26 ms·

John Carmack: My Steve Jobs Stories

1075 points by AJRF 8y ago

melling 8y ago
"After the public cleared out and the rest of us were gathered in front of the stage, I started urgently going on about how web apps are terrible, and wouldn’t show the true potential of the device. We could do so much more with real native access!" Where was Carmack when everyone was forcing us to listen to "web apps are the future of mobile"? He could have ended that HN debated instantly.
- robotresearcher 8y ago
  > Where was Carmack He was in the debate at the origin, speaking firmly and directly to the key players, as your quote shows.
- overcast 8y ago
  Web apps are the future, how many more stupid native apps must I install to get basic textual and photo information? The only right answer is universal apps(the web).
  - untog 8y ago
    Any absolute answer is wrong here. Native apps will likely always have a place when OS/UI integration are paramount. But web apps will become a lot more prevalent than they have been previous as more and more hooks are exposed to the native core. Which is a good thing for everyone.
    - XorNot 8y ago
      I'd argue the issue is that a lot of "native" apps are basically a webapp in a native wrapper on mobile (and desktop now - thanks Electron!). I don't really know the best way to delineate what should and shouldn't be a web app, beyond a vague notion that my daily news rotation should be in the browser.
    - taoistextremist 8y ago
      Yeah, there's certain things that native apps make a lot more sense for (e.g. messaging apps like Facebook Messenger where you want notifications to come up similar to text messages), but certain things really don't need anything more than the mobile website you look at (for example, at least for some people, mobile Wikipedia over the app).
      - untog 8y ago
        > (e.g. messaging apps like Facebook Messenger where you want notifications to come up similar to text messages) Actually I'd argue the web is great for that too. On Android you can already implement a messaging app, complete with notifications, on the web. I wish people like my bank used it. I don't want to install their native app because I barely ever use it, but would I like to get urgent notifications from them every now and then? You bet I would.
        taoistextremist 8y ago
        I personally don't like relying on my browser for notifications. I like having native apps because usually fine tuning notifications for them is easier in that respect, things that while I imagine are possible through the web browser, probably aren't going to be done on a web app. It's also just an organizational thing since I don't like to have a list of a bunch of tabs, but having a handful of apps isn't too bad to navigate through. Just because there's been a lot of progress in making web apps do things that were more natural for native apps, doesn't mean that it's the best way to go about something. I get the wish for more support for web apps, though. I just switched over from a near 4-year-old phone that was replete with security updates and other un-removable stuff in the storage which prevented me from having a lot of apps installed (especially as so many insist on a large footprint in internal storage), so I increasingly used my web browser to access things. After the switch, though, you can bet I downloaded a bunch of apps I had deleted.
  - redial 8y ago
    How many websites are you gonna have to "install" to get basic textual and photo information, whatever that means?
    - overcast 8y ago
      Zero? Websites don't ask to install when I visit them.
  - xfer 8y ago
    What's "basic textual and photo information"? You have already installed one called the browser, to get some information.
    - overcast 8y ago
      Do I need to explain what text, and photos are?
    - passiveincomelg 8y ago
      Yes, and the browser should be enough in many cases, but the holder of that information tries to force their app on everyone. One of the most annoying examples of that for me is accepting a new connection on LinkedIn from my phone. I want to tap on the link in the email and be done. Instead it redirects me to the store, I close it, try again. Sometimes it works, sometimes I give up and do it later. Another example is Facebook. :)
  - ksk 8y ago
    >how many more stupid native apps must I install to get basic textual and photo information? You're conflating the web with web apps. Those are two separate things. If web apps are to be the future, bloating up the browser to the size of an OS to get native-app level functionality sounds like a dystopian future to me. I don't want my browser to access my GPU, I don't want by browser leaking my LAN IP, I don't want my browser communicating with USB devices on my machine, etc, etc... Also, nobody (yet) has been able to create a GUI/Client App standard for cross-platform delivery that performs well across different hardware architectures and operating systems which are designed and optimized for completely different things. That makes sense because the "one size fits all" way of doing things is terrible for performance among other things. >The only right answer is universal apps(the web). The only "right" answer is that we should tolerate specific web apps only when the benefits outweigh the costs.
- sp332 8y ago
  I think the current course, which is making decent web APIs that open the "potential of the device" to web apps, is going to get us the advantages of both.
- ropeadopepope 8y ago
  > Where was Carmack when everyone was forcing us to listen to "web apps are the future of mobile"? > He could have ended that HN debated instantly. This is going to be difficult to hear, but online debates are essentially for entertainment purposes only. Arguments had on the internet rarely affect our industry as a whole. Arguments had in person between people of power and influence are far more effective, time efficient and can affect entire industries (even countries!) in profound ways. No amount of technology beats face to face communication. No amount of technology replaces individual power and influence.
  - MperorM 8y ago
    Of course they don't affect the industry as a whole, however they do affect the people who read HN. Reading a debate on the dangers of over-reliance of DOckers today made me realize that I should consider alternatives for my next project. Reading about a new awesome technology, might make someone go out and do a project with said technology. While that doesn't affect the industry as a whole, the debates sure are useful for the people reading and participating in them
  - duncan_bayne 8y ago
    I can attest to this, having spent a great deal of effort here and on a W3C list arguing against EME. I was aware of the "online argumentation is entertainment" rule but hadn't appreciated the rule's broadness until then. A good rule of thumb is that a "consultative process" is a smokescreen unless the people being consulted have voting rights amongst those doing the consulting.
- Tloewald 8y ago
  It was quite obvious to us at the time that Apple was planning to provide a native SDK but hoped to mollify third-party developers with "web apps" while Apple got their house in order (having barely managed to get the phone done on schedule). As it happened, the reaction to web apps was so negative they ended up releasing their SDK hastily (which anyone who went through the pain of using it for the first couple of years can attest to). One of the common mistakes people have when discussing Steve Jobs is mistaking what he said for what he believed. (We see this confusion constantly in the news, where "The Whitehouse believes" is used to describe something in a press release.) He knew how to stay on message, and he knew that saying "our SDK will probably be released in alpha form in a year and be somewhat stable in two years" was off message. It's also fairly clear that if he had had a bunch of arguments about something and reached some provisional conclusion, he wasn't going to have much patience with an argument he had previously encountered and beaten to death from someone random.
  - BearOso 8y ago
    He knew how to stay on message, and he knew that saying "our SDK will probably be released in alpha form in a year and be somewhat stable in two years" was off message. Reminds me of “we couldn’t get the fingerprint sensor under the screen working, so we had to quickly come up with an alternate authentication method, and that required this hideous notch” vs “Face ID is the newest, best thing ever.” They still try to hide it when things don’t go their way.
    - bobbles 8y ago
      Spoken like a true 'never used an iPhone x' user
    - saagarjha 8y ago
      > we couldn’t get the fingerprint sensor under the screen working, so we had to quickly come up with an alternate authentication method, and that required this hideous notch I think you should try using iPhone X before you comment on it.
- ojr 8y ago
  depends on the team, a web app can still run, 32 bit apps like the one Carmack built are deprecated
  - saagarjha 8y ago
    Not necessarily true. Given source code, it's often possible to create binaries that run on modern computers, and it's often the case that web apps stop working because something they depended on disappeared or someone broke backwards compatibility.
  - nto09eint3nt 8y ago
    You know, until the server for the app is taken offline, which is far more frequent of an occurrence than a big move like taking your app from 32 to 64-bit which has been spread over literally a decade.
jakear 8y ago
For those who are unable/unwilling to access Facebook: John Carmack Steve Jobs My wife once asked me “Why do you drop what you are doing when Steve Jobs asks you to do something? You don’t do that for anyone else.” It is worth thinking about. As a teenage Apple computer fan, Jobs and Wozniak were revered figures for me, and wanting an Apple 2 was a defining characteristic of several years of my childhood. Later on, seeing NeXT at a computer show just as I was selling my first commercial software felt like a vision into the future. (But $10k+, yikes!) As Id Software grew successful through Commander Keen and Wolfenstein 3D, the first major personal purchase I made wasn’t a car, but rather a NeXT computer. It turned out to be genuinely valuable for our software development, and we moved the entire company onto NeXT hardware. We loved our NeXTs, and we wanted to launch Doom with an explicit “Developed on NeXT computers” logo during the startup process, but when we asked, the request was denied. Some time after launch, when Doom had begun to make its cultural mark, we heard that Steve had changed his mind and would be happy to have NeXT branding on it, but that ship had sailed. I did think it was cool to trade a few emails with Steve Jobs. Several things over the years made me conclude that, at his core, Steve didn’t think very highly of games, and always wished they weren’t as important to his platforms as they turned out to be. I never took it personally. When NeXT managed to sort of reverse-acquire Apple and Steve was back in charge, I was excited by the possibilities of a resurgent Apple with the virtues of NeXT in a mainstream platform. I was brought in to talk about the needs of games in general, but I made it my mission to get Apple to adopt OpenGL as their 3D graphics API. I had a lot of arguments with Steve. Part of his method, at least with me, was to deride contemporary options and dare me to tell him differently. They might be pragmatic, but couldn’t actually be good. “I have Pixar. We will make something [an API] that is actually good.” It was often frustrating, because he could talk, with complete confidence, about things he was just plain wrong about, like the price of memory for video cards and the amount of system bandwidth exploitable by the AltiVec extensions. But when I knew what I was talking about, I would stand my ground against anyone. When Steve did make up his mind, he was decisive about it. Dictates were made, companies were acquired, keynotes were scheduled, and the reality distortion field kicked in, making everything else that was previously considered into obviously terrible ideas. I consider this one of the biggest indirect impacts on the industry that I have had. OpenGL never seriously threatened D3D on PC, but it was critical at