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From: Steve Jobs. "Great idea, thank you."
- 1-more 1y agoThis is how I find out next.com returns a 301 to apple.com. Fascinating!
- mattl 1y agoFor a while a few years ago they had it misconfigured and you could browse apple.com at next.com -- so pages like next.com/ipad worked. https://web.archive.org/web/20130301092249/http://www.next.com/ipad/ https://web.archive.org/web/20130301092249/http://www.next.c...
- nxobject 1y agoIt would be a cool tribute to redirect next.com to the Mac Studio product page, as the closet descendant of the NeXTcube. Similarly, Apple still has control of pasemi.com - if only Apple’s chip team had a similar webpage…
- FlamingMoe 1y agoGreat story, put a smile on my face.
- luotuoshangdui 1y agoThat's a fun little story
- Aurornis 1y ago> Hi - I'm new here. I did something dumb and > set up a mail alias so that steve@next.com > would go to me. > This was a bad idea, I'm sorry. > I've changed it to steve@next.com goes to you, > not to me. I think that makes more sense. > My apologies. > Signed, new guy. What a great example of how to own a mistake, apologize, communicate, and get it fixed. I can think of so many past situations with coworkers that would have been so much better handled with quick communication like this.
- airstrike 1y agoIt really is the perfect message. It's effective, efficient, impactful and human at the same time. No wonder they've had such a long tenure at Apple.
- bilekas 1y agoOwning a mistake is amazing, actually I do believe it's one of the most important skills you need to learn in any profession. You won't learn it in University, only when you think the world is on the line. It's a super nice example. Explain the situation as early as possible, don't be afraid and roll with it. The fawning over the response bothers me no end.
- andrew_lettuce 1y agoOther super power phrases: I'm sorry, it's my fault, I forgive you, can you forgive me?
- bilekas 1y agoYou might have jumped into the wrong thread of mine.
- GuinansEyebrows 1y agoI love how sarcastic this reply comes across. Did it feel at all like that in the moment or was it received as earnest?
- khazhoux 1y agoI didn’t pick up any sarcasm at all. It was a good idea which clearly hadn’t occurred to SJ himself, but would have been obvious once seeing the suggestion
- smm11 1y agoI emailed Steve Jobs right after he came back to Apple and suggested they make a carry-able computer that could project the interface and keyboard input to any glass surface.
- mattl 1y agoDid you get a reply?
- edm0nd 1y agoand? did he reply?
- smm11 1y agoYes, "thanks," from NeXTmail.
- kccqzy 1y agoIn 2010 I emailed Steve Jobs about an idea for improving iWork 09. I forgot what it was. No reply ever.
- p_ing 1y agoI'm not sure how a glass surface would work given how lasers interact with glass. But this style of keyboard has been done in various forms as far back as '92. They're awful. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projection_keyboard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projection_keyboard
- sgerenser 1y agoAt that point, Steve was just starting to kill all the “moonshots” and “cool tech but who is really going to buy it” products like the Newton and OpenDoc. Even if he read the email, there’s no way he’d be interested in something like that at the time.
- throwaway7783 1y ago34 years at Apple/Next. Amazing tenure!
- cmarschner 1y ago$$$$$
- foobahhhhh 1y ago[flagged]
- girvo 1y agoYes, that is one of the main incentives for working.
- sgustard 1y agoYou could also have bought $1,000 worth of stock at the time and it would be worth one million today (since 1995 with reinvested dividends, source ChatGPT). Up to you whether the 32 years spent in the office makes the money more worthwhile to you.
- malfist 1y agoExactly how does one purchase $1,000 in stock of a company never listed on a stock exchange? NeXt was never public. For the love of God, use the right tool. Portfolio back testers are a dime a dozen and easy to use and get 100% accurate answers. LLMs are the wrong tool to get investment expertise from.
- icedchai 1y agoApple was, though. They went public in 1980. The IPO price, adjusted for splits, was a little under $0.10 per share. Ignoring any dividends, etc. your $1000 today is the equivalent of over 10,000 shares of Apple, worth almost $2 million today.
- BeetleB 1y ago
- mattl 1y agoSteve Hayman, long time NeXT/Apple employee who just retired last week from Apple having started in 1993 with NeXT. His WebObjects demo from 2001 is one of the most entertaining tech demos I've ever seen https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NfWnDJtUyrw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NfWnDJtUyrw
- no_wizard 1y agoIn many ways, WebObjects feels ahead of its time. Sometimes I wonder what happened to these ideas.
