CFO of Morgan Stanley and current CIO and president of Google. Is it truly talent that drives these leaders to the top of these organizations or is it connections to other crazy powerful people? Maybe both.
Sometimes I feel like I’m over here building cool stuff with talent galore but nothing ever gets what it needs financially. It’d be nice to know these types of people I suppose
It has some brilliant writing and the acting is off the charts (whoever handled casting is unbelievable), but man it can definitely make you roll your eyes occasionally lol
I didn’t know about this show. Thanks for the recommendation I’ll check it out.
Is it based on a true story?
This is the role of successful companies like this, just like top universities. They help create the connection between people with huge potential (or money), superstars, and amplify it.
Remember those pictures will all the famous 20th century geniuses in one place. They each got to reach the peak by building a new step on top of someone else's previous step, and so on. Eventually they all climbed the same ladder together. They were like a talent packed sports team dominating the sports for many seasons. It's not a coincidence they're in the same picture.
From back row to front, reading left to right: Auguste Piccard, Émile Henriot, Paul Ehrenfest, Édouard Herzen, Théophile de Donder, Erwin Schrödinger, Jules-Émile Verschaffelt, Wolfgang Pauli, Werner Heisenberg, Ralph Howard Fowler, Léon Brillouin, Peter Debye, Martin Knudsen, William Lawrence Bragg, Hendrik Anthony Kramers, Paul Dirac, Arthur Compton, Louis de Broglie, Max Born, Niels Bohr, Irving Langmuir, Max Planck, Marie Skłodowska Curie, Hendrik Lorentz, Albert Einstein, Paul Langevin, Charles-Eugène Guye, Charles Thomson Rees Wilson, Owen Willans Richardson.
Spite and necessity are much more common motivators for greatness than team synergy. People will do the wildest things because they share a mutual enemy. Just look at the drone innovation that’s happened in Ukraine.
On the other hand, annoying sports analogies are a fantastic recipe for mediocrity.
Great scientists and engineers seldom work alone, but their paths to the top were usually rather unique, and all too often, full of tragedy.
The Mass scene sort of fizzled in the 90s for various reasons - not dead, but not dominant - and the centre of gravity moved to the West Coast.
So if you were born in CA and studied there - and Atkinson did both - your odds of hitching your wagon to a success story were higher than if you were born in Montana or Dublin.
This is sold as a major efficiency of US capitalism, but in fact it's a major inefficiency because it's a severe physical and cultural constraint on opportunity. It's not that other places lack talented people, it's that the networks are highly localised, the culture is very standardised - far less creative than it used to be, and still pretends to be - and diverse ideas and talent are wasted on an industrial scale.
You see this as inefficient and maybe you’re right. I think about how little it has cost to run these schools compared to the wealth (financial, cultural, technological) they spin off and to me it looks very efficient.
Don't really buy Levy's thesis of the migration from east to west and Stallman as "the last hacker" hasn't aged well.
But Boston/Cambridge (really Massachusetts generally) did sort of empty out of a lot of tech for a time as minicomputer companies declined and Silicon Valley became the scene. I actually decided not to go that direction because, at the time in the nineties, it would have been a relative cost of living downgrade.
I don't think social relationships and their geography are a particular characteristic of capitalism - let alone US-specific capitalism.
They - and the resulting hub/centralization effects - predate it by millennia. There is no shortage of historical cities or state that became major hubs for certain industries or research. How much of the effort in those places is "wasted" seems hard to quantify in an objective way, but again, the pattern of low-hanging fruit being more available to the first wave and then a lot of smart, hard-working people in the future generations working more around the edges is not capitalism-exclusive.
I find myself pining for a lot of the "old days" when anything seemed possible and it was open and exciting. You could DO surprisingly, not a lot, but everything still felt possible.
Now everything seems trapped in advertising dominated closed box. Login and live in this limited little space...
The internet is still there, I can still put up a site that isn't covered with ads. I wish I could surf just that internet and so on.
You just solved it for me.
I've been wondering what to use 90s.dev for.
That's it.