Apple, and that meant that it remained enough of a going concern to be the clear choice when mobile devices started getting GPUs. While long in the tooth now, it was so much better than what we would have gotten if half a dozen SoC vendors rolled their own API back at the dawn of the mobile age. I wound up doing several keynotes with Steve, and it was always a crazy fire drill with not enough time to do things right, and generally requiring heroic effort from many people to make it happen at all. I tend to think this was also a calculated part of his method. My first impression of “Keynote Steve” was him berating the poor stage hands over “This Home Depot shit” that was rolling out the display stand with the new Mac, very much not to his satisfaction. His complaints had a valid point, and he improved the quality of the presentation by caring about details, but I wouldn’t have wanted to work for him in that capacity. One time, my wife, then fiancé, and I were meeting with Steve at Apple, and he wanted me to do a keynote that happened to be scheduled on the same day as our wedding. With a big smile and full of charm, he suggested that we postpone it. We declined, but he kept pressing. Eventually my wife countered with a suggestion that if he really wanted “her” John so much, he should loan John Lassiter to her media company for a day of consulting. Steve went from full charm to ice cold really damn quick. I didn’t do that keynote. When I was preparing an early technology demo of Doom 3 for a keynote in Japan, I was having a hard time dealing with some of the managers involved that were insisting that I change the demo because “Steve doesn’t like blood.” I knew that Doom 3 wasn’t to his taste, but that wasn’t the point of doing the demo. I brought it to Steve, with all the relevant people on the thread. He replied to everyone with: “I trust you John, do whatever you think is great.” That goes a long way, and nobody said a thing after that. When my wife and I later started building games for feature phones (DoomRPG! Orcs&Elves!), I advocated repeatedly to Steve that an Apple phone could be really great. Every time there was a rumor that Apple might be working on a phone, I would refine the pitch to him. Once he called me at home on a Sunday (How did he even get my number?) to ask a question, and I enthused at length about the possibilities. I never got brought into the fold, but I was excited when the iPhone actually did see the light of day. A giant (for the time) true color display with a GPU! We could do some amazing things with this! Steve first talked about application development for iPhone at the some keynote I was demonstrating the new ID Tech 5 rendering engine on Mac, so I was in the front row. When he started going on about “Web Apps”, I was (reasonably quietly) going “Booo!!!”. After the public cleared out and the rest of us were gathered in front of the stage, I started urgently going on about how web apps are terrible, and wouldn’t show the true potential of the device. We could do so much more with real native access! Steve responded with a line he had used before: “Bad apps could bring down cell phone towers.” I hated that line. He could have just said “We aren’t ready”, and that would have been fine. I was making some guesses, but I argued that the iPhone hardware and OS provided sufficient protection for native apps. I pointed at a nearby engineer and said “Don’t you have an MMU and process isolation on the iPhone now?” He had a wide eyed look of don’t-bring-me-into-this, but I eventually got a “yes” out of him. I said that OS-X was surely being used for things that were more security critical than a phone, and if Apple couldn’t provide enough security there, they had bigger problems. He came back with a snide “You’re a smart guy John, why don’t you write a new OS?” At the time, my thought was, “Fuck you, Steve.”. People were backing away from us. If Steve was mad, Apple employees didn’t want him to associate the sight of them with the experience. Afterwards, one of the execs assured me that “Steve appreciates vigorous conversation”. Still deeply disappointed about it, I made some comments that got picked up by the press. Steve didn’t appreciate that. The Steve Jobs “hero / shithead” rollercoaster was real, and after riding high for a long time, I was now on the down side. Someone told me that Steve explicitly instructed them to not give me access to the early iPhone SDK when it finally was ready. I wound up writing several successful iPhone apps on the side (all of which are now gone due to dropping 32 bit support, which saddens me), and I had many strong allies inside Apple, but I was on the outs with Steve. The last iOS product I worked on was Rage for iOS, which I thought set a new bar for visual richness on mobile, and also supported some brand new features like TV out. I heard that it was well received inside Apple. I was debriefing the team after the launch when I got a call. I was busy, so I declined it. A few minutes later someone came in and said that Steve was going to call me. Oops. Everyone had a chuckle about me “hanging up on Steve Jobs”, but that turned out to be my last interaction with him. As the public story of his failing health progressed, I started several emails to try to say something meaningful and positive to part on, but I never got through them, and I regret it. I corroborate many of the negative character traits that he was infamous for, but elements of the path that led to where I am today were contingent on the dents he left in the universe. I showed up for him.
AdmiralAsshat 8y ago
Some great anecdotes in there. As an aside, surely a person of Carmack's stature and knowledge would have a dedicated blog. I have to wonder if his decision to post so many of these wonderful stories on Facebook might be due to some "pressure" from his employer.
- chickenfries 8y ago
  That seems like a HUGE reach to me. Not every technical person is a FOSS warrior. Would you say the same thing if he posted on Medium?
  - aetherson 8y ago
    He doesn't work for Medium.
    - chickenfries 8y ago
      Ok, well, if this is really some big ploy by Facebook to now allow their employees to have personal blogs, then why do so many exist? https://medium.com/facebook-design https://medium.com/facebook-design
      - astrodust 8y ago
        It's probably because as a designer Facebook is fucking ugly and at least Medium has decent typography.
        rhizome 8y ago
        I suspect the function of design at FB is oriented more toward consistency than beauty.
        astrodust 8y ago
        If by "consistency" you mean "function over form" then sure. It's basically brutalist.
uptown 8y ago
"I did think it was cool to trade a few emails with Steve Jobs." Funny he should write that. Many, many years ago I wrote an email to John Carmack asking something about his .plan postings which must have seemed fairly mundane looking back on it now. He was nice enough to write me back. And I thought that was pretty cool too. I guess it just goes to show that even the people you respect or admire have people they respect and admire themselves.
- gallerdude 8y ago
  To add one rung above that, I remember a quote from Jobs's biography to the extent of "I would trade all of my technology for an afternoon with Socrates."
  - vijay_nair 8y ago
    For anyone wondering how a Steve-Socrates dialog might be like, I found this analogous bit of history: --- Diogenes was in Corinth when Alexander the Great sent word through a messenger asking Diogenes to come see him in Macedonia. Diogenes told the Alexander’s messenger, “Go tell your emperor that Corinth is as far from Macedonia as Macedonia is from Corinth. So if your emperor wants to see me, he can come and find me here.” Irrefutable logic and infinite self-assurance. The last bit can only come from someone who really does not need anything from anyone however high and mighty. Alexander surely was not used to being turned down. But I suppose being a warrior, he admired courage. So he went to Corinth to meet Diogenes. Diogenes was sitting in his tub and enjoying the morning sun when Alexander showed up on his high horse with a whole bunch of soldiers. After a brief introduction, Alexander proudly offered to give Diogenes anything that he needed. “Is there anything I can do for you, Sir?” asked Alexander. Diogenes replied, “Yes, you could. You are blocking the sun. Please stand aside.” --- https://deeshaa.org/2017/03/03/diogenes-of-sinope/ https://deeshaa.org/2017/03/03/diogenes-of-sinope/
    - NoB4Mouth 8y ago
      This story was one of the first i heard back in high school during my first courses of philosophy. I still admire the courage and free-thinking spirit of those Greek intellectuals. Imagine some of our current "intellectuals" been called by the White House today. They will be in the hurry to meet the "President". During the visit they will make sure they get some selfies with M. President in order to show it as a life-achievements... Vanity is a common pattern among our modern days intelligentsia
pweissbrod 8y ago
Rapid switch between charming and aggressive. Creating an environment where you surround yourself with sycophants. Punch downwards at employees working for you to assert and maintain your power while projecting you aspire for "higher standards". Set unrealistic expectations to see which folks will work nights and weekends to your order. ^^ Managers take note. These are excellent traits to climbing the corporate ladder. Just be a dick without looking like a dick.
- scarface74 8y ago
  You can only do that if you're Steve Jobs. The chances of someone ever working on a product that's going to define an industry are infinitesimal. If I got a chance to work on the iPhone in 2006, yeah I might put up with a lot of crap. If all I'm doing is writing yet another software as a service CRUD app and I have an insufferable manager - I'll jump ship so fast it will make their head spin. On second thought, thier head won't spin, they will put out a rec the day I submit my letter of resignation and forget I existed in three months.
  - sgift 8y ago
    > I'll jump ship so fast it will make their head spin. Sure, you do. Many people don't. There was this thread on Amazon today which tells me people put up with many, many abuses. Fertile ground for others to follow Jobs example.
    - mherdeg 8y ago
      for benefit of other readers, I think that's https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17062782 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17062782
      - sgift 8y ago
        It is, thanks for linking.
    - scarface74 8y ago
nimbius 8y ago
Im all for giving the dead their rest, but Steve was in my honest opinion more asshole than legend. https://arstechnica.com/cars/2016/07/steve-jobs-loophole-closed-california-wants-temporary-license-plates/ https://arstechnica.com/cars/2016/07/steve-jobs-loophole-clo... Registration funds important things like police, fire, and public education. Rolling around town as a tightwad billionaire who thinks hes too good to pay for public services is beyond the pale.
- Tloewald 8y ago
  In my opinion, folks who say they're being "honest" about something are kind of begging the question. That said, I doubt he did it to save money, although I'm surprised he allowed a dealer plate frame on the car. I think he thought they looked ugly. It may even have been a bandwidth issue — he simply didn't want to decide _which_ license plate to get and it was easier to avoid the issue altogether. He famously didn't own much furniture (at least when he was single) because he couldn't find any he liked, not because he was cheap.
- joering2 8y ago
  Steve Jobs is not dead and certainly not resting in peace aka RIP. The man was a Buddist believer. He is reborn as a bird or a stone or whatever. At least to me its inportant what after-life definition he believed in and gave it my respect.
  - deleted 8y ago
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- joshuas 8y ago
  His cars were registered, he paid the taxes, he just didn't put the license plate on.
  - mshook 8y ago
    Which allowed him to park on disabled parking spaces without being fined... https://www.cultofmac.com/2613/steve-jobs-still-parking-in-handicapped-spaces-the-pictures/2613/ https://www.cultofmac.com/2613/steve-jobs-still-parking-in-h... https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/steve-jobs-car-apple-ceo-license-plates/story?id=14834608 https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/steve-jobs-car-apple-ceo-l...