- mattl 1y agoAFAIK, WebObjects is still in use inside Apple, but also Project Wonder and WOLips have kept the tooling active (it all stopped working after Apple depreciated the Obj-C/Java bridge) and modern libraries for WebObjects.
- immibis 1y agoIt was probably no better than most of the other frameworks we have. Most things aren't. In a set of lots of things, it's more fun to speculate about the ones that we haven't seen, but there's a good chance they're about the same as the ones we have.
- ralfd 1y agoWatched only a short time, but the phone call were he pretends to be a lifeline for "who wants to be a millionaire" cracked me up.
- mattl 1y agoAt one point he asks someone in the front row if EOF is patented, and then blurts out "software patents are evil" amongst other things. Really refreshing to see.
- phillco 1y agoThe idea of any official Apple presentation today beginning with a humorous rendition of _God Save the Queen_ is so absurd I can't help but smile at what we've lost.
- AIorNot 1y ago[flagged]
- mattl 1y agoWhere are you seeing geek hero worship here?
- bayindirh 1y agoSteve was a temperamental guy. It's not geek hero worship, just being afraid of your boss, plus the timidness and vulnerability of being a new hire.
- mlyle 1y agoHey, running into someone who is exceptional and having a fun story to tell about it is reasonable and doesn't deserve this negative energy. That time I ran into Larry Bird, or just missed having dinner with Douglas Adams, or the time I talked to Jonny Kim-- they're little markers of time in my existence. I know they're not gods, and I've done pretty cool things myself, but I'm still in awe of the cool stuff they've done.
- jjulius 1y agoKevin Nash and I peed next to one another in an airport bathroom one time.
- cosmicgadget 1y agoWell don't leave us hanging.
- jonathanlydall 1y agoI have a famous person anecdote I enjoy telling. More than 20 years ago now, my brother (who was maybe 9) had his friend over for lunch and the night before my brother had spent the night at his house. So my mother asks what they got up to, and the friend says they were playing water pistol fights with his sister’s boyfriend, “Wa-kin”, who was visiting. We then ask what the boyfriend does, and he responds that he’s an actor. (Just be aware now that we live in Johannesburg, South Africa.) So we say, cool, has he acted in anything we might know? And friend says something like “Oh, lots of movies, Gladiator, Signs, others…”. At which point I remember thinking, “no way!” and “so that’s how Joaquin is pronounced” (as I’d only ever seen it written). Turns out the friend’s sister was a model living in New York which explained the situation I would never have guessed.
- kccqzy 1y agoIt's interesting that they can just reassign an email alias to someone else without any approvals. Could this be a permissions oversight? Or could the person who designed the system thought that heck it's always permitted to reassign an email alias owned by the current user?
- khazhoux 1y agoAre you requesting a process and architecture retrospective on a company from 30 years ago? :-)
- kadoban 1y agoThe bigger issue is probably being allowed to set up an arbitrary one at _all_ without approvals. Once you have one, redirecting it is maybe not the biggest issue? Could still be problematic though. This story is quite old, security culture in tech was really quite basic and forgotten in a lot of places. I would hope that a similar thing would not be allowed today at anything like a big company.
- pixl97 1y ago>security culture in tech was really quite non-existent This is 1991, the actual number of people on the internet was tiny back then. Things like SMTP servers were commonly open relays (for some reason I'm remembering sendmail being an open relay out of the box). A lot of the internet culture wasn't based on security, but of the premise you shouldn't be a dick. It quickly changed in the next few years as the number of people online exploded.
- pianoben 1y agoYep! A formative experience of my childhood was working out how to type SMTP commands over telnet and sending mail from billg@microsoft.com to my dad. Such "opportunities" vanished decades ago. Fun times :)
- mixmastamyk 1y ago
- msh 1y agoIt must have been a big difference between working for a cutting edge tech company like next and a regular company back then.
- neilv 1y agoThat beats my similar anecdote. At a high-profile place, I too used an automated IT thing to make a first-name email alias for myself, and there was a semi-famous person there with the same first name. It played out much like this story: I started getting email for the VIP, so I told them, and switched it over to them. I don't recall them being as gracious as Steve Jobs that time. Then, the only other interaction I had with them was them during my time there, was them declining my request to participate in something. :)
- bentcorner 1y agoI did something very similar, but the effects were different - people who intended to send mail to other people with my first name had my new distribution list (I created a distribution list with myname@company.com with myself as the only member) pop up as the first thing in their autocomplete. I started to receive mail across the entire company for people who typed "myname<TAB>". I deleted the distribution list a few minutes later.
