Ask HN: Was anyone working at Apple during Steve Jobs' return in 1997?

It's hard to overstate how bloated Apple was internally.

Marketing had products for every conceivable niche. Engineering was all posturing: great hand-waving plans papered over nasty middle-management infighting. Hundreds of engineers in new glass-walled offices, producing plans. I wrote test code against a component that had been delivered months earlier only to find that it was just a stub. Even the debugger had bugs. Everyone knew it was a mess, but went along with it, fatalistically thinking that any OS-level project would be that messy.

I went across the street to JavaSoft: small teams cranking out code that would last forever. Swing was built in a year. Signs on the offices not to disturb the programmers. ~1,000 classes in 1.1, ~10K in 1.2 the next year. One main engineering manager hired a bunch of kids out of college. The JDK tech lead, Mark Reinhold, is still at the helm today.

Night and day; it was like going from the Soviet Union to the U.S.

When considering a new job, I almost don't care about technology. Engineering culture makes all the difference.

Your description of 1997 Apple sounds uncomfortably close to modern Google. I miss working for startups.

You guys were creating Java?

> ~1,000 classes in 1.1, ~10K in 1.2 the next year.

9K classes in a year sounds crazy as hell

A typical well-designed class will usually be a few hundred lines a code, tops. Often less than 100 lines.

9k classes * 100-300 == 900k-2.7m LOC

Not TOO crazy for the most complete standard library ever developed, for a language meant from the beginning to take over enterprise business computing.

How many LOC are in whatever meme language is hype this year? Hell, I feel like I see nearly that many lines of console output, when I run NPM to pull in dependencies, lol.

I disagree with what I call Java's OOP obsession, but I have to admire the drive behind that ecosystem.

I'm disgusted by it, but admire the ability for the system to run in spite of the mess that the pattern generate.

What do you look at in engineering culture?

And how do you even "look" at it from the outside? Ask interviewers and they will always tell you that they have great culture, teamwork, etc

Easy,

Ask where the documentation is.

Ask how much input engineers have on what they are working on.

Ask how many meetings hours they average per day.

>Ask how much input engineers have on what they are working on.

This is the way. Ask this question of people working at a legacy company and they won't be able to meet your eyes.

> Ask where the documentation is.

I've had a reasonably long career and worked at a number of companies at this point, and I've never seen this 'documentation' that engineers are supposedly producing.

We really have the opposite problem, there are lots of documentations but they are not exactly organized or all up to date. Much easier to fix than not having any of them I would guess.

Right before that era I worked on Mosaic for Windows, and the Mac developers sat across the stairwell from us. The Mac guys had a very love hate relationship with Macs.

On the one hand the lead was infinitely proud of being able to have 2 (or was it three?) monitors on his desk, big CRTs on a desk designed during the Cold War, by a designer who had nightmares about nuclear blasts and wanted someplace safe to duck and cover. You could do that with Macs but not quite yet with Windows. If memory serves, Linux got that ability before Windows did but don't quote me on that.

On the other hand they were writing what is ostensibly a concurrent application on an operating system with no protected memory and no pre-emptive multitasking, so the whole thing was using hand-rolled cooperative multitasking via C longjumps. It's no wonder the Windows team had an easier time keeping up with Netscape for that golden year. They were from what I understand cross compiling, and the Windows team could just do Windowsy things with a fifth of the staff.

So my experience of this era, through that lens, through learning to hate Macs at the hands of Mathematica, and also through rumor mills, was that a lot of Apple's OS people ended up going to Palm, where they made pretty much the same set of tradeoffs. It was very weird watching subsequent Palm models start to bump up against the same ceiling that NextStep was helping Apple route around.

I told my Mac loving friends to talk to me when Apple had a modern OS. So when NextStep merged my ears pricked up. My first Mac ended up being an anomaly. Apple briefly produced a 13" Mac with a discrete video card, which they haven't since. I had been struggling to get Linux drivers for a Fujitsu LightBook, which was ridiculously small, but was practically obsolete by the time I got everything working. That device is the sole time I've contributed to Linux, which was cool but exhausting. So I ran to a pretty UI, works out of the box, but ships with /bin/bash with open arms and never looked back.

You could still see the bones of NextStep in OS X for some time.

The university ended up with upward of 60 NeXT machines (which I later learned is a lot for one college), in 2 labs when I started, eventually in 3 that I knew of, one of which I ended up with after hours access to. On many occasions they were the only open machines. I had helped too many people who lost their papers to faulty disk drives and learned that the best way to write a paper was to keep my Unix account empty and mail myself copies, so it hardly mattered that I didn't have a floppy for the NeXTs. It didn't hurt that they never figured out how to meter the NeXT laser printer, so while it wasn't the best or fastest printer on campus, it was the only free one. "Your printah is out of paypah."

