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The secret call to Andy Grove that may have helped Apple buy NeXT
- gooftop 8y agoHuh.. is that title linkbait? Other than the photo of Andy Grove, I don't see anything about a call with Andy? (Or I'm really slow today) (edit: oh I am slow today. Its told in story form, the meeting with Andy Grove is several posts down on the page).
- AdmiralAsshat 8y agoThe call with Andy established a relationship between NeXT and Intel, which, while not bearing fruit immediately, lead to the Apple CEO's decision years later to acquire NeXT.
- cdbattags 8y agoThere are multiple parts. Keep scrolling.
- GoRudy 8y agoIt's a multiple part post... read a bit further down "I closed my office door, picked up the phone, and asked for Andy Grove. I wanted to know why they weren’t in the conversation. I guessed it was because we used the Intel i860 chip on one of our graphics boards and it didn’t impress us. But what were Michael Dell, Bill Gates and Andy going to do about the Intel 80486 facing the same fate as Motorola’s 68040? I had to know."
- ProAm 8y agoIt's a super hard article to follow. I felt like I was reading a list of tweets or something.
- wodenokoto 8y agoThe story stretches across several "posts", just keep scrolling
- goatherders 8y agoGreat story. All too often - and particularly when it comes to Apple - there is a mythology that a company grows based solely on the decisions and leadership of one individual. The reality is that the vast majority of critical decisions are rooted in stories like this. Apple, Dell, MS, Sun, Oracle, etc.
- ballenf 8y agoIf anyone else doesn't recognize the author, here's a CV: https://www.bloomberg.com/research/stocks/private/person.asp?personId=229844 https://www.bloomberg.com/research/stocks/private/person.asp...
- cdbattags 8y agoIs this a paid-for service? I get redirected to https://www.bloomberg.com/markets/stocks https://www.bloomberg.com/markets/stocks
- ballenf 8y agoNo, it just opened up for me. Maybe uBlock helped, but here's the relevant text: > Mr. Chris MacAskill serves as President of SmugMug, Inc. Mr. MacAskill serves as Chief Executive Officer of Cakes Inc. Mr. MacAskill served as Chief Executive Officer of Barnes & Noble.com Professional, Technical and Business Bookstore since co-founding Fatbrain in June 1995. From September 1983 to September 1990, Mr. MacAskill served as Vice President of Engineering at Western Atlas International. In September 1981, Mr. MacAskill founded PSI, which was acquired by Western Atlas International in October 1983. Mr. MacAskill also serves as the Chairman of the Board of Barnes & Noble.com Professional, Technical and Business Bookstore. He serves as a Director of Cakes Inc. From June 1991 to June 1995, Mr. MacAskill served as Director of Developer Relations at NeXT Computer and General Magic. Mr. MacAskill received his B.S. in Geophysics from the University of Utah and received his M.S. in Geophysics from Stanford University. Sorry for the formatting, but it's the same on the site. If there's a better bio somewhere, I didn't see it.
- cmacaskill 8y agoHere's my LinkedIn. I dunno why Bloomberg has me as Chairman of bn.com. Fatbrain.com was bought by them but I was never chairman. https://www.linkedin.com/in/chris-macaskill-970ab1/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/chris-macaskill-970ab1/
- ballenf 8y ago
- vsdzvgfWE 8y agoSo now we've seen a few Steve Jobs stores like this, including the one from John Carmack. A recurring theme is that Steve is such a bonehead that his underlings have to do things to "manage him." Whether that be doing things behind his back, withholding information from him, controlling who he meets and talks to. You also read about people working insane hours to complete things which probably didn't merit it, just to please steve's whims. Since there's a cult-of-personality around the guy, I think it's important to remind everyone that these behaviors are actually signs of poor leadership. If you work for someone like this, don't! You're better than that. Not saying Steve Jobs didn't do great things. But let's all agree he accomplished them in spite of these flaws, not because of them.
- GoRudy 8y agoI never worked for the guy but sure seems like he had a knack for hiring and inspiring world class talent. I'd work for anyone with that ability.
- vsdzvgfWE 8y ago> he had a knack for hiring and inspiring world class talent Never said the guy didn't have any good traits. Obviously, Apple and NeXT had lots of great people work there. > I'd work for anyone with that ability. Yeah you lost me. I won't work for someone who can't admit fault and treats their employees like dirt. I don't care how good they are at convincing people to work for them. You should have priorities in your life. "Not being abused" should be higher than "being able to say you've worked with the greatest talent."
- GoRudy 8y agoI think i'm personally willing to make some concessions on personality in exchange for doing something like building the future. Does the end justify the means, sometimes? Kind of like the instructors at my workout classes, I don't always like them, they're not always that nice but they definitely make me better.
- linuxhansl 8y agoHah... I remember I went to a tradeshow - I think it was the CeBit and can't remember the year, must've been before '93. NeXT had a booth there and I remember asking the folks if it ran on Intel processors. I distinctly the remember all the folks there laughing at me as if that was the most ridiculous thing they had ever heard and asking me to move right along. Edit: Spelling.