- MarceliusK 1y agoYou did the right thing handing over the alias, but yeah, getting the cold shoulder afterward stings a little
- khazhoux 1y agoHonestly, kind of sad that Tim Cook’s reply was so generic. I don’t think I’m off base in saying this, and from personal experience, he is really not connected to the people at the company.
- void-pointer 1y agoThe experience as CEO of a company with 10e2-10e3 headcount is a lot different than the experience with 10e4-10e6 headcount.
- jawns 1y agoBut the latter can often afford a secretary, if not a team of secretaries, to handle these sorts of things, with permission to add his signature.
- cosmicgadget 1y agoPersonally I'd either say nothing or farm the research out to an assistant for long tenure employees.
- rdlw 1y agoAny number of negative employees would be troubling, but I admit 9.9 million of them would be especially bad.
- chinchilla2020 1y agoThat's actually his personality based on my knowledge of interactions with him. He is sort of a workaholic robot.
- lapcat 1y agoThere's no evidence that Steve Jobs knew Steve Hayman from Adam. "This was the only email I ever personally received from Steve Jobs."
- mattl 1y agoHayman did a lot of WWDC presentations of WebObjects which was the only thing really keeping NeXT alive prior to the merger. He mentions elsewhere that towards the end Jobs was mostly at Pixar and NeXT was reduced to selling $50,000 WebObjects licenses but also had its first profitable quarter.
- HaZeust 1y agoIf this kind of thing is up your alley, check out techemails.com
- ViktorRay 1y agoWow this is such a neat website! Thanks for sharing!
- qingcharles 1y agoI love these because I was involved in some of the deals they post about and I finally get to see behind the scenes of what was being talked about :)
- scop 1y agoGreat story. Have to ask…what’s up with that avatar for Tim Cook?
- gield 1y agoIt's his image in Apple's internal employee directory, also used for emails. It's an old image, probably taken in the early 2000s.
- ryancnelson 1y agoi love this. A startup I was at during early COVID times got acquired into Hewlett Packard Enterprise, so we all became HPE employees with HPE addresses. There was a similar form there to request "ryancnelson"@hpe, etc... One of my co-workers got cute and asked for "root@hpe.com" .... And boy, there's a lot of cron jobs running at HP.
- ferguess_k 1y agoOr something like "ab-production@company.com", where ab is whatever a mage system.
- williamdclt 1y agoI’m confused why cron jobs would be sending emails to root@hpe.com?
- ecnahc515 1y agoCronjobs often run as root. If the host has is configured to send emails when a cronjob is completed it will default to sending it to user@domain where the user is the user the cronjob runs as, and the domain is what was configured in the cron configuration.
- dijit 1y agoMinor nitpicky correction: cron only sends an email if there's any stdout of the job. This is an important distinction because if you have configured mail forwarding, your cron jobs should be configured to output only on error.. then any emails are actionable.
- threePointFive 1y agoMoreutils has a great command `chronic` which is a wrapper command like `time` or `sudo`, ie. you just run `chronic <command>`. It'll supress stdout and stderr until the command exits at which point it will print only if the exit code was non-zero.
- georgewsinger 1y agoThis was such a great story. Steve was a mischievous person himself, so surely a part of him respected this.
- duxup 1y agoMy first real job my boss told me "Everyone fucks up, it's ok, when you do your first big fuck up... just be honest, and tell me." 3 years later I accidentally took down all the ATMs for one of the largest consumer banks in America for a while in the middle of the night. My boss came in "Hey you finally did it, you took longer than most, but that was a good one!" and that was all that was ever said about it.
- karmakaze 1y agoOh this is about email. Thought it might be from the Xerox PARC tour, or the Sherlock app, etc.
- levlaz 1y agoMost wholesome HN post this year
- 6stringmerc 1y ago[flagged]
- vkou 1y ago[flagged]
- ab5tract 1y agoI think he was all of those things, but also could be the opposite of those things, too. Humans are complex and when you already changed the course of history by 25 or whatever, you are going to be even more complex. I don’t idolize Steve Jobs but I do find him to contrast positively against other similar figures like Gates and Ellison. Low bars, I know. But I guess I wanted to defend that people can have a soft spot for Jobs without ever making a dime from any of his endeavors.