notadoc 8y ago
Facebook? No thanks
- esMazer 8y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17067129 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17067129
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staunch 8y ago
Steve Jobs and John Carmack are very similar people in a lot of ways. They're both from lower-class backgrounds, incredibly smart, had serious personality problems as children that could have landed them in prison as adults. They're both entirely "self-made" and spent their entire lives with (almost) singular focus, to the point of becoming the best in the world at what they chose to work on. My impression is that John Carmack has avoided being CEO during his career because he knows it would involve him becoming more like Steve Jobs than he wants to be. Could John Carmack have made an even bigger positive impact in the world if he had gone in Steve Jobs' direction? How much would he have had to change as a person? I suspect a lot of people would come think of him as an "asshole" if he chose to get his hands dirty with the work of a CEO. Maybe the world would be even richer than it is now but at some cost to John Carmack and (perhaps) others. In any case, they're both beautiful examples of the greatness and weakness of the partially-evolved primate we call Human.
- epicureanideal 8y ago
  Citation needed on Steve being lower class. Lower compared to what? Based on the little I know about how he grew up, it seems he was more middle class than lower, and also happened to grow up in the best place to grow up to rise with the computer industry. Middle class kids in Iowa don't live 20 minutes from Stanford, for example. So, I'd say "middle class with unusually good opportunities". I'm really not trying to say he didn't accomplish a lot, because he did, but let's not pretend he was seriously disadvantaged. Carmack seems to have more claim to being disadvantaged, although I have no idea if he is interested in making such a claim. According to some articles I just read he was arrested while trying to steal his first computer, and spent a year in juvenile prison, which generally doesn't happen to affluent people.
  - gowld 8y ago
    https://games.slashdot.org/story/99/10/15/1012230/John-Carmack-Answers https://games.slashdot.org/story/99/10/15/1012230/John-Carma... John Carmack Answers: """ ... stereotypical geek aspects to my life growing up - phreaking, hacking (nobody called it "cracking" back then), rockets, bombs, and thermite (sometimes in not-so-smart combinations), sci-fi, comic books, D&D, arcades, etc. I was sort of an amoral little jerk when I was young. I was arrogant about being smarter than other people, but unhappy that I wasn't able to spend all my time doing what I wanted. I spent a year in a juvenile home for a first offence[1] after an evaluation by a psychologist went very badly. """ [1] Per wikipedia, the offense was: burning through a window, grand theft of computers, and then presenting as autistic to the psychiatric evaluator. From my outsider view, I get the impression that Carmack "grew up" into a relative well-adjusted adult with respect for other humans, but Steve Jobs never did.
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Arjuna 8y ago
John mentioning his NeXT computer in this post reminded me of his NeXT computer purchase story from Masters of Doom: "On a cold winter day, Carmack laced up his shoes, slipped on his jacket, and headed out into the Madison snow. The town was blanketed in the stuff, cars caked in frost, trees dangling ice. Carmack endured the chill because he had no car; he'd sold the MGB long before. It was easy enough for him to shut out the weather, just like he could, when necessary, shut Tom and Romero's antics out of his mind. He was on a mission. Carmack stepped into the local bank and requested a cashier's check for $11,000. The money was for a NeXT computer, the latest machine from Steve Jobs, cocreator of Apple. The NeXT, a stealth black cube, surpassed the promise of Jobs's earlier machines by incorporating NeXTSTEP, a powerful system tailor-made for custom software development. The market for PCs and games was exploding, and this was the perfect tool to create more dynamic titles for the increasingly viable gaming platform. It was the ultimate Christmas present for the ultimate in young graphics programmers, Carmack."
- sylens 8y ago
  Thought of that very passage when I read this. It's not often you get to read a book that is so biographical about a person who is also still posting about their life on social media.
  - drzaiusapelord 8y ago
    Not really. Tech is still very young. The home PC as a popular item is only around 30-40 years old depending on your criteria. Most of these guys are still around and active. I mean, you can email Vint Cerf today or read endless books about Apple, Woz, etc. You can tweet Bill Gates, etc. The dead in this industry are the super old timers, many of whom you really never hear about, or the unfortunate souls who passed away relatively young. Jobs was only 56 when he passed away.
    - electrum 8y ago
      John Carmack was also successful at a relatively young age. He released Doom at age 23.
pandakar 8y ago
loxs 8y ago
Desktop (non mobile) link: https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=2146412825593223&id=100006735798590 https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=2146412825...
sg0 8y ago
About "reality distortion field": https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Reality_Distortion_Field.txt https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Reality_Distorti...
palisade 8y ago
This is a pretty touching story. John has definitely been one of my heroes for a long time in the field as has Steve. At the end of the day, they're human. It sucks that he regrets not getting back in touch with Steve before his passing. We can't turn back time unfortunately. I guess the lesson here is we can get focused on the hero worship and the little details and forget we are dealing with someone's ego and feelings. Some constructive criticism from John and a declined phone call broke up their relationship. :( Steve could be rough to work with but they obviously had respect for one another, so it is sad to see in the end there was some bad blood. At least John tried to get back in touch. I think the line at the end really says it all, "...but elements of the path that led to where I am today were contingent on the dents he left in the universe. I showed up for him." Edit: If you're reading this John, thank you for all the gaming joy you've given the world over the years. I remember asking you programming questions and you were always responsive. You've left dents for others too. Edit: Regarding the snide comment Steve made that you could write your own OS. He might have secretly feared you would. He knew you could.
agumonkey 8y ago
I was just giving back the "steve jobs" manga biography (yes..). I know 90% of it but ... I still read the 200 pages. He's such a special character for someone who grew up with nascent personal computer era.
dingo_bat 8y ago
Steve Jobs sounds like an amazing asshole! I wonder if all celebrity CEOs (Bezos, Gates, Zuck, etc.) are like this in private interactions.
- wilsonnb 8y ago
  Probably not, at least not as much. There's a reason Steve Jobs has always been notorious for this sort of behavior.
  - gowld 8y ago
    All of those CEOs are famous (and more) for being assholes. What made Steve Jobs different is that he also inspired a bizarre sort of love -- People want to be Gates/Zuck/Bezos, but no one dreams of working for them. And no one has a religious zeal for evangelizing their those CEOs' transparent marketing lies like they do for Jobs'.
  - GeekyBear 8y ago
    Does Gates and Ballmer seeking to screw Paul Allen out of his equity in Microsoft because Allen was distracted while in cancer treatment ring a bell?
- puzzle 8y ago
  The most concise, yet illuminating description I have heard about ongoing relationships with Jobs is something similar to "dealing with Khrushchev, but without the shoe antics", i.e. that, to him, everything was a zero-sum game, all the time.
- JohnCarmack 8y ago
  Zuck is very courteous and open to other people's perspectives. Gates was sharp and no-nonsense when I had a meeting with him. I haven't met Bezos.
  - saagarjha 8y ago
    You're probably being truthful here, but then again, would you say anything else if you weren't part of a subsidiary of Facebook?
ceronman 8y ago
A question from someone who has never seen a NeXT computer: How is it possible that Doom was developed on NeXT? As far as I know, Doom was first released for MS-DOS. Wouldn't be really hard to develop a MS-DOS game from another operative system and another CPU architecture? Specially at the time without engines abstracting platform details?
- busterarm 8y ago
  http://doom.wikia.com/wiki/NEXTSTEP http://doom.wikia.com/wiki/NEXTSTEP From my memory of reading Masters of Doom, they developed for where they expected the consumer PC hardware market to be at the time of release. If you wanted that hardware at the time they were developing, $10k Next workstations were your best bet. When Doom came out, I (and most other folks) needed a new PC. Ports to multiple platforms were pretty common in those days with games and that's something the team had a lot of experience with from their years at Softdisk. Having looked at the game code, it's not really terribly difficult.
  - kyberias 8y ago
    I don't think so. It's just that the development environment was so much more productive on NeXT.
    - saagarjha 8y ago
      After having a very recent encounter with developing software on NeXTSTEP 3.3, I'll have to agree with you. For how old it is, it held up pretty well!
  - rasz 8y ago
    Nah, it wasnt about raw speed, Doom doesnt even run all that well on next, its slower than 386DX40 on emulator trying to approximate NeXTcube Turbo speed.
- jacquesm 8y ago
  That's called porting. And whether or not it is a lot of work depends on how much foresight you had about doing that at some point in the future. If you didn't then it would be a very large amount of work because platform assumptions would be baked in all over the place. If you did - and you were a disciplined programmer - then it could be reasonably quick. I've written software that ported cleanly between Windows and SGI Irix, the original was built for the SGI and when windows capabilities caught up it was relatively straightforward to port, I tried very hard to keep all the platform dependent stuff in a single file so I knew exactly which bits to leave untouched and where to use the chainsaw.
macros 8y ago
Every time I see one of his posts on facebook.com I cringe and think wistfully about the .plan days.
horsecaptin 8y ago
Anyone else notice how it is impossible to select and copy text?
- jjrh 8y ago
  yeah - drives me nuts because I have a habit of highlighting text while I read it.
- AlexeyBrin 8y ago
  That's because the link points to the mobile version, try the desktop one https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=2146412825593223&id=100006735798590 https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=2146412825.... I can select and copy the text just fine.
ProudNounDUzber 8y ago
Now I just want a God of War game with Steve as Kratos and John as Atreus.
ProudNounDUzber 8y ago
yep
xenadu02 8y ago
By all accounts (and I have no personal knowledge here) Steve could be a jerk, or at least very demanding. Steve was definitely successful. Being a jerk != being successful! Having a great product eye and good design sense are excellent traits to emulate. Having "strong opinions, loosely held" is another great trait to emulate. Being honest and direct when something isn't good is also a great trait to emulate. Demanding people do their best is another great trait to emulate. Being a jerk (at least under certain circumstances) is orthogonal and unrelated. Unfortunately far too many people mistake correlation for causation and think being a demanding jerk is the key to success. First: you are no Steve Jobs. Second: that isn't what made him successful. (Being direct and brutally honest can also come off as being a jerk. We have lots of pressure to be positive / supportive and avoid social conflict. It is always easier to say "that's great" or "nice job" than give actual constructive feedback, especially when the recipients are likely to be defensive about it. It is critical for startups to avoid this and be brutally honest with themselves about the product!)
