5 ms·

An 'Unknown' Co-Founder Leaves After 20 Years of Glory and Turmoil (1997)

43 points by sinzone 15y ago

ricardobeat 15y ago
The "real" story on the floppy drive: http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Hide_Under_This_Desk.txt http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&s... Usually the expressions "gave the go ahead", "instructed", "supervised", "was instrumental" mean the person in question didn't do shit.
- nir 15y ago
  That's the story of the Mac floppy, the article refers to the Apple II one. If by "didn't do shit" you mean he didn't actually hold the soldering iron, you're missing a lot.
  - rmason 15y ago
    When Woz spoke at Michigan State in May I heard him tell the story of how he built the original floppy drive for the Apple II. Woz wanted to go to Las Vegas for a show (Comdex?) and was told if the floppy drive was ready by then he could go. He said after working for days he took a break and that's when the solution just came to him. He said with a big smile Vegas was great!
    - wallflower 15y ago
      The full, amazing story of Woz hacking a floppy drive is in his Founders at Work interview. One of my favorite interviews in JL's book. http://www.foundersatwork.com/steve-wozniak.html http://www.foundersatwork.com/steve-wozniak.html
      - jforman 15y ago
        "You have all these waiting periods, and it was just too awkward and too slow. So Mike [Markkula] said we needed two things: a floating point Basic (that's a Basic with decimal points, which I didn't have) and a floppy disk." Sounds like a meaningful contribution to me.
  - ricardobeat 15y ago
    Oops. The tone in this article makes me upset, if you hadn't noticed :) This one puts it under a much better light: http://apple2history.org/history/ah05/#02 http://apple2history.org/history/ah05/#02
ianterrell 15y ago
Apple's first president was named Michael Scott.
- wanorris 15y ago
  As noted in the article: "When the company dismissed its first president, Michael Scott, in 1981, for example, Mr. Markkula, agreed to cede the title of chairman to Mr. Jobs and become Apple's president -- but only until a permanent chief executive could be hired. That took two years, but when Mr. Jobs hired John Sculley in 1983, Mr. Markkula quickly stepped aside, though he remained on the Apple board."
callmevlad 15y ago
I wonder how different the world would be if IBM did indeed buy Apple in the mid-90s.
- wanorris 15y ago
  The idea of the replacement for the original Mac OS being sourced from within IBM (instead of from NeXT) is flatly scary. OS/2 is the most obvious source, and it actually had quite a few strengths, but it's really hard to imagine it being an elegant replacement for Macs, just as it's hard to imagine Apple turning things around without Jobs at the helm. Really, I don't imagine much of Apple would still be around at all. So unless we imagine Linux storming the gates, I guess that would mean Microsoft vincit omnia. And without Apple, smartphones would likely still be niche Blackberry variants for heavy email users and such. Certainly the advent of tablets as popular consumer devices seems unlikely. Wow, the technology world might be pretty different.
  - mechanical_fish 15y ago
    There are always lots of problems with these counterfactual scenarios. For one thing, if Apple had gone ahead and disappeared they wouldn't have been around to compete with. It's hard to imagine what would have become of, say, the BeOS in a world without Apple because in practice Apple did survive, and stole all of Be's oxygen. It is important to remember that computing trends are driven by manufacturing. Even if Apple had gotten taken apart and Steve Jobs had (improbably) taken up bass fishing, processors would still have gotten smaller and more efficient, batteries would have continued to improve, displays would have been built. Touchscreen devices would have eventually arrived. Hard drives would still have gotten larger and cheaper on schedule; flash memory would still have gotten cheap enough to build SSDs. And these trends would have encouraged the growth of, say, pure-digital delivery of movies and music - Apple didn't invent the MP3, or Napster, and they famously didn't invent the portable MP3 player. What Steve Jobs did was see all the trends very clearly, realize the products that they would eventually enable, and just steer straight towards those products with ultimate focus. But the trends were still there. These things were going to happen. It's true that some of them might have arrived years or even decades later, though, and with a lot less flair.
mbreese 15y ago
So that's where the dummy contact "John Appleseed" comes from...
a5seo 15y ago
Another example showing why the valuation formula, "add $1M in value per hacker, subtract 500k per MBA," holds.
losethos 15y ago
I wrote every line of LoseThos. LoseThos doesn't execute code I did not write. It only compiles with my compiler/assembler natively, not cross-compiled. Obviously, no GPL code. God says... C:\TEXT\WEALTH.TXT ng to the intention of the lawgiver, must necessarily be diminished by every such regulation. By means of such regulations, indeed, a particular manufacture may sometimes be acquired sooner than it could have been otherwise, and after a certain time may be made at home as cheap, or cheaper, than in the foreign country. But though the industry of the society may be thus carried with advantage into a particular channel sooner than it could have been otherwise, it will by no means follow that the su --------------------- Technically, during boot, it calls the BIOS for reading blocks, measuring memory and changing to VGA mode. The PCIRep() command will using the PCIBIOS, 32-bit code for getting PCI info. PCIRep is optional. Use MemRep() if you are curious about memory. Yes, memory under 1Meg is not touched except the 200K or so for OSMain.