- kevin_thibedeau 1y agoThere's a great interview of Allen Baum, high school friend of Wozniak and peripherally involved in the early years of Apple (he pilfered the HP stock room to supply Woz with parts for the Apple 1 & 2 prototypes). He was a roommate with Jobs for one summer and, notably, doesn't say anything bad about him over the course of the three hour interview. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wN02z1KbFmY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wN02z1KbFmY
- vkou 1y agoPeople are complex, with good and bad areas, which is precisely what makes cults of personality problematic. And the discourse around some people (Jobs in particular) is waaaay more cultish than is healthy. And this particular anecdote is the poster child for it. 'Printing out and framing the response' as the daydream reaction to receiving that e-mail is wild, even with the caveats.
- ab5tract 1y agoThat still doesn’t imply that people cut him slack strictly because of profits received, which was my only point.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- msephton 1y agoWhilst working in corporate I tried to get matt@apple.com which was showing as free, but in fact somebody in retail had claimed it. Good for them!
- MarkMarine 1y agoI had mark@apple.com during my time there, accidentally got added to one of the exec’s threads from Tim and felt pretty silly (and didn’t read anything in that thread, couldn’t delete it fast enough, had to email Tim to explain)
- hx8 1y agoThere are a lot of stories like this where people accidentally get emails and then not read them. Why wouldn't you read the email?
- dewey 1y agoBecause that’s the story you hear. The story that happened might be different.
- abtinf 1y agoOne reason: everything is insider trading.
- MarkMarine 1y agoI loved my job at Apple and I don’t know what level of surveillance they have on the work computers. It’s just absolutely not worth the risk.
- whamlastxmas 1y agoWhat possible upside is there to reading it? The potential downside is getting fired. I’d delete it too
- hx8 1y agoReally feels like the sender should be the one at risk and not the receiver.
- testfrequency 1y agoThis post is particularly funny to me as well as I also had a very common name@apple.com email and I would often get sensitive emails, including travel info, sent to me - despite the fact that I had worked there longer than most peers. I eventually grew so annoyed with it that I ended up surrendering the email to said person as it was a losing battle.
- AceJohnny2 1y agoA colleague had an email when they started that was very similar to an SVP. When they highlighted the confusion, it got fixed promptly.
- testfrequency 1y agoIf anything, all it taught me was that nobody at the company would bother to check directory before emailing. Now that the company uses Slack however, I imagine there’s a lot less confusion.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- tjah1087 1y agoI have a colleague in a big tech firm whose email address is derived from his initials, resulting in the glorious: "svp@<company>.com" Needless to say, he sometimes gets emails he shouldn't.
- andai 1y agoWas it this guy? https://xkcd.com/1279/ https://xkcd.com/1279/
- scarface_74 1y agoI have absolutely no respect for Tim Cook anymore. I understood that Cook was the operations guy and not a product guy like Jobs. I even have to begrudgingly admit that he has to navigate the political waters in both China and the US doing things I don’t like. But he consistently makes Apple’s products worse in the name of money - advertising on the phone, malicious compliance in the EU, what came out in the recent court case where he ignored Phil Schiller (head of App Store and long time a Apple employee) who suggested they do the right thing as far as the courts ruling, and how the experience is worse not being able to buy third party content (kindle) and subscriptions within apps. Well you can now. The Kindle app has been updated. Of course I don’t care if they skim 30% from games, loot boxes and coins where 90% of their revenue comes from. I wouldn’t consider it an honor to get an email from Cook. The enshittification of iOS is completely on him.
- fooker 1y agoThe current MacBooks and iMacs are the best computers they have every sold.
- scarface_74 1y agoI agree. But how did like not being able to click on “Buy Book” from the Kindle app until three days ago when the court forced them? How do you like all of the ads in the App Store and they are thinking about adding more? How did you like having an 8GB MacBook and the overpriced upgrades until Apple Intelligence forced them to have 16GB minimum? How did you like being stuck with Lightning ports until the EU forced them? And the malicious compliance in the EU.
- fooker 1y ago> How did you like being stuck with Lightning ports until the EU forced them? Didn’t make much difference for me, in fact I still use a phone with lightning. The rest don’t really matter for me, I have not downloaded anything from the App Store after the initial phone setup and I don’t spend money on subscriptions. Apple being hostile to open platforms and competitors is a forty year old story.