- andrei_says_ 8y ago
  Thank you for this. Getting lost in ego is a common trap for smart people in powerful positions. One can be brutally honest in a nonpersonal way, with non-sarcastic humor, with lightness and friendliness. Including appreciation for already existing effort, adding reasoning, logic, and vision in the communication go a long way. Edit: added appreciation :)
  - dhimes 8y ago
    Indeed. Diplomacy is worth a lot.
- baxtr 8y ago
  Yes, I think he was successful even though he was a jerk from time to time. That trait surely cost him some years. But it also shows how smart he must have been to compensate for that.
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r3vo 8y ago
It seems pretty likely to me that Steve Jobs was a high functioning sociopath. The line about how his demeanor changed dramatically when Carmack's wife asked for a favor was indicative to me. "One time, my wife, then fiancée, and I were meeting with Steve at Apple, and he wanted me to do a keynote that happened to be scheduled on the same day as our wedding. With a big smile and full of charm, he suggested that we postpone it. We declined, but he kept pressing. Eventually my wife countered with a suggestion that if he really wanted “her” John so much, he should loan John Lassiter to her media company for a day of consulting. Steve went from full charm to ice cold really damn quick. I didn’t do that keynote." I find sociopaths fascinating, but I would sure never want to work for one. It must take an incredible amount of calculation and self discipline to keep a semblance of normality for an incredibly high profile sociopath like Jobs. On a side note, the late Pieter Hintjens of ZeroMQ wrote an excellent book about psychopaths available online for free here. https://legacy.gitbook.com/book/hintjens/psychopathcode/deta.. https://legacy.gitbook.com/book/hintjens/psychopathcode/deta.... Also want to disclaim that I am not a psychiatrist and my opinion of Job's sociopathy is only my speculation.
- fsloth 8y ago
  If psychiatrists generally frown upon diagnosing people who are not their patients, as a non-expert, I would be fairly careful in labeling now deceased people based on anecdotal data. Especially if I was not familiar with the person. Jobs had obvious pathological facets in his interactions with other people - but inventing labels on top of the anecdotes really does not add value in any way. Mr. Hintjens was not a psychiatric expert either. That he wrote a book on the subject, is not entirely to his credit. As such, he could have just described "predatory behavior". There is popular material available on psychopathy and socipathy written by subject matter experts. For example "The Psychopath Inside: A Neuroscientist's Personal Journey into the Dark Side of the Brain" by James Fallon is written by a neuroscientist who accidentally discovers he is a psychopath.
  - taneq 8y ago
    Generally I agree with you but there's a really, really clear pattern in everything anyone's ever written about an encounter with Steve Jobs. Over the space of decades he was unpredictably charming or abusive, a consummate manipulator and user, completely untrustworthy and seemingly without a conscience. It's not a clinical diagnosis and should never be treated as such. But after you've run into a couple of people in your own life with those same attributes and that same pattern of behaviour, that's plenty to go on.
redm 8y ago
I suppose its inevitable that we dissect the lives and actions of "great" people like Steve Jobs. The fact is that no one is perfect, and those who usually accomplish great things have fascinating lives and personality flaws. At the end of the day, you take the good with the bad, its a package deal, and call it Human.
txsh 8y ago
Cool anecdotes. I wonder who he stole them from.
- saagarjha 8y ago
  What makes you think that they're not genuine?
  - busterarm 8y ago
    It's a veiled reference to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZeniMax_v._Oculus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZeniMax_v._Oculus
hwestiii 8y ago
This pretty much confirms my suspicion that Apple is|was not a company I'd ever want to work at. Making cool stuff might be cool, but I don't want to sacrifice large chunks of my life for it.
dchichkov 8y ago
The impact that John Carmack has on the industry is just ridiculous. Apple, NVIDIA, Facebook. As a teenage software engineer, he was a revered figure to me (and I wonder to how many others). I've had an opportunity to work with his source code for a few months - it was a thing of beauty. If you want to learn from him, read his source code and essays. They are full of brilliance.
webbles 8y ago
I used to respect Carmack, then he joined Facebook.
crusso 8y ago
The Steve Jobs "hero / shithead" rollercoaster was real That's funny. I had a boss at Apple when I did some contracting there in 1999 who told me that Jobs asked him, "You wanna be a hero?" before giving him a project. My boss told me, "Yep, one day you're a hero, the next day you're a shithead."
remir 8y ago
I think it's weird how Apple, even to this day, took some of Jobs's "darker" traits as if he still runs the place. For example, a couple of years ago, I remember a game dev saying that they made one of the top selling game on iOS and received plenty of attention/help from Apple's engineers at WWDC, but when they made an Android version of their game, suddenly it was radio silence with Apple. This is the kind of thing Jobs would have done, but now that he's gone, I'm disappointed that Apple did not evolve past this kind of behavior.
- rimliu 8y ago
  Would it be any different had he not released the Android version? Or was the expectation to be invited to the every WWDC from then on?
  - remir 8y ago
    I'm sure it would have been different, yes. I don't know if they expected to be invited to every WWDC, but I remember the developer saying he had good access at Apple because they loved his app so much. When he announced his Android version, Apple kinda stopped returning his calls and engineers would not give him as much time for questions and help. He went from VIP to nobody.
Rainymood 8y ago
Honestly, I think this is what it's like to be in an abusive relationship. You know he's abusive and yet you still stay in the relationship with him/her because of all the good times and you delude yourself into thinking that's OK ... I think this gives a rarely glimpse into the rationalizations that happen in the mind of people that are in abusive relationships. From the outside it is trivial to see that the relationship dynamic is abusive but when you're in it ... suddenly it's OK even for one of the most renowned programmers of all time?
- fsloth 8y ago
  Having a relationship with the CEO of one of the most important companies in your field is a bit different from a plain frienship or sexual pairing. Just knowing the guy and engaging with him time to time dilutes the concept of an abusive relationship.
  - Ari_Ugwu 8y ago
    I'm not so sure. Reading John Carmack's story (and others) it seems that Steve Jobs was able to convince people to enjoy the abuse and remember it with revery. That is a special kind of talent, but as others have mentioned it seems to attract and inspire the worst kind of corporate scum. The places where it doesn't seem like an abusive relationship it most certainly seems like the way a feudal tyrant would be behave.
    - fsloth 8y ago
      There is a difference between just being a douchebag, and actually sparring people. Psychological pressure is not just a bad thing. Too much of it, yes, and used for selfish reasons, yes - but - there is a net positive effect of making people defend their position and holding them accountable for their views. From what I've read Jobs combined the positive sparring attitude as well as negative I-must-have-my-catharsis-by-abusing-you as well. An intellectually keen sparring partner is something most people cherish. Given this sparring partner is Jobs there is a random reward/punishment element involved - is he going to cherish me or banish me? We all know this random reward system is the key to addictive interactions. Jobs was probably a keen intellectual sparring partner combined with an emotional game of chance. No wonder people revered him. I think the 'asshole steve jobs' reverence goes into the same pile with Gordon Gekko admiration. The problem with Jobs is he was a non-fictional character and people the lizard-people kind of types seem to completely misunderstand what was the good part in him as a leader.
DonHopkins 8y ago
On October 25 1988, I gave Steve Jobs a demo of pie menus, NeWS, UniPress Emacs and HyperTIES at the Educom conference in Washington DC. His reaction was to jump up and down, point at the screen, and yell “That sucks! That sucks! Wow, that’s neat! That sucks!” I tried explaining how we'd performed an experiment proving pie menus were faster than linear menus [1], but he insisted the liner menus in NeXT Step were the best possible menus ever. But who was I to rain on his parade, two weeks after the first release of NeXT Step 0.8? (Up to that time, it was the most hyped piece of vaporware ever, and doubters were wearing t-shirts saying "NeVR Step"!) [1] https://medium.com/@donhopkins/an-empirical-comparison-of-pie-vs-linear-menus-466c6fdbba4b https://medium.com/@donhopkins/an-empirical-comparison-of-pi...
- justin66 8y ago
  I'll have to read the article. I'm a little surprised that pie menus never caught on even in the era of tablets, where they seem extremely well-suited.
  - panic 8y ago
    They do see some use in games, where you have control over all the menu items. Long strings can break pie menu layout pretty badly, especially if you bring up the menu near the edge of the screen.
    - taspeotis 8y ago
      Indeed, see here [1] for some examples. [1] https://www.google.com.au/search?q=battlefield+command+menu&tbm=isch https://www.google.com.au/search?q=battlefield+command+menu&...
    - DonHopkins 8y ago
      That's all true! Here's an illustrated transcript of a video (and the video itself) demonstrating the pie menus (and SimAntics visual programming language) in The Sims! The Sims Pie Menus: https://medium.com/@donhopkins/the-sims-pie-menus-49ca02a74da3 https://medium.com/@donhopkins/the-sims-pie-menus-49ca02a74d... And this discusses the issues you raised and more: OLPC Sugar Pie Menu Discussion: https://medium.com/@donhopkins/olpc-sugar-pie-menu-discussion-738577e54516 https://medium.com/@donhopkins/olpc-sugar-pie-menu-discussio...
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ksec 8y ago
@John Carmack, My biggest question is, why now? I mean what trigger you to post this / share this pieces about Steve Jobs? The reason I ask was because only a few week ago I posted a few comments about the state of Mac, Gaming on Mac and Gaming as iOS App Revenue. In the age of E-Sports and Gaming is the sole segment that is pushing / slowing / stopping the decline of PC sales, I wonder if Apple would take gaming a little more seriously, since Steve Jobs deleted all Gaming DNA in Apple once he returned from NeXT. And I said I wish John Carmack would comment a bit on Steve Jobs given he has been on Stage a few times in Keynote, and has surprisingly never shared any stories since he passed away. But I think this confirms my suspicious >Several things over the years made me conclude that, at his core, Steve didn’t think very highly of games, and always wished they weren’t as important to his platforms as they turned out to be. I never took it personally. And it is a little strange since Steve worked at Atari.
- _arvin 8y ago
  I came across this HN comment that might answer your question: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17069109 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17069109 or you can see Carmack's original tweet here: https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/993142700374462464 https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/993142700374462464