43 points by sinzone 15y ago

The "real" story on the floppy drive: http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Hide_Under_This_Desk.txt http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&s... Usually the expressions "gave the go ahead", "instructed", "supervised", "was instrumental" mean the person in question didn't do shit.

nir 15y ago
That's the story of the Mac floppy, the article refers to the Apple II one. If by "didn't do shit" you mean he didn't actually hold the soldering iron, you're missing a lot.
- rmason 15y ago
  When Woz spoke at Michigan State in May I heard him tell the story of how he built the original floppy drive for the Apple II. Woz wanted to go to Las Vegas for a show (Comdex?) and was told if the floppy drive was ready by then he could go. He said after working for days he took a break and that's when the solution just came to him. He said with a big smile Vegas was great!
  - wallflower 15y ago
    The full, amazing story of Woz hacking a floppy drive is in his Founders at Work interview. One of my favorite interviews in JL's book. http://www.foundersatwork.com/steve-wozniak.html http://www.foundersatwork.com/steve-wozniak.html
    - jforman 15y ago
      "You have all these waiting periods, and it was just too awkward and too slow. So Mike [Markkula] said we needed two things: a floating point Basic (that's a Basic with decimal points, which I didn't have) and a floppy disk." Sounds like a meaningful contribution to me.
- ricardobeat 15y ago
  Oops. The tone in this article makes me upset, if you hadn't noticed :) This one puts it under a much better light: http://apple2history.org/history/ah05/#02 http://apple2history.org/history/ah05/#02

ianterrell 15y ago

Apple's first president was named Michael Scott.

wanorris 15y ago
As noted in the article: "When the company dismissed its first president, Michael Scott, in 1981, for example, Mr. Markkula, agreed to cede the title of chairman to Mr. Jobs and become Apple's president -- but only until a permanent chief executive could be hired. That took two years, but when Mr. Jobs hired John Sculley in 1983, Mr. Markkula quickly stepped aside, though he remained on the Apple board."

callmevlad 15y ago

I wonder how different the world would be if IBM did indeed buy Apple in the mid-90s.

wanorris 15y ago
The idea of the replacement for the original Mac OS being sourced from within IBM (instead of from NeXT) is flatly scary. OS/2 is the most obvious source, and it actually had quite a few strengths, but it's really hard to imagine it being an elegant replacement for Macs, just as it's hard to imagine Apple turning things around without Jobs at the helm. Really, I don't imagine much of Apple would still be around at all. So unless we imagine Linux storming the gates, I guess that would mean Microsoft vincit omnia. And without Apple, smartphones would likely still be niche Blackberry variants for heavy email users and such. Certainly the advent of tablets as popular consumer devices seems unlikely. Wow, the technology world might be pretty different.
- mechanical_fish 15y ago
  There are always lots of problems with these counterfactual scenarios. For one thing, if Apple had gone ahead and disappeared they wouldn't have been around to compete with. It's hard to imagine what would have become of, say, the BeOS in a world without Apple because in practice Apple did survive, and stole all of Be's oxygen. It is important to remember that computing trends are driven by manufacturing. Even if Apple had gotten taken apart and Steve Jobs had (improbably) taken up bass fishing, processors would still have gotten smaller and more efficient, batteries would have continued to improve, displays would have been built. Touchscreen devices would have eventually arrived. Hard drives would still have gotten larger and cheaper on schedule; flash memory would still have gotten cheap enough to build SSDs. And these trends would have encouraged the growth of, say, pure-digital delivery of movies and music - Apple didn't invent the MP3, or Napster, and they famously didn't invent the portable MP3 player. What Steve Jobs did was see all the trends very clearly, realize the products that they would eventually enable, and just steer straight towards those products with ultimate focus. But the trends were still there. These things were going to happen. It's true that some of them might have arrived years or even decades later, though, and with a lot less flair.

mbreese 15y ago

So that's where the dummy contact "John Appleseed" comes from...

a5seo 15y ago

Another example showing why the valuation formula, "add $1M in value per hacker, subtract 500k per MBA," holds.

losethos 15y ago

I wrote every line of LoseThos. LoseThos doesn't execute code I did not write. It only compiles with my compiler/assembler natively, not cross-compiled. Obviously, no GPL code. God says... C:\TEXT\WEALTH.TXT ng to the intention of the lawgiver, must necessarily be diminished by every such regulation. By means of such regulations, indeed, a particular manufacture may sometimes be acquired sooner than it could have been otherwise, and after a certain time may be made at home as cheap, or cheaper, than in the foreign country. But though the industry of the society may be thus carried with advantage into a particular channel sooner than it could have been otherwise, it will by no means follow that the su --------------------- Technically, during boot, it calls the BIOS for reading blocks, measuring memory and changing to VGA mode. The PCIRep() command will using the PCIBIOS, 32-bit code for getting PCI info. PCIRep is optional. Use MemRep() if you are curious about memory. Yes, memory under 1Meg is not touched except the 200K or so for OSMain.