But looking at today's tech landscape, with its walled gardens and app stores, I can't help but feel we've gone backwards.
I understand though that clinics aren't the ideal for many (they are for some), since you aren't allowed to have the trip at home or leave the clinic until it is over.
Eventually they are made illegal but new ones appear.
Every other human creative practice and media (poetry, theater, writing, music, painting, etc) have existed in a wide variety of cultures, societies, and economic contexts.
But computing has never existed outside of the immensely expensive and complex factories & supply chains required to produce computing components; and corporations producing software and selling it to other corporations, or to the large consumer class with disposable income that industrialization created.
In that sense the momentum of computing has always been in favor of the corporations manufacturing the computers dictating what can be done with them. We've been lucky to have had a few blips like the free software movement here and there (and the outsized effect they've had on the industry speaks to how much value there is to be found there), but the hard reality that's hard to fight is that if you control the chip factories, you control what can be done with the chips - Apple being the strongest example of this.
We're in dire need of movements pushing back against that. To name one, I'm a big fan of the uxn approach, which is to write software for a lightweight virtual machine that can run on the cheap, abundant, less/non locked down chips of yesteryear that will probably still be available and understandable a century from now.
I'm not against the idea of a disasterproof runtime, but you're not "pushing back" against the consumerist machine by outlasting it. When high-quality software becomes inaccessible to support some sort of longtermist runtime, low-quality software everywhere sees a rise in popularity.
on some level it is just human nature to want to consume than create. just is. its not great but lets not act like people havent tried to make creative new platforms for self expression and software creation and they all kinda failed
That may be true.
But it doesn't really explain why the tools for simple popular creation are not there. There are a lot of people in the world who would use them, even if its only 1%.
For a long while, Apple computers came an entrie creative suite of programs to make your own content and publish it on the Internet via iWeb.
For a variety of reasons, hardly anyone took advantage of it.
You must be too young to have experienced the time when it was expected that you would build your own computer at home, and either write your own software for it, or get it for free (or just a duplication beer) from the local computer club.
If developers "didn't deserve rights" for what they did with that, then I don't see how we should let Apple off the hook for PRISM compliance and backdoored Push Notifications.
It's also designed to be usable and educational for kids.
The word you are looking for is enshittification.
When I moved out to "the Valley" in 1995, the apartment I picked out turned out to be right next to General Magic (on Mary Ave.).
I knew it as a "spin off" of Apple but at the time did not know the luminaries that were there. It was just a cute rabbit in a hat logo — lit up when I got home late and was turning off to my apartment.
> The Apple II displayed white text on a black background. I argued that to do graphics properly we had to switch to a white background like paper. It works fine to invert text when printing, but it would not work for a photo to be printed in negative. The Lisa hardware team complained the screen would flicker too much, and they would need faster refresh with more expensive RAM to prevent smearing when scrolling. Steve listened to all the pros and cons then sided with a white background for the sake of graphics.
Real Hackers didn't use rgb dweeb keyboards though
But yes, I also think of "light mode" as "starting into a light bulb all day" and when possible prefer light text on a dark background. How much of that is real and how much is just part of the same nostalgic impulse that leads me to install PxPlusVGA9 [0]...
[0] https://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts/fontlist/font?ibm_vga_...
I know it's beating a dead horse to pick on these, but it's a real problem. I look back at how productive we were with tiny teams up until right before 2010, and the main thing that stands out compared to today is all this goddamn overhead.
Watching some YouTube about the Beatles and, of course, their LSD trips. More recently the history of Robert Crumb — on his big acid trip he more or less created a large part of his stable of comic characters.
Somewhere along the way, someone said that LSD alters your mind permanently....
It caused me to wonder if we'll never get the genius of Beatles music, Crumb art without the artist taking something conscious-altering like LSD. Of course then I have to consider all the artists before LSD was "invented" — the Edvard Munch's, T.S. Eliot's, William Blake's, etc.
(Tried acid once in college. That was enough of that.)
LSD is not known to permanently alter brain; for that you need psilocybin.