1075 points by AJRF 8y ago

"After the public cleared out and the rest of us were gathered in front of the stage, I started urgently going on about how web apps are terrible, and wouldn’t show the true potential of the device. We could do so much more with real native access!" Where was Carmack when everyone was forcing us to listen to "web apps are the future of mobile"? He could have ended that HN debated instantly.

robotresearcher 8y ago
> Where was Carmack He was in the debate at the origin, speaking firmly and directly to the key players, as your quote shows.
overcast 8y ago
Web apps are the future, how many more stupid native apps must I install to get basic textual and photo information? The only right answer is universal apps(the web).
- untog 8y ago
  Any absolute answer is wrong here. Native apps will likely always have a place when OS/UI integration are paramount. But web apps will become a lot more prevalent than they have been previous as more and more hooks are exposed to the native core. Which is a good thing for everyone.
  - XorNot 8y ago
    I'd argue the issue is that a lot of "native" apps are basically a webapp in a native wrapper on mobile (and desktop now - thanks Electron!). I don't really know the best way to delineate what should and shouldn't be a web app, beyond a vague notion that my daily news rotation should be in the browser.
  - taoistextremist 8y ago
    Yeah, there's certain things that native apps make a lot more sense for (e.g. messaging apps like Facebook Messenger where you want notifications to come up similar to text messages), but certain things really don't need anything more than the mobile website you look at (for example, at least for some people, mobile Wikipedia over the app).
    - untog 8y ago
      > (e.g. messaging apps like Facebook Messenger where you want notifications to come up similar to text messages) Actually I'd argue the web is great for that too. On Android you can already implement a messaging app, complete with notifications, on the web. I wish people like my bank used it. I don't want to install their native app because I barely ever use it, but would I like to get urgent notifications from them every now and then? You bet I would.
      - taoistextremist 8y ago
        I personally don't like relying on my browser for notifications. I like having native apps because usually fine tuning notifications for them is easier in that respect, things that while I imagine are possible through the web browser, probably aren't going to be done on a web app. It's also just an organizational thing since I don't like to have a list of a bunch of tabs, but having a handful of apps isn't too bad to navigate through. Just because there's been a lot of progress in making web apps do things that were more natural for native apps, doesn't mean that it's the best way to go about something. I get the wish for more support for web apps, though. I just switched over from a near 4-year-old phone that was replete with security updates and other un-removable stuff in the storage which prevented me from having a lot of apps installed (especially as so many insist on a large footprint in internal storage), so I increasingly used my web browser to access things. After the switch, though, you can bet I downloaded a bunch of apps I had deleted.
- redial 8y ago
  How many websites are you gonna have to "install" to get basic textual and photo information, whatever that means?
  - overcast 8y ago
    Zero? Websites don't ask to install when I visit them.
- xfer 8y ago
  What's "basic textual and photo information"? You have already installed one called the browser, to get some information.
  - overcast 8y ago
    Do I need to explain what text, and photos are?
  - passiveincomelg 8y ago
    Yes, and the browser should be enough in many cases, but the holder of that information tries to force their app on everyone. One of the most annoying examples of that for me is accepting a new connection on LinkedIn from my phone. I want to tap on the link in the email and be done. Instead it redirects me to the store, I close it, try again. Sometimes it works, sometimes I give up and do it later. Another example is Facebook. :)
- ksk 8y ago
  >how many more stupid native apps must I install to get basic textual and photo information? You're conflating the web with web apps. Those are two separate things. If web apps are to be the future, bloating up the browser to the size of an OS to get native-app level functionality sounds like a dystopian future to me. I don't want my browser to access my GPU, I don't want by browser leaking my LAN IP, I don't want my browser communicating with USB devices on my machine, etc, etc... Also, nobody (yet) has been able to create a GUI/Client App standard for cross-platform delivery that performs well across different hardware architectures and operating systems which are designed and optimized for completely different things. That makes sense because the "one size fits all" way of doing things is terrible for performance among other things. >The only right answer is universal apps(the web). The only "right" answer is that we should tolerate specific web apps only when the benefits outweigh the costs.
sp332 8y ago
I think the current course, which is making decent web APIs that open the "potential of the device" to web apps, is going to get us the advantages of both.
ropeadopepope 8y ago
> Where was Carmack when everyone was forcing us to listen to "web apps are the future of mobile"? > He could have ended that HN debated instantly. This is going to be difficult to hear, but online debates are essentially for entertainment purposes only. Arguments had on the internet rarely affect our industry as a whole. Arguments had in person between people of power and influence are far more effective, time efficient and can affect entire industries (even countries!) in profound ways. No amount of technology beats face to face communication. No amount of technology replaces individual power and influence.
- MperorM 8y ago
  Of course they don't affect the industry as a whole, however they do affect the people who read HN. Reading a debate on the dangers of over-reliance of DOckers today made me realize that I should consider alternatives for my next project. Reading about a new awesome technology, might make someone go out and do a project with said technology. While that doesn't affect the industry as a whole, the debates sure are useful for the people reading and participating in them
- duncan_bayne 8y ago
  I can attest to this, having spent a great deal of effort here and on a W3C list arguing against EME. I was aware of the "online argumentation is entertainment" rule but hadn't appreciated the rule's broadness until then. A good rule of thumb is that a "consultative process" is a smokescreen unless the people being consulted have voting rights amongst those doing the consulting.
Tloewald 8y ago
It was quite obvious to us at the time that Apple was planning to provide a native SDK but hoped to mollify third-party developers with "web apps" while Apple got their house in order (having barely managed to get the phone done on schedule). As it happened, the reaction to web apps was so negative they ended up releasing their SDK hastily (which anyone who went through the pain of using it for the first couple of years can attest to). One of the common mistakes people have when discussing Steve Jobs is mistaking what he said for what he believed. (We see this confusion constantly in the news, where "The Whitehouse believes" is used to describe something in a press release.) He knew how to stay on message, and he knew that saying "our SDK will probably be released in alpha form in a year and be somewhat stable in two years" was off message. It's also fairly clear that if he had had a bunch of arguments about something and reached some provisional conclusion, he wasn't going to have much patience with an argument he had previously encountered and beaten to death from someone random.
- BearOso 8y ago
  He knew how to stay on message, and he knew that saying "our SDK will probably be released in alpha form in a year and be somewhat stable in two years" was off message. Reminds me of “we couldn’t get the fingerprint sensor under the screen working, so we had to quickly come up with an alternate authentication method, and that required this hideous notch” vs “Face ID is the newest, best thing ever.” They still try to hide it when things don’t go their way.
  - bobbles 8y ago
    Spoken like a true 'never used an iPhone x' user
  - saagarjha 8y ago
    > we couldn’t get the fingerprint sensor under the screen working, so we had to quickly come up with an alternate authentication method, and that required this hideous notch I think you should try using iPhone X before you comment on it.
ojr 8y ago
depends on the team, a web app can still run, 32 bit apps like the one Carmack built are deprecated
- saagarjha 8y ago
  Not necessarily true. Given source code, it's often possible to create binaries that run on modern computers, and it's often the case that web apps stop working because something they depended on disappeared or someone broke backwards compatibility.
- nto09eint3nt 8y ago
  You know, until the server for the app is taken offline, which is far more frequent of an occurrence than a big move like taking your app from 32 to 64-bit which has been spread over literally a decade.