I came on board with the NeXT acquisition (or rather reverse acquisition as ex-NeXT often refer to)…

So I do recall seeing a few times after we relocated to Infinite Loop, that Steve at first was just working as a consultant, and not as an employee. Thus at the time he didn’t have a badge to enter in IL1 (Infinite Loop 1: hold Apple HQ); many times when he was coming in the morning, he had to wait at the glass door to enter the campus, until some kind soul was letting him in (despite the policy only badged employees could enter or visitors with a printed tag). I saw it happening more than once while grabbing a coffee at the coffee booth in the IL1 building.

Later on, after he came back officially as CEO (or iCEO), I remember clearly during a lunch with co-workers (at Café Mac, seating outside) watching at a distance Steve & Jony walking inside the campus, then seating at a bench and Jony opening some carrying case/luggage, and let Steve pull the content out of it, so he could look at it in the sun: it looked like a piece of plastic… at the time, we had no clue what it was, except the color was orange. Many months later, Steve introduced the first iBook (which was the first Mac with Wifi): when I saw the orange color of the iBook I made the connection with what we saw back that day; Jony was most likely showing to Steve the first shell of the future iBook.

Steve otherwise at work was truly laser focus at a time on different projects: I was working on backend web services development with public facing web site, so usually every 2 weeks our boss was presenting to Steve our progress (every week or even more while closer to ship): our boss usually was always coming back with clear feedback on what was good or terrible, which we obviously had to improve for the next presentation… stressful yes, but truly enjoyable. More than once, Steve did cut some projects that were close to finish and you just had to go along since no one had a say in it, except Steve.

Obviously I have a few more stories of that sort, since I spent close to 20 years at Apple (/NeXT).

It was quite something to get the hard work you did for months presented on stage by Steve… I still miss the excitement from it even if it is more than 15 years ago.

Edit: fixing a few typos

I'm really thankful I had a chance to work at 1 Infinite Loop during that time. I worked with other Developer Relations folks in IL3, with near-daily trips to IL2 to either meet with folks on the QuickTime team or just hang out. Occasionally I'd get early glimpses at things like QTi and HyperCard 3.

I vividly recall the day Steve introduced the iMac in the Infinite Loop quad. If I had to pick a day that telegraphed Apple's future fortunes, it would be that day. Rhapsody's potential was compelling, but as Macintosh OS it was still pretty Crapsody at the time. The iMac was a Real Thing — as friendly as computers get, that only Apple could've created and sold.

I was a T.Rbbt back in the SF Bay Area, over a decade ago, in the early wild west days of the "gig economy;" one of my first gigs was to "throw away a bunch of old electronics." As a diehard Apple fanboy, since 1991, I was excited for even the opportunity to throw away old history (knowing nothing more than "old electronics").

Upon showing up to a nice top-floor suite near Delores Park, I knew immediately that these would be nicer "old electronics" — turns out it was a BUNCH of PROTOTYPE Apple Computers (no "LISA," but plenty of history and unique items, given their hacked-together nature); 'WOZ literally had his hands on at least ONE of these,' I remember thinking; 'CERTAINLY!'

I mistakenly told the disposer of this "old electronics" just how cool all this HISTORY was, to which he immediately realized that I wasn't going to be throwing any of it away. Needless to say, he accompanied me to the junkyard as we both watched Apple History get run over by a skidsteer.

Just tragic. PS T.R. sucks - gfkt Leah!

I was at Apple 2006-2010 and worked with many who were there during SJ's return. It was drastic in both product and headcount cuts.[1] SJ was many things but above all, he was feared.

[1] roughly 1/3 of the company https://www.mercurynews.com/2014/08/29/1997-apple-bites-the-...

I recall people of that era wondering why the guy who created NeXT, a cool idea with zero commercial success, was so arrogant as to think he knew how to make a winning product.

What I don't think a lot of people knew at the time was the hand Jobs played in the birth of Pixar, which is definitely something to be cocky about.

One of my coworkers decided he was going to specialize in ObjectiveC, because yes the jobs were rare but they paid a premium. This was before Apple started talking to BeOS and NeXT about an acquisition, so I thought he was crazy.

When the iPhone came out and mobile apps became a gold rush, I spent a lot of time wondering where he was now and whether he had a Scrooge McDuck room to swim in his money.

I didn't work there, but for all you old-timers, I attended the Brass Ring job fair at the Santa Clara convention center, early 1997 before Jobs rejoined.

I distinctly remember the Apple recruitment booth was empty, vs all of the high-activity booths around them. I remember it vividly because it was sad seeing how far they had fallen, people weren't interested in even talking to the recruiter.

Imagine getting a job at Apple in 1997 and never selling a share. I know some people that have been at Apple for 12+ years and are planning on retiring next year, they are multi-multi-millionaires just from regular stock grants.