- pavlov 8y agoNeXTSTEP 3.1 with Intel support shipped in May 1993, so it must have been a few years before that.
- ScottBurson 8y agoThat reaction sounds like they already had the project underway, but were trying to keep it a secret.
- adrianmsmith 8y agoAccording to the article, Apple's CEO said they chose NeXT over Be because "In the end it came down to NeXT already supporting Intel and that was important to us". Why was running on Intel important to Apple? Apple didn't use Intel at that time (Dec 1996), and didn't decide to use Intel until much later (announced 2005)? Whereas BeOS already did run on the CPU platform that Apple did use at that time?
- peatmoss 8y agoMy hunch is that they were absolutely hedging and that they liked not being dependent on a single CPU vendor.
- cmiles74 8y agoI purchased one of the first Macs that ran on a PowerPC processor and I was profoundly disappointed. Performance was no better than a 68040-based Mac and it was pretty crashy. As time went on and software was updated that machine became less crashy but performace was always poor. I don't have any insider information, but I wouldn't be surprised if Apple felt like they needed a backup plan in case the PowerPC alliance was unsuccessful at matching the speed growth of Intel's products. I'd say the G3 was the first PowerPC CPU that impressed me, I think Apple only stuck with PowerPC for two more generations (the G5).
- Tloewald 8y agoI got one of the first PowerPC computers in a lab full of high end spare no expense PCs and it cranked. If your experience was otherwise, I suspect you were running software under emulation so the fact it was “no better” was a borderline miracle. The second gen PowerPC macs were “the fastest 680x0 boxes ever shipped” (an Apple engineer boasted to me at WWDC and he wasn’t wrong) The PowerPC allowed Apple to overtake the Pentium and gave it boasting rights until the failure of the G5.
- warrenm 8y agoAnd the G5 really only failed because of cooling issues - obviously, IBM has been able to continue to push the POWER platform that undergirded PowerPC far beyond the G5
- empath75 8y agoDoes anybody know how jobs decided to base next on open source code (bsd)? It seems sort of antithetical to everything he stood for.
- enf 8y agoI don't know the story, but 4.3BSD, which went into NeXTStep, was not open source. It wasn't until 4.4BSD that BSD was available without a paid Unix license. NeXT tried to get away with a closed-source fork of GCC for Objective C, but eventually backed down under legal threat.
- saagarjha 8y agoWhich was probably one of the reasons why they ended up writing LLVM.
- davidgay 8y agoLLVM was a UIUC project.
- koffiezet 8y agoThe dropping of GCC and adopting LLVM is directly related to the pending switch to GPLv3 of GCC. If there's one thing companies don't like, it's uncertainty - and the whole GPLv3 discussion gave them exactly that. They needed an alternative - and placed their bets on the more liberally licensed LLVM project.
- bitL 8y agoI can't imagine "doing the right thing" would not end up with immediate termination in the current "top" corporations running internal surveillance 24/7... Will there be ever a good time for accidental inventions again?
- starshadowx2 8y agoI've read a few of these articles from Cake now and I like how it looks but I find using CTRL+F doesn't work correctly. On this article it doesn't seem to pick up anything past the second post unless you go to that post, click on it, and then type in your search.
- rgrove 8y agoHey, I'm the guy who built that. Sorry about the Ctrl+F troubles. That's happening because we don't actually render all the posts in the conversation; to improve performance, we only render visible posts and a few posts above and below the visible region of the page. Unfortunately browsers don't currently offer any good way for us to make Ctrl+F work for not-yet-rendered posts in this scenario, so this is a tradeoff between better performance and worse find-on-page functionality. I'll give some thought to how to improve this.
- js2 8y agoIf I disable JavaScript everything is apparently rendered server-side and is indistinguishable from the page loaded with JavaScript enabled, except that ctrl-f works as expected. What's the benefit of progressive rendering via JavaScript here?
- rgrove 8y agoWith JavaScript disabled, you'll get a server-rendered page that renders up to 25 posts per page and relies on traditional prev/next pagination. When you scroll to the bottom of the page you'll have to click "Next" to see the next page of posts. With JavaScript enabled, you'll get a hybrid or client-rendered page that only renders the posts that are visible or likely to be visible soon. More posts will be loaded and rendered seamlessly as you scroll until you reach the end of the conversation. The benefit of the JS approach is that we can load and render only the stuff you're likely to see, which keeps data usage down and performance up. This is especially nice on mobile devices and slow connections. We think the infinite pagination is also a nicer experience than manual pagination. But we also want things to work when JS isn't available, primarily because that improves SEO. It's a nice bonus that the tiny percentage of people who prefer to browse with JS disabled can still read Cake.
- asveikau 8y agoThe funny thing is I remember BeOS running on x86. Wikipedia says the first release containing that was 1998, which puts it a year or two after the NeXT acquisition. I wonder if these two facts have something to do with each other.
- vasuvasu 8y agoWhy'd Steve call Bill about TrueType? Apple invented TrueType and then licensed it to Microsoft.
- senatorobama 8y agoNot a single PoC involved in this whole story.