jakear 8y ago

For those who are unable/unwilling to access Facebook: John Carmack Steve Jobs My wife once asked me “Why do you drop what you are doing when Steve Jobs asks you to do something? You don’t do that for anyone else.” It is worth thinking about. As a teenage Apple computer fan, Jobs and Wozniak were revered figures for me, and wanting an Apple 2 was a defining characteristic of several years of my childhood. Later on, seeing NeXT at a computer show just as I was selling my first commercial software felt like a vision into the future. (But $10k+, yikes!) As Id Software grew successful through Commander Keen and Wolfenstein 3D, the first major personal purchase I made wasn’t a car, but rather a NeXT computer. It turned out to be genuinely valuable for our software development, and we moved the entire company onto NeXT hardware. We loved our NeXTs, and we wanted to launch Doom with an explicit “Developed on NeXT computers” logo during the startup process, but when we asked, the request was denied. Some time after launch, when Doom had begun to make its cultural mark, we heard that Steve had changed his mind and would be happy to have NeXT branding on it, but that ship had sailed. I did think it was cool to trade a few emails with Steve Jobs. Several things over the years made me conclude that, at his core, Steve didn’t think very highly of games, and always wished they weren’t as important to his platforms as they turned out to be. I never took it personally. When NeXT managed to sort of reverse-acquire Apple and Steve was back in charge, I was excited by the possibilities of a resurgent Apple with the virtues of NeXT in a mainstream platform. I was brought in to talk about the needs of games in general, but I made it my mission to get Apple to adopt OpenGL as their 3D graphics API. I had a lot of arguments with Steve. Part of his method, at least with me, was to deride contemporary options and dare me to tell him differently. They might be pragmatic, but couldn’t actually be good. “I have Pixar. We will make something [an API] that is actually good.” It was often frustrating, because he could talk, with complete confidence, about things he was just plain wrong about, like the price of memory for video cards and the amount of system bandwidth exploitable by the AltiVec extensions. But when I knew what I was talking about, I would stand my ground against anyone. When Steve did make up his mind, he was decisive about it. Dictates were made, companies were acquired, keynotes were scheduled, and the reality distortion field kicked in, making everything else that was previously considered into obviously terrible ideas. I consider this one of the biggest indirect impacts on the industry that I have had. OpenGL never seriously threatened D3D on PC, but it was critical at Apple, and that meant that it remained enough of a going concern to be the clear choice when mobile devices started getting GPUs. While long in the tooth now, it was so much better than what we would have gotten if half a dozen SoC vendors rolled their own API back at the dawn of the mobile age. I wound up doing several keynotes with Steve, and it was always a crazy fire drill with not enough time to do things right, and generally requiring heroic effort from many people to make it happen at all. I tend to think this was also a calculated part of his method. My first impression of “Keynote Steve” was him berating the poor stage hands over “This Home Depot shit” that was rolling out the display stand with the new Mac, very much not to his satisfaction. His complaints had a valid point, and he improved the quality of the presentation by caring about details, but I wouldn’t have wanted to work for him in that capacity. One time, my wife, then fiancé, and I were meeting with Steve at Apple, and he wanted me to do a keynote that happened to be scheduled on the same day as our wedding. With a big smile and full of charm, he suggested that we postpone it. We declined, but he kept pressing. Eventually my wife countered with a suggestion that if he really wanted “her” John so much, he should loan John Lassiter to her media company for a day of consulting. Steve went from full charm to ice cold really damn quick. I didn’t do that keynote. When I was preparing an early technology demo of Doom 3 for a keynote in Japan, I was having a hard time dealing with some of the managers involved that were insisting that I change the demo because “Steve doesn’t like blood.” I knew that Doom 3 wasn’t to his taste, but that wasn’t the point of doing the demo. I brought it to Steve, with all the relevant people on the thread. He replied to everyone with: “I trust you John, do whatever you think is great.” That goes a long way, and nobody said a thing after that. When my wife and I later started building games for feature phones (DoomRPG! Orcs&Elves!), I advocated repeatedly to Steve that an Apple phone could be really great. Every time there was a rumor that Apple might be working on a phone, I would refine the pitch to him. Once he called me at home on a Sunday (How did he even get my number?) to ask a question, and I enthused at length about the possibilities. I never got brought into the fold, but I was excited when the iPhone actually did see the light of day. A giant (for the time) true color display with a GPU! We could do some amazing things with this! Steve first talked about application development for iPhone at the some keynote I was demonstrating the new ID Tech 5 rendering engine on Mac, so I was in the front row. When he started going on about “Web Apps”, I was (reasonably quietly) going “Booo!!!”. After the public cleared out and the rest of us were gathered in front of the stage, I started urgently going on about how web apps are terrible, and wouldn’t show the true potential of the device. We could do so much more with real native access! Steve responded with a line he had used before: “Bad apps could bring down cell phone towers.” I hated that line. He could have just said “We aren’t ready”, and that would have been fine. I was making some guesses, but I argued that the iPhone hardware and OS provided sufficient protection for native apps. I pointed at a nearby engineer and said “Don’t you have an MMU and process isolation on the iPhone now?” He had a wide eyed look of don’t-bring-me-into-this, but I eventually got a “yes” out of him. I said that OS-X was surely being used for things that were more security critical than a phone, and if Apple couldn’t provide enough security there, they had bigger problems. He came back with a snide “You’re a smart guy John, why don’t you write a new OS?” At the time, my thought was, “Fuck you, Steve.”. People were backing away from us. If Steve was mad, Apple employees didn’t want him to associate the sight of them with the experience. Afterwards, one of the execs assured me that “Steve appreciates vigorous conversation”. Still deeply disappointed about it, I made some comments that got picked up by the press. Steve didn’t appreciate that. The Steve Jobs “hero / shithead” rollercoaster was real, and after riding high for a long time, I was now on the down side. Someone told me that Steve explicitly instructed them to not give me access to the early iPhone SDK when it finally was ready. I wound up writing several successful iPhone apps on the side (all of which are now gone due to dropping 32 bit support, which saddens me), and I had many strong allies inside Apple, but I was on the outs with Steve. The last iOS product I worked on was Rage for iOS, which I thought set a new bar for visual richness on mobile, and also supported some brand new features like TV out. I heard that it was well received inside Apple. I was debriefing the team after the launch when I got a call. I was busy, so I declined it. A few minutes later someone came in and said that Steve was going to call me. Oops. Everyone had a chuckle about me “hanging up on Steve Jobs”, but that turned out to be my last interaction with him. As the public story of his failing health progressed, I started several emails to try to say something meaningful and positive to part on, but I never got through them, and I regret it. I corroborate many of the negative character traits that he was infamous for, but elements of the path that led to where I am today were contingent on the dents he left in the universe. I showed up for him.

AdmiralAsshat 8y ago

Some great anecdotes in there. As an aside, surely a person of Carmack's stature and knowledge would have a dedicated blog. I have to wonder if his decision to post so many of these wonderful stories on Facebook might be due to some "pressure" from his employer.

chickenfries 8y ago
That seems like a HUGE reach to me. Not every technical person is a FOSS warrior. Would you say the same thing if he posted on Medium?
- aetherson 8y ago
  He doesn't work for Medium.
  - chickenfries 8y ago
    Ok, well, if this is really some big ploy by Facebook to now allow their employees to have personal blogs, then why do so many exist? https://medium.com/facebook-design https://medium.com/facebook-design
    - astrodust 8y ago
      It's probably because as a designer Facebook is fucking ugly and at least Medium has decent typography.
      - rhizome 8y ago
        I suspect the function of design at FB is oriented more toward consistency than beauty.
        astrodust 8y ago
        If by "consistency" you mean "function over form" then sure. It's basically brutalist.

uptown 8y ago

"I did think it was cool to trade a few emails with Steve Jobs." Funny he should write that. Many, many years ago I wrote an email to John Carmack asking something about his .plan postings which must have seemed fairly mundane looking back on it now. He was nice enough to write me back. And I thought that was pretty cool too. I guess it just goes to show that even the people you respect or admire have people they respect and admire themselves.

gallerdude 8y ago
To add one rung above that, I remember a quote from Jobs's biography to the extent of "I would trade all of my technology for an afternoon with Socrates."
- vijay_nair 8y ago
  For anyone wondering how a Steve-Socrates dialog might be like, I found this analogous bit of history: --- Diogenes was in Corinth when Alexander the Great sent word through a messenger asking Diogenes to come see him in Macedonia. Diogenes told the Alexander’s messenger, “Go tell your emperor that Corinth is as far from Macedonia as Macedonia is from Corinth. So if your emperor wants to see me, he can come and find me here.” Irrefutable logic and infinite self-assurance. The last bit can only come from someone who really does not need anything from anyone however high and mighty. Alexander surely was not used to being turned down. But I suppose being a warrior, he admired courage. So he went to Corinth to meet Diogenes. Diogenes was sitting in his tub and enjoying the morning sun when Alexander showed up on his high horse with a whole bunch of soldiers. After a brief introduction, Alexander proudly offered to give Diogenes anything that he needed. “Is there anything I can do for you, Sir?” asked Alexander. Diogenes replied, “Yes, you could. You are blocking the sun. Please stand aside.” --- https://deeshaa.org/2017/03/03/diogenes-of-sinope/ https://deeshaa.org/2017/03/03/diogenes-of-sinope/
  - NoB4Mouth 8y ago
    This story was one of the first i heard back in high school during my first courses of philosophy. I still admire the courage and free-thinking spirit of those Greek intellectuals. Imagine some of our current "intellectuals" been called by the White House today. They will be in the hurry to meet the "President". During the visit they will make sure they get some selfies with M. President in order to show it as a life-achievements... Vanity is a common pattern among our modern days intelligentsia

pweissbrod 8y ago

Rapid switch between charming and aggressive. Creating an environment where you surround yourself with sycophants. Punch downwards at employees working for you to assert and maintain your power while projecting you aspire for "higher standards". Set unrealistic expectations to see which folks will work nights and weekends to your order. ^^ Managers take note. These are excellent traits to climbing the corporate ladder. Just be a dick without looking like a dick.

scarface74 8y ago
You can only do that if you're Steve Jobs. The chances of someone ever working on a product that's going to define an industry are infinitesimal. If I got a chance to work on the iPhone in 2006, yeah I might put up with a lot of crap. If all I'm doing is writing yet another software as a service CRUD app and I have an insufferable manager - I'll jump ship so fast it will make their head spin. On second thought, thier head won't spin, they will put out a rec the day I submit my letter of resignation and forget I existed in three months.
- sgift 8y ago
  > I'll jump ship so fast it will make their head spin. Sure, you do. Many people don't. There was this thread on Amazon today which tells me people put up with many, many abuses. Fertile ground for others to follow Jobs example.
  - mherdeg 8y ago
    for benefit of other readers, I think that's https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17062782 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17062782
    - sgift 8y ago
      It is, thanks for linking.
  - scarface74 8y ago

nimbius 8y ago

Im all for giving the dead their rest, but Steve was in my honest opinion more asshole than legend. https://arstechnica.com/cars/2016/07/steve-jobs-loophole-closed-california-wants-temporary-license-plates/ https://arstechnica.com/cars/2016/07/steve-jobs-loophole-clo... Registration funds important things like police, fire, and public education. Rolling around town as a tightwad billionaire who thinks hes too good to pay for public services is beyond the pale.

