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Apple's 1978 office floor plan
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- jaysonelliot 15y agoIt's interesting to see that in such an early year, Jobs and Woz's offices are almost as far apart as they could possibly be in the building.
- orionlogic 15y agoIt's because Woz always wanted to stay as an engineer, not as a manager. That's why Jobs and Markkula is one place while Woz near the software team.
- jaysonelliot 15y agoYou could also say, conversely, that Jobs placed himself next to Markkula instead of Woz, finding it more important to sit next to the VP of marketing than the chief engineer. I'm not making any judgements on the way they organized the physical space in the office. It clearly worked, after all, Apple in 1978 was on the precipice of an unprecedented success. I'm just interested in the way that the physical location of people in an office affects the work that is done there. I wonder, would the early history of Apple had been any different if Jobs and Woz had sat right next to each other every day? How many startups today seat the technical and business co-founders next to one another, versus those that sit far apart, and how does that change the personalities of those companies?
- jstevens85 15y agoAccording to Isaacson's biography, it was Markkula who insisted that Jobs be heavily involved in the non-engineering areas of the company.
- bluekeybox 15y agoAccording to the same book, Wozniak specifically insisted at some point that he would prefer to be treated as an engineer and not be involved with high-level management. One could also say it would be interesting how things might have turned out if Wozniak was more ambitious.
- mapgrep 15y agoThis is correct. In fact, the book said this was what finally got Woz to quit HP and go full time at Apple: One of his friends told him he could start a company without going into management, which he hadn't realized. Jobs had convinced all these friends and family to lobby him, but none of it worked until he was told he could stay an engineer.
- defen 15y agoOn the subject of counterfactuals, I recently finished reading Jobs' bio and Woz's autobiography and found myself contemplating how their lives would have turned out if they hadn't met each other. It seems easy to project the most likely outcome for Woz if he hadn't met Jobs - he'd probably still be an engineer at HP (assuming he didn't get laid off by one of their disastrous CEOs), his Apple ][ board a forgotten relic sitting in his garage. Less likely but still possible is that someone else would have helped him commercialize it, but there never would have been a Macintosh as we know it and the company would have ended up like Commodore, Tandy, and Atari. With Jobs, though, it's much more difficult to imagine where he'd have ended up without Woz. I could see him pushing Atari into PCs (but Bushnell didn't want the Apple ][, so that seems unlikely), or he could have been a religious leader, or a burned-out hippie living in Humboldt County, or a tyrannical Silicon Valley middle manager, or any number of other things.
- erikpukinskis 15y agoHere's a random theory: They would've met each other a little later, and done the same thing. Jobs and Wozniak orbited each other a few times before they really connected professionally. If you change one little thing so they wouldn'tve met each other, they would've met each other some other way. And if you change enough things so that they NEVER would've met each other, you'dve changed enough things that they wouldn't really be Steve Jobs and Woz anymore.
- microtherion 15y agoIt's also interesting to see that the CEO and CFO shared an office, while some key engineers had private offices.
- Swizec 15y agoIt might have something to do with the fact that marketing people are on the phone a lot and engineers have to focus a lot. Wherever I've worked the engineering team always locked the CEO away from themselves because he's a huge distraction.
- microtherion 15y agoI'm not questioning the good sense of this arrangement, but I find it an interesting glimpse at the balance of power at the company.
- philwelch 15y agoTypically, the CEO is "locked away" in a spacious corner office and the engineers have to make do with cubes.
- bluekeybox 15y agoIf the CEO never had to meet people from outside the company, I'm sure his office would be less spacious.
- philwelch 15y agoAnd if engineers never had to concentrate and focus to get their work done, I'm sure their workspaces would be open to auditory and visual distraction. Don't think for a minute that the typical business allocates these resources based on practicality rather than status.
- bluekeybox 15y agoBusinesses exist to make money, not to serve as a bed for some perverse status assertions. Not saying that the latter ones never happen; just pointing out the basic facts.
- jonerickson 15y agoTennis Courts!
- ww520 15y agoIt's tennis courts?
- j-dev 15y agoMaybe it was ping-pong table "courts".
- pingswept 15y agoFrom the article: "The building had four quadrants: Marketing/Admin, Engineering, Manufacturing, and a large empty space that we did not know what to do with when we moved in. That’s why it’s labeled 'Tennis courts?'"
- ethank 15y agoMy grandparents had an Advent when I was a kid. That thing probably spat out more radiation than I ever would care to research. It was a beautiful beast though and could heat a room.
- ChrisCooper 15y agoYoungen here: Might I ask what an Advent is? It's a hard thing to Google.
- kiiski 15y agoIt says at the bottom: "“Advent” was not a religious sanctuary, it was the demo room with the $3,000 projection TV[1] that we used for demos to Important People." [1]: http://i.ebayimg.com/t/Vintage-Advertisement-1978-ADVENT-VIDEOBEAM-TV-ORIGINAL-/00/$(KGrHqUOKpIE1qzFmO)OBNj-OycyMg~~0_3.JPG http://i.ebayimg.com/t/Vintage-Advertisement-1978-ADVENT-VID...
- ethank 15y agoAn Advent was a three tube projection system. It had a triangular arrangement of the CRT's, one red, one green, one blue. You had to focus and align them yourself, but with a good screen you could get a pretty good looking 60" television. It required a dark room. Since it sat in the middle of the floor, it was subject to kids bumping into it (in my grandparents home anyhow) and also then subject to grandfathers shouting. He later replaced it with a front projection set that bounced the CRT projectors off a mirror onto a screen. It was a beast.
- dsr_ 15y agoSign of the times: three secretary/receptionists for a 20 person company. I suspect they were the only female employees, too.
- billpaetzke 15y agoAnd a room for "Xerox."
- xxx__xxx 15y agoNot true ( I don't think.) I know Susan Kare designed the icons, and she was working for Apple around the time of the Macintosh.
- jaysonelliot 15y agodsr_ 1 is correct. On that floor plan, at least, the only women are secretaries or receptionists. Susan Kare desiged the icons, as you say, but that was years later. In 1978, the Apple ][ was still only a year old itself. The Macintosh isn't really that early in Apple history, for those of us who grew up with Apple ][s.
- Yopie 15y agoIt's interesting to see the toilet is in the center of the building. When Jobs took over Pixar the new campus development was planning to build three separate buildings: for creatives, for producers and for business people. But Jobs insisted that they be brought under one roof, with toilets at the centre — because that’s where everyone meets and talks.
- far33d 15y agoIt works too. The atrium is a very common chance meeting place, and that's nearly 100% due to the coffee, conf. rooms, and bathrooms being centrally situated.
- Empact 15y agoThis is a also applicable to residential architecture - I lived in several large student houses in Austin, and the houses whose floorplans required new arrivals to pass through common spaces (living room, kitchen) on the way to their private rooms invariably had closer and more general ties than those that did not.
- skrebbel 15y agoNo coffee? :-(
- johnyzee 15y agoFunny how everyone is mentioned by their first name except Steve and Woz.
- sfg 15y agoIt would be a bit confusing to have two 'Steve' offices.
- umjames 15y agoI also think it's interesting that with Jobs and Woz's offices being across the building from each other, that forces them to walk past everyone else to talk to each other in person. That has to make it easier for founders and executives to keep track of how things are going in the trenches. That could also make employees feel that management doesn't consider themselves "above" them.