If you understand that LSD doesn’t permanently alter the brain, why do you think PY “permanently” alters the brain? It does alter the brain (like LSD; see the plethora of research on PY altering neurogenesis and functional connectivity [0]), I’m unsure of what you mean by “permanent”.
I know that there absolutely are people who shouldn’t take it based on their mindset and underplaying predispositions.
There is certainly a point to be made about psychoactive (and other) drugs inducing episodes of psychosis. This is something on the uptick with marijuana legalization in the US [0].
And I think am plainly wrong about my understanding of these effects not being “permanent”. I suppose I was thinking about this too much from a “neurotypical” angle, and not from the angle of how substances can alter the neurological trajectory of people with predisposed sensitivity.
[0] https://www.nbcnews.com/health/mental-health/marijuana-induc...
For example college age, like your buddy was at, is very typically the onset time for schizophrenia even without drugs. And schizophrenia itself may make people gravitate towards drugs.
For psilocybin, there is plenty, e.g.: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8376772/
I think defining “permanent” would first be useful. The brain is extremely plastic.
Beyond that, OP comment was referring to psychosis effects. See his comment below.
at least acid doesnt make sense to consume daily because it stops having the same effects the more you consume it
How do we get it back?
How do we share it with others?
There has to be a way.
Time machine.
> How do we share it with others?
Just like the church, capture them in their most formative years.
If it works out well, I'm going to see about getting a Wacom One display tablet with touch.
There is an aspect of creativity that comes from being inspired, taking off from others’ ideas.
But there is also an aspect of creativity that’s more ascetic, and requires being bored—when there’s nothing else to do, turn the computer into a toy, to play with it, so you are not bored. And I am increasingly of the opinion getting to that state, at least for me, requires turning off the internet.
I think I know how to recapture that "whole new world" feeling and share it.
It's on the tip of my tongue, and has been for a while.
But I can't fully see it yet. I need to go offline for a while. You're right.
If by it you mean excitement about a personal computer, I’m not sure.
If you are speaking more generally about having some activity that is creative and all-consuming, then look to the arts. There are people picking up a guitar or paintbrush or bread recipe for the first time today and it’s going to become everything to them.
I'm interested in how to do "good" journeys vs non-good ones...
[1] https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/20...
I think this was the hook that got many of us to admire Apple as a company (and more broadly, to get excited about computing as a discipline/industry). For a long time, that was arguably (one of) their primary mission.
I suspect to what extent it could still be considered to be the case today would be subject to much debate.
A significant chunk of every iPhone and iPad release is features specifically for creatives.
This specific site doesn’t cater to creatives and will often be full of developers comments bemoaning those things, but I really challenge anyone to look at any of their Mac/iOS product releases in the last decade and point out how creatives aren’t still a big component of their DNA.
Sculley really wasn't the right person to lead Apple. He should have been begging them to do it in-house.
They had the right tech, maybe a hair too early, but manageable, and the smart folks to build on it & iterate.
What they were missing was anyone who could take the freedom of wireless and marry it to the constraints of mid-90’s hardware & networks.
Respect. RIP.
Grateful for all his work.
I admit it is exciting to make something you truly believe is good and helpful.
And that it's disappointing when that thing isn't used by anyone.
It's even worse when it turns out it's just not that useful.
But in the end, everything is replaced anyway. So I guess it's fine.
Two billion active Apple devices in 2025.
I want to double down on this - I’m lucky enough to have worked places where I truly believed the world would be a better place if we “won,” and not on the margins, and it really, really makes a difference in quality of life. I’ve worked at other places, too, and the cognitive drag of knowing that your skills and efforts - your ability to change the world - is at best being wasted is something you don’t truly feel until it’s gone.
I've also wasted countless years on pursuits I still think were good but overall never truly helped make the world better. This was less bad and seems inevitable.
Still, if I’m going to spend a third of my life on something - and, more importantly, if I’m going to be responsible for my efforts contributing to something - I’d prefer it be something I find value in. I’ll take the risk of being wrong - although I’m certainly looking at the world through less rose-tinted glasses than I used to.
It's sad when management takes that work and locks it down, and puts it in a walled garden.