Tloewald 8y ago
In my opinion, folks who say they're being "honest" about something are kind of begging the question. That said, I doubt he did it to save money, although I'm surprised he allowed a dealer plate frame on the car. I think he thought they looked ugly. It may even have been a bandwidth issue — he simply didn't want to decide _which_ license plate to get and it was easier to avoid the issue altogether. He famously didn't own much furniture (at least when he was single) because he couldn't find any he liked, not because he was cheap.
joering2 8y ago
Steve Jobs is not dead and certainly not resting in peace aka RIP. The man was a Buddist believer. He is reborn as a bird or a stone or whatever. At least to me its inportant what after-life definition he believed in and gave it my respect.
- deleted 8y ago
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joshuas 8y ago
His cars were registered, he paid the taxes, he just didn't put the license plate on.
- mshook 8y ago
  Which allowed him to park on disabled parking spaces without being fined... https://www.cultofmac.com/2613/steve-jobs-still-parking-in-handicapped-spaces-the-pictures/2613/ https://www.cultofmac.com/2613/steve-jobs-still-parking-in-h... https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/steve-jobs-car-apple-ceo-license-plates/story?id=14834608 https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/steve-jobs-car-apple-ceo-l...

notadoc 8y ago

Facebook? No thanks

esMazer 8y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17067129 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17067129

deleted 8y ago

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staunch 8y ago

Steve Jobs and John Carmack are very similar people in a lot of ways. They're both from lower-class backgrounds, incredibly smart, had serious personality problems as children that could have landed them in prison as adults. They're both entirely "self-made" and spent their entire lives with (almost) singular focus, to the point of becoming the best in the world at what they chose to work on. My impression is that John Carmack has avoided being CEO during his career because he knows it would involve him becoming more like Steve Jobs than he wants to be. Could John Carmack have made an even bigger positive impact in the world if he had gone in Steve Jobs' direction? How much would he have had to change as a person? I suspect a lot of people would come think of him as an "asshole" if he chose to get his hands dirty with the work of a CEO. Maybe the world would be even richer than it is now but at some cost to John Carmack and (perhaps) others. In any case, they're both beautiful examples of the greatness and weakness of the partially-evolved primate we call Human.

epicureanideal 8y ago
Citation needed on Steve being lower class. Lower compared to what? Based on the little I know about how he grew up, it seems he was more middle class than lower, and also happened to grow up in the best place to grow up to rise with the computer industry. Middle class kids in Iowa don't live 20 minutes from Stanford, for example. So, I'd say "middle class with unusually good opportunities". I'm really not trying to say he didn't accomplish a lot, because he did, but let's not pretend he was seriously disadvantaged. Carmack seems to have more claim to being disadvantaged, although I have no idea if he is interested in making such a claim. According to some articles I just read he was arrested while trying to steal his first computer, and spent a year in juvenile prison, which generally doesn't happen to affluent people.
- gowld 8y ago
  https://games.slashdot.org/story/99/10/15/1012230/John-Carmack-Answers https://games.slashdot.org/story/99/10/15/1012230/John-Carma... John Carmack Answers: """ ... stereotypical geek aspects to my life growing up - phreaking, hacking (nobody called it "cracking" back then), rockets, bombs, and thermite (sometimes in not-so-smart combinations), sci-fi, comic books, D&D, arcades, etc. I was sort of an amoral little jerk when I was young. I was arrogant about being smarter than other people, but unhappy that I wasn't able to spend all my time doing what I wanted. I spent a year in a juvenile home for a first offence[1] after an evaluation by a psychologist went very badly. """ [1] Per wikipedia, the offense was: burning through a window, grand theft of computers, and then presenting as autistic to the psychiatric evaluator. From my outsider view, I get the impression that Carmack "grew up" into a relative well-adjusted adult with respect for other humans, but Steve Jobs never did.

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Arjuna 8y ago

John mentioning his NeXT computer in this post reminded me of his NeXT computer purchase story from Masters of Doom: "On a cold winter day, Carmack laced up his shoes, slipped on his jacket, and headed out into the Madison snow. The town was blanketed in the stuff, cars caked in frost, trees dangling ice. Carmack endured the chill because he had no car; he'd sold the MGB long before. It was easy enough for him to shut out the weather, just like he could, when necessary, shut Tom and Romero's antics out of his mind. He was on a mission. Carmack stepped into the local bank and requested a cashier's check for $11,000. The money was for a NeXT computer, the latest machine from Steve Jobs, cocreator of Apple. The NeXT, a stealth black cube, surpassed the promise of Jobs's earlier machines by incorporating NeXTSTEP, a powerful system tailor-made for custom software development. The market for PCs and games was exploding, and this was the perfect tool to create more dynamic titles for the increasingly viable gaming platform. It was the ultimate Christmas present for the ultimate in young graphics programmers, Carmack."

sylens 8y ago
Thought of that very passage when I read this. It's not often you get to read a book that is so biographical about a person who is also still posting about their life on social media.
- drzaiusapelord 8y ago
  Not really. Tech is still very young. The home PC as a popular item is only around 30-40 years old depending on your criteria. Most of these guys are still around and active. I mean, you can email Vint Cerf today or read endless books about Apple, Woz, etc. You can tweet Bill Gates, etc. The dead in this industry are the super old timers, many of whom you really never hear about, or the unfortunate souls who passed away relatively young. Jobs was only 56 when he passed away.
  - electrum 8y ago
    John Carmack was also successful at a relatively young age. He released Doom at age 23.

pandakar 8y ago

loxs 8y ago

Desktop (non mobile) link: https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=2146412825593223&id=100006735798590 https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=2146412825...

sg0 8y ago

About "reality distortion field": https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Reality_Distortion_Field.txt https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Reality_Distorti...

palisade 8y ago

This is a pretty touching story. John has definitely been one of my heroes for a long time in the field as has Steve. At the end of the day, they're human. It sucks that he regrets not getting back in touch with Steve before his passing. We can't turn back time unfortunately. I guess the lesson here is we can get focused on the hero worship and the little details and forget we are dealing with someone's ego and feelings. Some constructive criticism from John and a declined phone call broke up their relationship. :( Steve could be rough to work with but they obviously had respect for one another, so it is sad to see in the end there was some bad blood. At least John tried to get back in touch. I think the line at the end really says it all, "...but elements of the path that led to where I am today were contingent on the dents he left in the universe. I showed up for him." Edit: If you're reading this John, thank you for all the gaming joy you've given the world over the years. I remember asking you programming questions and you were always responsive. You've left dents for others too. Edit: Regarding the snide comment Steve made that you could write your own OS. He might have secretly feared you would. He knew you could.

agumonkey 8y ago

I was just giving back the "steve jobs" manga biography (yes..). I know 90% of it but ... I still read the 200 pages. He's such a special character for someone who grew up with nascent personal computer era.

dingo_bat 8y ago

Steve Jobs sounds like an amazing asshole! I wonder if all celebrity CEOs (Bezos, Gates, Zuck, etc.) are like this in private interactions.

wilsonnb 8y ago
Probably not, at least not as much. There's a reason Steve Jobs has always been notorious for this sort of behavior.
- gowld 8y ago
  All of those CEOs are famous (and more) for being assholes. What made Steve Jobs different is that he also inspired a bizarre sort of love -- People want to be Gates/Zuck/Bezos, but no one dreams of working for them. And no one has a religious zeal for evangelizing their those CEOs' transparent marketing lies like they do for Jobs'.
- GeekyBear 8y ago
  Does Gates and Ballmer seeking to screw Paul Allen out of his equity in Microsoft because Allen was distracted while in cancer treatment ring a bell?
puzzle 8y ago
The most concise, yet illuminating description I have heard about ongoing relationships with Jobs is something similar to "dealing with Khrushchev, but without the shoe antics", i.e. that, to him, everything was a zero-sum game, all the time.
JohnCarmack 8y ago
Zuck is very courteous and open to other people's perspectives. Gates was sharp and no-nonsense when I had a meeting with him. I haven't met Bezos.
- saagarjha 8y ago
  You're probably being truthful here, but then again, would you say anything else if you weren't part of a subsidiary of Facebook?

ceronman 8y ago

A question from someone who has never seen a NeXT computer: How is it possible that Doom was developed on NeXT? As far as I know, Doom was first released for MS-DOS. Wouldn't be really hard to develop a MS-DOS game from another operative system and another CPU architecture? Specially at the time without engines abstracting platform details?

busterarm 8y ago
http://doom.wikia.com/wiki/NEXTSTEP http://doom.wikia.com/wiki/NEXTSTEP From my memory of reading Masters of Doom, they developed for where they expected the consumer PC hardware market to be at the time of release. If you wanted that hardware at the time they were developing, $10k Next workstations were your best bet. When Doom came out, I (and most other folks) needed a new PC. Ports to multiple platforms were pretty common in those days with games and that's something the team had a lot of experience with from their years at Softdisk. Having looked at the game code, it's not really terribly difficult.
- kyberias 8y ago
  I don't think so. It's just that the development environment was so much more productive on NeXT.
  - saagarjha 8y ago
    After having a very recent encounter with developing software on NeXTSTEP 3.3, I'll have to agree with you. For how old it is, it held up pretty well!
- rasz 8y ago
  Nah, it wasnt about raw speed, Doom doesnt even run all that well on next, its slower than 386DX40 on emulator trying to approximate NeXTcube Turbo speed.
jacquesm 8y ago
That's called porting. And whether or not it is a lot of work depends on how much foresight you had about doing that at some point in the future. If you didn't then it would be a very large amount of work because platform assumptions would be baked in all over the place. If you did - and you were a disciplined programmer - then it could be reasonably quick. I've written software that ported cleanly between Windows and SGI Irix, the original was built for the SGI and when windows capabilities caught up it was relatively straightforward to port, I tried very hard to keep all the platform dependent stuff in a single file so I knew exactly which bits to leave untouched and where to use the chainsaw.

macros 8y ago

Every time I see one of his posts on facebook.com I cringe and think wistfully about the .plan days.

horsecaptin 8y ago

Anyone else notice how it is impossible to select and copy text?

jjrh 8y ago
yeah - drives me nuts because I have a habit of highlighting text while I read it.
AlexeyBrin 8y ago
That's because the link points to the mobile version, try the desktop one https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=2146412825593223&id=100006735798590 https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=2146412825.... I can select and copy the text just fine.

ProudNounDUzber 8y ago

Now I just want a God of War game with Steve as Kratos and John as Atreus.

