Right on! Your experiences resonate completely with mine.
The Apple story did get ugly. Starting with the Pirate Flag:
http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Pirate_Flag.txt
things slowly degraded between the Lisa and Mac team.
It culminated in a Lisa-Mac team meeting where Jobs eviscerated the
Lisa project, and brow-beat the Lisa team into quitting or figuring
out another place in the company. It was truly a black experience.
Probably for the best, but it could be done without rage. It became a
Russian novel.
Fortunately for my group of 4, the PrintShop was doing double duty and
was on both teams. And with the laser printer in sight, and other
printers finally being able to come into the architecture (early
inkjet, daisy wheels, and so on), Jobs saw the advantage of a
sophisticated, non-pirate approach in that domain.
But still, he once really badly ripped one of the PrintShop members in
public. I flew into his office in a rage, and quit. I walked out
with 20,000 shares of stock.
So it went. It was tough to be at Apple and be at all formal in
computer science.
All in all, in my three companies, Sun was by far the best. I
actually got paid to fail and even got dinged on a performance
appraisal for not taking enough risks! That lead to going to the SFI
Complex Systems Summer School and taking complexity into SunLabs. Now
*that* is risky! But when we were done, a small group of us were
starting in on some of Stephanie Forrest's ideas for self healing
servers .. servers that "groomed" each other.
Complexity rocks! And that's why I love this list, we're truly unique.
-- Owen
On Nov 27, 2009, at 12:20 AM, Jochen Fromm wrote:
Here is another picture
http://www.folklore.org/ProjectView.py?project=Macintosh&gallery=1
Somehow Steve Jobs got all the money, Andy Hertzfeld and Bill
Atkinson got all the glory, and you got all the hard work? What a
distribution.
My first task in my first job after university was working on
printing procedures as well. Writing printing functions is not a
very thankful task, there is always a printer, printer driver or
paper size which does not work. And the system would work without
them, they do not belong to the core of the system.
In every software system there is a core and a shell - the core
that's the part
which gets, stores, and processes the data. It is the part which is
encapsulated by the API. The shell consists of additional parts:
localization and translation, import and export, and printing. The
system would run without the shell, it would only be a bit less
useful.
If you join a software team late, your first work is often at this
shell - if you would join Google as an engineer today, you would
probably work on some Javascript problems in the calendar functions.
Or printing functions for the calendar. I wonder what Software
Wizard Andy Hertzfeld is doing at Google currently?
-J.
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