- jorgesborges 1y agoThat is one of the most beautifully crafted “I did something dumb” emails — and to a CEO no less. I wish all my emails were so clear, direct, and personable.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- bilekas 1y ago: Edit : The OP has history until recently - My message is off base and in the wrong context. Apologies. I feel like I'm in crazy town... Hi - I'm new here. I did something dumb and set up a mail alias so that steve@next.com would go to me. This was a bad idea, I'm sorry. I've changed it to steve@next.com goes to you, not to me. I think that makes more sense. My apologies. Signed, new guy. This was > That is one of the most beautifully crafted “I did something dumb” emails Why ? What is happening if you can't email your boss/upper on the regular like that ? "Hey, I'm gonna be late today, ate too many burritos last night and had to visit the hospital" BOSS : Great idea, thanks > PROFOUND!
- LukeShu 1y ago> What is happening if you can't email your boss/upper on the regular like that ? In a 40 person startup or small company, sure. In a 400 person company, the guy at the top is a few levels removed from "your boss" to be emailing with "on the regular". OP had Jobs as his CEO for 20 years (hired in 1991, until Jobs passed in 2011), and says this was the only time Jobs directly emailed with him (of course, 400 people in 1991 was the smallest the company would be during that time, it would only grow from there).
- bilekas 1y ago> OP had Jobs as his CEO for 20 years (hired in 1991, until Jobs passed in 2011), and says this was the only time Jobs directly emailed with him (of course, 400 people in 1991 was the smallest the company would be during that time, it would only grow from there). You're right, I had to dig into OPs history to find that. I take back what I said. He gets every pass he wants, and now it makes sense.
- NKosmatos 1y agoThese two short emails are the best tech flex I’ve ever seen ;-) Nice one and enjoy your retirement!
- foobahhhhh 1y agoMind blown. I remember getting very excited that my teacher in 1991 sent an email. I didn't see the email or use that computer. Just the concept that the email was sent to another country. Weird I barely remember what the email was about. But something along the lines of science and contacting another school.
- pkaye 1y agoWhat if a new employee was named Steve Teve?
- incanus77 1y agoI first learned about the ability to apply for custom aliases at my university after noticing a guy I knew didn't have the usual pattern — first 5 of last name, first name initial, and nothing or else numbers 2+ depending upon your order in line. So I was 'millej3'. Then I thought about the guy's name: D___ Hoover. He had applied for, and got, 'hoover'.
- hennell 1y agoI got an alias setup for my uni address. Although it asked where it should go, so I just directed it directly to my Gmail. My inbox was closed after graduation. My forwarding alias worked for years after. Unrelated fact, a university ending email domain is enough to prove student status for a lot of software.
- stevage 1y ago>Unrelated fact, a university ending email domain is enough to prove student status for a lot of software. When Facebook first came out, it was the only way I could get an account.
- stevage 1y agoI had a colleague, also at a university, where the policy was first 4 of surname, then first name initial. Her name was S____ Cuntin. Yes, they actually issued it.
- ahi 1y agoI'm in my 40s so bit of a grey beard now, but I worked with the real grey beards at University of Michigan. Something like 75k active staff and students, and more than 600k living alumni, yet their email addresses were like bob@umich.edu. Setting up the first campus email server came with privileges.
- 1y ago
- cynicalsecurity 1y agoThat was a very sweet post, thank you.
- bilekas 1y agoIt's a really cool story, but I can't help but feel a lot has be idealized around regular people who did extraordinary things. I mean, Steve Jobs had to work with people, but he wasn't some prophet. He was a talented guy, who had his failures and successes, more of the latter. It is a cool story, but if my boss of 15 years ago becomes world famous, I'm not going to personally treasure the email he sent with 4 words, possible 2 automated, write a blog post about it. I'm just going to giggle to myself a little. Again, I might be in the minority here.
- sailfast 1y agoI’d hypothesize you would if you thought he was a great boss, and the opportunity to work there was unique. Just reading that email felt magical to me - to get something so visionary on your first day at a company in the early 90s would’ve convinced me they were leading me in the right direction.
- bilekas 1y agoAgain, I like the guy, but you say this : > to get something so visionary In what world are 4 words visionary ? "Great idea, thank you" You're idealizing a boss you worked with..
- zerocrates 1y agoI assume they mean the email at the top of the post, with the photo and embedded audio.