If you've not seen it, this video of Job' informal talk with WWDC attendees in 1997 is a classic. At the time he was only consulting at Apple after the Next acquisition and Gil Amelio was still at the helm. He talks quite a bit about how the company is re-engineering itself and refocusing on a narrower set of products, and deals constructively with some pretty hardball questions from the audience.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qyd0tP0SK6o&t=1086s

Is this the one with the loaded question/insult from an audience member about deprecating a framework? Cause I agree that Apple has been too developer-hostile on Mac OS for a very long time, even though I'm mostly on the user side (but have also done a little Mac dev). They unnecessarily break third-party software too often, to the point where many devs have given up on proper Mac support and just thrown things into an Electron app.

Gil Amelio and Ellen Hancock were I think some of the most underrated management that Apple had, they at least had a better clue about where the company needed to go.

Also, I think Michael Spindler did more damage to Apple than Scully did.

I strongly disagree. Amelio's Macworld 1997 keynote was a legendary failure, just a shocking public show of incompetence. He built zero confidence in anyone joining from NeXT. His book shows a poor understanding of what happened at Apple ("wow, I directed a VP to go write a new modern OS, and they just never did it!?!"). There was no useful depth of vision or insight coming from him or Hancock at the time (my opinion as a lead eng from that time), and it is clear to me that Apple would have continued to spiral into oblivion under their lead (like yahoo).

I'll grant that he did spark the revival by doing the NeXT deal, as Apple did need an acquisition to reboot the software stack.

I dont blame Copland on Amelio, like the product was moribund before he got there, he had the sense to realize it was moribund, hire someone to verify that and then to cancel it and go find something else.

It's interesting because he clearly has some vision, but he is also a master salesman and manipulator. He pretty adeptly dodges the question about "yea, this is good for Apple but what about developers", because he launches into a sales pitch that ropes you in but leads you to the time that we have today, where Apple uses its walled garden approach to bend and mold developers to their will. It's likely to me that, even at this time, Jobs probably had the whole 30% cream off the top model in his head. It also leads to where macOS and iOS-only developers are worn down by the siphoning and churn and sidelined by the prominence of cross-platform web and Electron apps.

https://youtu.be/qyd0tP0SK6o?t=1260

And god, Jobs just drips with a sort of icky confidence and condescension, and there's certainly a lot of cult of personality present in the audience members.

I read that one differently. His presentation style was not as well developed as later, but setting that aside I doubt he had a grand plan. What he appeared to have is a point of view that without developers Apple was going to die no matter what else they did, and without more compelling hardware it also wouldn't matter what else they did. He knew that Apple's leverage with the big vendors (Adobe, MS) was limited, so my guess is he was at the point of this talk fishing around trying to figure out how to hustle the company out of that situation. He knew that the current product line was very poor and not making them money. The $150M MS deal was masterful. The product simplification was necessary. But you can see the fishing around, they talked about licensing, supporting Intel, enterprise app dev and server infrastructure, all kinds of random stuff. So I don't attribute any grand plan, just a really specific view on what Apple's problem was and a lot of hustling to try to solve them.

Interesting, ended up watching the entire thing. So much to grok in retrospect but if I was in that crowd a lot of it would sound like hand wavy, bullshit, intangible business speak to me. Really puts into perspective the vision that some people have that many of us can’t grasp. This talk is a great victory for amazing product management.

Anybody familiar with the Improv / Quantrix spreadsheets that he claims is 5X - 10X more productive than Excel? What's so special about them? Has that functionality found its way into Excel at this point?

Quantrix is still popular today for large financial modelling. The main advantage of Improv/Quantrix was that everything is named, and formulas are expressed as logical formulas, not references to spreadsheet columns, which makes the spreadsheets themselves more interpretable and readily auditable. If you're disciplined with named ranges, you can do a similar thing in Excel these days, but it doesn't really feel as natural as it did in Improv, and on a multi-person team with varying Excel skill levels it can be a challenge to maintain that discipline.

The best reading on that period I'm aware of is the Jim Carleton book "Apple". He's a WSJ reporter who was covering the company at the time and the book covers the period ending around when Jobs returned but before he stepped in as CEO. The thing I find most interesting about that book is it was written without being tainted by knowledge of the company's later resurgence. It provides a really different take than anything written much later. I didn't care for Walter Isaacson's book much, he injects too much of his own opinion into things and besides being obnoxious I don't think his calibration on the business is very good.

I feel like the Isaacson bio is fairly accurate factually on that time, from what I knew as a senior SW Eng at NeXT/Apple. It was a huge course change, eventually pushed through the entire software org by Steve, the NeXT leadership and a set of Apple folks that chose to embrace the new direction.

I wasn’t working there but when Jobs came back, Gil Amelio was at the helm, not Sculley. Sculley was long gone by that time. Also worth noting is that Amelio had also cancelled a bunch of projects to cut down costs but Jobs’ was more drastic.

Thanks for clarifying, changed the original post

One of the most famous examples was Jony Ive. Jony was recruited to Apple in 1992 after Steve left.

Jony did not come from NeXT, as many seem to believe.

...as many seem to believe

I've ever encountered anyone who thinks that.