ProudNounDUzber 8y ago

yep

xenadu02 8y ago

By all accounts (and I have no personal knowledge here) Steve could be a jerk, or at least very demanding. Steve was definitely successful. Being a jerk != being successful! Having a great product eye and good design sense are excellent traits to emulate. Having "strong opinions, loosely held" is another great trait to emulate. Being honest and direct when something isn't good is also a great trait to emulate. Demanding people do their best is another great trait to emulate. Being a jerk (at least under certain circumstances) is orthogonal and unrelated. Unfortunately far too many people mistake correlation for causation and think being a demanding jerk is the key to success. First: you are no Steve Jobs. Second: that isn't what made him successful. (Being direct and brutally honest can also come off as being a jerk. We have lots of pressure to be positive / supportive and avoid social conflict. It is always easier to say "that's great" or "nice job" than give actual constructive feedback, especially when the recipients are likely to be defensive about it. It is critical for startups to avoid this and be brutally honest with themselves about the product!)

andrei_says_ 8y ago
Thank you for this. Getting lost in ego is a common trap for smart people in powerful positions. One can be brutally honest in a nonpersonal way, with non-sarcastic humor, with lightness and friendliness. Including appreciation for already existing effort, adding reasoning, logic, and vision in the communication go a long way. Edit: added appreciation :)
- dhimes 8y ago
  Indeed. Diplomacy is worth a lot.
baxtr 8y ago
Yes, I think he was successful even though he was a jerk from time to time. That trait surely cost him some years. But it also shows how smart he must have been to compensate for that.
- deleted 8y ago
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r3vo 8y ago

It seems pretty likely to me that Steve Jobs was a high functioning sociopath. The line about how his demeanor changed dramatically when Carmack's wife asked for a favor was indicative to me. "One time, my wife, then fiancée, and I were meeting with Steve at Apple, and he wanted me to do a keynote that happened to be scheduled on the same day as our wedding. With a big smile and full of charm, he suggested that we postpone it. We declined, but he kept pressing. Eventually my wife countered with a suggestion that if he really wanted “her” John so much, he should loan John Lassiter to her media company for a day of consulting. Steve went from full charm to ice cold really damn quick. I didn’t do that keynote." I find sociopaths fascinating, but I would sure never want to work for one. It must take an incredible amount of calculation and self discipline to keep a semblance of normality for an incredibly high profile sociopath like Jobs. On a side note, the late Pieter Hintjens of ZeroMQ wrote an excellent book about psychopaths available online for free here. https://legacy.gitbook.com/book/hintjens/psychopathcode/deta.. https://legacy.gitbook.com/book/hintjens/psychopathcode/deta.... Also want to disclaim that I am not a psychiatrist and my opinion of Job's sociopathy is only my speculation.

fsloth 8y ago
If psychiatrists generally frown upon diagnosing people who are not their patients, as a non-expert, I would be fairly careful in labeling now deceased people based on anecdotal data. Especially if I was not familiar with the person. Jobs had obvious pathological facets in his interactions with other people - but inventing labels on top of the anecdotes really does not add value in any way. Mr. Hintjens was not a psychiatric expert either. That he wrote a book on the subject, is not entirely to his credit. As such, he could have just described "predatory behavior". There is popular material available on psychopathy and socipathy written by subject matter experts. For example "The Psychopath Inside: A Neuroscientist's Personal Journey into the Dark Side of the Brain" by James Fallon is written by a neuroscientist who accidentally discovers he is a psychopath.
- taneq 8y ago
  Generally I agree with you but there's a really, really clear pattern in everything anyone's ever written about an encounter with Steve Jobs. Over the space of decades he was unpredictably charming or abusive, a consummate manipulator and user, completely untrustworthy and seemingly without a conscience. It's not a clinical diagnosis and should never be treated as such. But after you've run into a couple of people in your own life with those same attributes and that same pattern of behaviour, that's plenty to go on.

redm 8y ago

I suppose its inevitable that we dissect the lives and actions of "great" people like Steve Jobs. The fact is that no one is perfect, and those who usually accomplish great things have fascinating lives and personality flaws. At the end of the day, you take the good with the bad, its a package deal, and call it Human.

txsh 8y ago

Cool anecdotes. I wonder who he stole them from.

saagarjha 8y ago
What makes you think that they're not genuine?
- busterarm 8y ago
  It's a veiled reference to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZeniMax_v._Oculus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZeniMax_v._Oculus

hwestiii 8y ago

This pretty much confirms my suspicion that Apple is|was not a company I'd ever want to work at. Making cool stuff might be cool, but I don't want to sacrifice large chunks of my life for it.

dchichkov 8y ago

The impact that John Carmack has on the industry is just ridiculous. Apple, NVIDIA, Facebook. As a teenage software engineer, he was a revered figure to me (and I wonder to how many others). I've had an opportunity to work with his source code for a few months - it was a thing of beauty. If you want to learn from him, read his source code and essays. They are full of brilliance.

webbles 8y ago

I used to respect Carmack, then he joined Facebook.

crusso 8y ago

The Steve Jobs "hero / shithead" rollercoaster was real That's funny. I had a boss at Apple when I did some contracting there in 1999 who told me that Jobs asked him, "You wanna be a hero?" before giving him a project. My boss told me, "Yep, one day you're a hero, the next day you're a shithead."

remir 8y ago

I think it's weird how Apple, even to this day, took some of Jobs's "darker" traits as if he still runs the place. For example, a couple of years ago, I remember a game dev saying that they made one of the top selling game on iOS and received plenty of attention/help from Apple's engineers at WWDC, but when they made an Android version of their game, suddenly it was radio silence with Apple. This is the kind of thing Jobs would have done, but now that he's gone, I'm disappointed that Apple did not evolve past this kind of behavior.

rimliu 8y ago
Would it be any different had he not released the Android version? Or was the expectation to be invited to the every WWDC from then on?
- remir 8y ago
  I'm sure it would have been different, yes. I don't know if they expected to be invited to every WWDC, but I remember the developer saying he had good access at Apple because they loved his app so much. When he announced his Android version, Apple kinda stopped returning his calls and engineers would not give him as much time for questions and help. He went from VIP to nobody.

Rainymood 8y ago

Honestly, I think this is what it's like to be in an abusive relationship. You know he's abusive and yet you still stay in the relationship with him/her because of all the good times and you delude yourself into thinking that's OK ... I think this gives a rarely glimpse into the rationalizations that happen in the mind of people that are in abusive relationships. From the outside it is trivial to see that the relationship dynamic is abusive but when you're in it ... suddenly it's OK even for one of the most renowned programmers of all time?

fsloth 8y ago
Having a relationship with the CEO of one of the most important companies in your field is a bit different from a plain frienship or sexual pairing. Just knowing the guy and engaging with him time to time dilutes the concept of an abusive relationship.
- Ari_Ugwu 8y ago
  I'm not so sure. Reading John Carmack's story (and others) it seems that Steve Jobs was able to convince people to enjoy the abuse and remember it with revery. That is a special kind of talent, but as others have mentioned it seems to attract and inspire the worst kind of corporate scum. The places where it doesn't seem like an abusive relationship it most certainly seems like the way a feudal tyrant would be behave.
  - fsloth 8y ago
    There is a difference between just being a douchebag, and actually sparring people. Psychological pressure is not just a bad thing. Too much of it, yes, and used for selfish reasons, yes - but - there is a net positive effect of making people defend their position and holding them accountable for their views. From what I've read Jobs combined the positive sparring attitude as well as negative I-must-have-my-catharsis-by-abusing-you as well. An intellectually keen sparring partner is something most people cherish. Given this sparring partner is Jobs there is a random reward/punishment element involved - is he going to cherish me or banish me? We all know this random reward system is the key to addictive interactions. Jobs was probably a keen intellectual sparring partner combined with an emotional game of chance. No wonder people revered him. I think the 'asshole steve jobs' reverence goes into the same pile with Gordon Gekko admiration. The problem with Jobs is he was a non-fictional character and people the lizard-people kind of types seem to completely misunderstand what was the good part in him as a leader.

DonHopkins 8y ago

On October 25 1988, I gave Steve Jobs a demo of pie menus, NeWS, UniPress Emacs and HyperTIES at the Educom conference in Washington DC. His reaction was to jump up and down, point at the screen, and yell “That sucks! That sucks! Wow, that’s neat! That sucks!” I tried explaining how we'd performed an experiment proving pie menus were faster than linear menus [1], but he insisted the liner menus in NeXT Step were the best possible menus ever. But who was I to rain on his parade, two weeks after the first release of NeXT Step 0.8? (Up to that time, it was the most hyped piece of vaporware ever, and doubters were wearing t-shirts saying "NeVR Step"!) [1] https://medium.com/@donhopkins/an-empirical-comparison-of-pie-vs-linear-menus-466c6fdbba4b https://medium.com/@donhopkins/an-empirical-comparison-of-pi...

justin66 8y ago
I'll have to read the article. I'm a little surprised that pie menus never caught on even in the era of tablets, where they seem extremely well-suited.
- panic 8y ago
  They do see some use in games, where you have control over all the menu items. Long strings can break pie menu layout pretty badly, especially if you bring up the menu near the edge of the screen.
  - taspeotis 8y ago
    Indeed, see here [1] for some examples. [1] https://www.google.com.au/search?q=battlefield+command+menu&tbm=isch https://www.google.com.au/search?q=battlefield+command+menu&...
  - DonHopkins 8y ago
    That's all true! Here's an illustrated transcript of a video (and the video itself) demonstrating the pie menus (and SimAntics visual programming language) in The Sims! The Sims Pie Menus: https://medium.com/@donhopkins/the-sims-pie-menus-49ca02a74da3 https://medium.com/@donhopkins/the-sims-pie-menus-49ca02a74d... And this discusses the issues you raised and more: OLPC Sugar Pie Menu Discussion: https://medium.com/@donhopkins/olpc-sugar-pie-menu-discussion-738577e54516 https://medium.com/@donhopkins/olpc-sugar-pie-menu-discussio...

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

ksec 8y ago

@John Carmack, My biggest question is, why now? I mean what trigger you to post this / share this pieces about Steve Jobs? The reason I ask was because only a few week ago I posted a few comments about the state of Mac, Gaming on Mac and Gaming as iOS App Revenue. In the age of E-Sports and Gaming is the sole segment that is pushing / slowing / stopping the decline of PC sales, I wonder if Apple would take gaming a little more seriously, since Steve Jobs deleted all Gaming DNA in Apple once he returned from NeXT. And I said I wish John Carmack would comment a bit on Steve Jobs given he has been on Stage a few times in Keynote, and has surprisingly never shared any stories since he passed away. But I think this confirms my suspicious >Several things over the years made me conclude that, at his core, Steve didn’t think very highly of games, and always wished they weren’t as important to his platforms as they turned out to be. I never took it personally. And it is a little strange since Steve worked at Atari.

_arvin 8y ago
I came across this HN comment that might answer your question: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17069109 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17069109 or you can see Carmack's original tweet here: https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/993142700374462464 https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/993142700374462464