- bilekas 1y ago> Just reading that email felt magical to me - to get something so visionary on your first day at a company in the early 90s would’ve convinced me they were leading me in the right direction I have a vision, not 20/20, but it involves you working for me. Good idea. Write a blog about me when I'm gone.
- lutusp 1y agoMy interactions with Steve Jobs came earlier, when he wasn't quasi-mythical, but was already a PITA. A typical interaction with Steve Jobs in 1976: "Hi! Are you Steve Wozniak?" "No, I'm Steve Jobs." "Okay ... umm ... where is Steve Wozniak?" I suspect people's preference for those who were actually building things, over selling them, may have twisted SJ's character ... I mean, more twisted than it already was. Ironically, two people I worked with in the early Apple days -- Steve Jobs, enough already said, and Jef Raskin, who designed the first incarnation of the Macintosh -- both died of pancreatic cancer. I actually miss Jef. We lived together for a while, as I was finishing Apple Writer and my frequent commutes from Oregon were becoming impractical. Here's a Jef Raskin story I think almost no one knows. Jet resolved to design an electric car. He packed a bunch of 12 volt car batteries into a relatively small, lightweight car, and, after removing the ICE, rigged an electric motor in its place. First test drive, Jef tried to descend a hill, only to discover the car's brakes, which until then had gotten an assist from the ICE, were nowhere near adequate to stop the suddenly-massive battery bank. Very scary, briefly out of control, but no harm done.
- agentjj 1y agoSo the mythical Apple car project actually goes way back :)
- AceJohnny2 1y agoTangentially, there remains a test electric car gathering {r,d}ust in one of Google's parking lots, from the early years, that I believed "belonged" to Sergey. IIRC it's at 37.417743, -122.082186 I wonder if they'll ever move it out, put it in a museum or something.
- lutusp 1y agoApparently still there, but mostly hidden under a tree (as seen by Google Maps). In a spectacular irony, Google has no street view of their own parking lot. I suppose one could periodically check for the presence of this artifact, and if it were to suddenly vanish, that would suggest that Google has decided to build another electric car. It is, after all, legacy IP, best hidden away.
- iwontberude 1y agoThe audio snippet was value enough to visit this page. Awesome story too!
- iwontberude 1y agoOne thing that struck me reflecting on this is how much of Steve Job's mythos is about his harsh unrelenting treatment of his employees. I think notes like this shows that Steve must have shown a lot of gratitude as well which goes unnoticed because its less exciting to talk about.
- actionfromafar 1y agoA quick and nice acknowledgment in an email is "a lot of gratitude"? I don't see it.
- arprocter 1y agoDespite P&G, people tend to assume my name ends Or instead of Er, so I thought it'd be smoother to get firstname@domain.tld Turns out folks used to firstinitiallastname@ are confused pretty much every time I tell them to get me at firstname@
- sn9 1y agoDid he take these screenshots decades ago and hold onto them all this time?
- silviogutierrez 1y agoWas wondering the same thing
- mmmlinux 1y agoSame also wondering this. Also wondering why so few are wondering about them.
- stevage 1y agoHa. My version of this is that Jimmy Wales has once emailed me, while I have never emailed him. He was weighing in on, of all things, whether the main page for "Georgia" should be the country or the US state.
- babyent 1y agoThat’s so cool. :) What a great career you’ve had to work with some really legendary people.
- duxup 1y agoWhen open mail relays used to exist I used to route all my mail through whitehouse.gov.
- munificent 1y agoWhy only first name? Should have set up `jobs@apple.com` to forward directly to Steve Jobs too and let the comedy ensure.
- mattl 1y agoThis was at NeXT, not Apple.
- munificent 1y agoSorry, jobs@next.com. The joke works either way. :)
- mattl 1y agoI’m surprised his estate or Apple doesn’t have steve.jobs pointing at something.
- pm2222 1y agoHow can one tell for sure if an email is from a specific person?
- tsunamifury 1y agoOk well the rest of us got emails at 2am demanding we Come in and fix some random slide in a presentation. And the world all thought this was “fun and quirky”.
- kingforaday 1y agoOP says: "suddenly a whole cavalcade of misdirected email was winding up in my inbox" I wonder what kind of email flooding this was like in 1991. 1/day? 1/week?
- icedchai 1y agoI had a UUCP email and news feed back in the early 90's, when I was a teenager. I'd get several emails a week from other nerds. I imagine someone at an actual tech company got many more!
- tehnub 1y agoSo Steve was against haptic feedback on the iPhone? I may have to turn it off in that case.
- altacc 1y agoLike many CEOs, Steve Jobs' primary skills seemed to be motivation and decision making, which means not always being correct and indeed sometimes confidently incorrect. But crucially gives direction & certainty for a company. He also didn't like the idea of third party apps and now iPhones are basically platforms for third party apps to run on.
- pmontra 1y agoI never had an iPhone but I think I disabled all haptic feedback on my Android phones and tablets since forever. I find it very annoying. My phone vibrates only to signal messages and calls. BTW, I don't type on the keyboard, I swype so I have less need for feedbacks.
- drmpeg 1y agoWhen C-Cube Microsystems was bought by LSI Logic in 2001, they grandfathered the old C-Cube e-mail policy of first/last initial. I ended up with the sweet e-mail address, re@lsil.com. Pretty good for a fairly large company. When Abhi Talwalkar became CEO, they changed to firstname.lastname. My manager, who had a 17 character last name, was not pleased.
- Alex_001 1y ago[dead]
- TowerTall 1y agoTwo days into my first job at a large global organisation, I got send the internal budget for the entire company. Turned out the the CEO's email address was "tfa@our.domain" and mine was "tf@our.domain". ups.
- pclark 1y agoI once did this. I (Peter) had pclark@adroll and a co-founder of the 750 ish person company I worked at had peter@adroll. Other Peter was widely known as PK. I jokingly emailed IT and asked to have P(eterclar)K@adroll and to my surprise they gave it to me. They even asked me if I thought it would be confusing for proper PK and I feigned confusion. I promptly got a lot of email for proper PK and since he was co-founder, CFO and board member I decided this wasn’t a funny prank.
- udev4096 1y agoTim cook is not an inspirational figure, quite the opposite
- smugma 1y agodre@apple.com got some interesting emails and iMessages after Apple acquired Beats.
- Damon-Q 1y agoIt's a great idea.
- DonHopkins 1y agoOn 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, but he insisted the liner menus in NeXT Step were the best possible menus ever. When I explained to him how flexible NeWS was, he told me "I don't need flexibility -- I got my window system right the first time!" But who was I to rain on his parade, two weeks after the first release of NeXT Step 0.8? He just wasn't in the mood to be told that he could have a better user interface. So I gave him one of the a "NeRD" buttons I'd made for NeWS NeRDs, which he appreciated. Up to that time, NeXT was the most hyped piece of vaporware ever, and doubters were wearing t-shirts saying “NeVR Step”! Even after he went back to Apple, Steve Jobs never took a bite of Apple Pie Menus, the forbidden fruit. There’s no accounting for taste!
- voidUpdate 1y agoDo you mean like a radial menu? I love those and I don't understand why more software doesn't use them. The GTA V weapon wheel is a great interface for selecting a weapon, and they are really fast to use in Blender.
- DonHopkins 1y agoYes that's right! The pie menus in Blender are wonderful, as is the whole Blender app, ecosystem, and community. Here's the paper we published in 1988 showing that pie menus were 15% faster and had significantly lower error rates than linear menus, which I 3/4 unsuccessfully tried to explain and demonstrate to Steve Jobs. (At least I got three "that sucks" to one "Wow, that’s neat" out of him. ;) An Empirical Comparison of Pie vs. Linear Menus. Jack Callahan, Don Hopkins, Mark Weiser, and Ben Shneiderman, ACM SIGCHI '88: https://donhopkins.medium.com/an-empirical-comparison-of-pie-vs-linear-menus-466c6fdbba4b https://donhopkins.medium.com/an-empirical-comparison-of-pie... The purpose of visualization is insight, not pictures: An interview with visualization pioneer Ben Shneiderman: https://medium.com/multiple-views-visualization-research-explained/the-purpose-of-visualization-is-insight-not-pictures-an-interview-with-visualization-pioneer-ben-beb15b2d8e9b https://medium.com/multiple-views-visualization-research-exp... Here is a 30 year retrospective of pie menus that I wrote 7 years ago (the 37 year anniversary of the paper is coming up in a few days on May 15): https://donhopkins.medium.com/pie-menus-936fed383ff1 https://donhopkins.medium.com/pie-menus-936fed383ff1 Lots of demos of different kinds of pie menus here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2KfeHNIXYUc&list=PLX66BqHq0qTCWwzRxTJ-XQ8o5vP7pjDbv https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2KfeHNIXYUc&list=PLX66BqHq0q... It's near impossible to convince people like Steve Jobs and organizations like Apple, Microsoft, Sun, Open Software Foundation, and even less open-to-outside-ideas open source projects like GIMP, to adopt unconventional ideas like pie menus. One of Blender's outstanding qualities is that they listen to their users and don't suffer from NIH syndrome, fortunately! I got frustrated at trying to get pie menus into official corporate user interface toolkits, and took a job in the game industry at Maxis, where you're not only allowed but even required to roll your own user interface, and got them into SimCity and The Sims: The Sims, Pie Menus, Edith Editing, and SimAntics Visual Programming Demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-exdu4ETscs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-exdu4ETscs Open Sourcing SimCity, by Chaim Gingold: https://donhopkins.medium.com/open-sourcing-simcity-58470a275446 https://donhopkins.medium.com/open-sourcing-simcity-58470a27... X11 SimCity Demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jvi98wVUmQA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jvi98wVUmQA Multi Player SimCityNet for X11 on Linux: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fVl4dGwUrA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fVl4dGwUrA Micropolis Online (SimCity) Web Demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8snnqQSI0GE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8snnqQSI0GE
- Agraillo 1y ago- OP mentioned this briefly with the plans to expand in 2021 [1] (Good old google still useful : [ "Steve next com" before:2025 ] ) - Also excluding rare words from the search allows finding several AI Summarizers for Hacker News [ "Steve next com" -amazed ] [1] https://blog.hayman.net/2021/02/07/business-cards-i-have-known.html#:~:text=steve@next.com https://blog.hayman.net/2021/02/07/business-cards-i-have-kno...
- mytailorisrich 1y ago32 years at Apple... which immediately made me look up Apple's share price. In 1993 in was about 50c (there may have been stock splits since), and it peaked at about $255 in December last year.
- voytec 1y agoI applaud the simple, blunt honesty from the very beginning: > Hi - I'm new here. I did something dumb
- MarceliusK 1y agoHonestly, this belongs in the museum of "wholesome oopsies in tech."
- sc970 1y agoTook a while to get a first name @ company email address. I work for a large company 50k employees (not in IT) with the standard email format <firstname>.<lastname>@company.com The company has a automated way to change your email address if your name changes, so I changed my last name to @. which allowed me officialy change my email address to <firstname>.@company.com. Then raised an IT fault to get my email address 'fixed' and remove the . after my name.
- rodolphoarruda 1y agoNice story! I loved reading it.
- julik 1y agoThe OG voice messages.
- jjkaczor 1y agoHeh - I had something similar when I started at Microsoft - but from my wife (now ex), who was emailing "[myGivenFirstName]@microsoft.com" for some reason, thinking that I was the only person with that name at Microsoft (uh-huh) and furious that I wasn't answering her, when I was away during initial onboarding...
- jrojers 1y agoI was an early employee at a startup and happened to share a similar name and initials with the guy who eventually became CFO. oooo boy - lots of receipts and approval emails sent my way. I would forward/delete and we'd laugh about it. Then we started to get big and it became less funny. Not my fault, and nobody blamed me, but one week we had a quarterly sales meeting and the company flew in 50+ reps from around the country... Those folks can spend money. I did my best to avoid reading, but receipts for extravagant food/drinks were hard to ignore.
- animanoir 1y ago[dead]
- AceVerse 1y agodo you want to be a second verse Google search Amazon bigg Boss I felt something talking to God because he must be called God because not I caught him first
- AceVerses 1y agodo you want to be a second verse Google search Amazon bigg Boss I felt something talking to God because he must be called God because not I caught him first
- AceVerses12345 1y agodo you want to be a second verse Google search Amazon bigg Boss I felt something talking to God because he must be called God because not I caught him first
- michaelcampbell 1y agoI once knew a guy who had a framed snail-mail letter from Steve Jobs, asking if he'd reconsider his decision to not accept a job offer from Apple. I saw the letter in ~1994, so not sure when it was actually sent. He said he didn't regret the decision at the time as he was a big Sybase DBA expert and didn't figure Apple would be doing much with databases of any sort, much less Sybase.
- mildzebrataste 1y agoThe Apple Watch uses a pie menu to open apps. You can switch to linear but that’s only useful if you’re trying to confirm something’s existence. The pie menu, as chaotic as it seems, is just a better experience, imho.
- zxcvbnm09po34 1y ago[flagged]