I have a fairly interesting perspective; I was there when Steve first returned, left after a few months and then returned in less than eighteen months.
I initially joined as a refugee from Be, as it became obvious the PowerPC would no longer be a viable platform for BeOS. I joing the Final Cut Pro team, which has just joined Apple as part of an aquisition of the "Key Grip" video editor from Macromedia.
The FCP team located in IL1 on the third floor I believe. Most of the floor was occupied by the Apple Advance Technology Group. ATG had a really cool space with private offices ringing the outside walls and interior areas with lots of whiteboards and space for doing whatever ATG did. Larry Tesler had a double wide private office and there was a lot of commotion.
The "Blue" team working in MacOs 9 was below us. It was very busy down there as OS 9 was the engine that still powered the company. Those first cool iMacs and MacBooks weren't running OSX! I don't think we even had a "Beaker" build yet.
Steve simply didn't like ATG and over the next few months the spaces rapidly cleared out. We were once stuck in a corner and soon we had a lot of room to set up a couple of large commercial quality edit suite with Avid Media Composers and other high end gear to help make FCP a commercial success.
I wasn't part of any sort of political competition; we just kept making FCP, but watching the exodus of ATG people and seeing how stressed out Steve Glass was running the Blue team was getting me down.
The NeXT people were setting up their world in IL2, with Avie taking an office on the 4th floor and an unofficial sort of NeXT hardware museum springing up outside of the area where the pool table was. It was a cool place to visit; lots of neat NeXT hardware and some SparcStations as well. A Symbolics workstation also showed up in a conference room on the second floor, although it may have been at Apple earlier. If you looked in various hardware labs, there was always intersting hardware to be found; DEC, Infographics, VAX and more.
It wasn't at all obvious to me that Apple was going to figure things out; Steve was being disruptive (in a good way?), but Gil, Ellen, Steve Glass and others were still around and all the NeXT people were doing their thing. I was convinced by some former Be people to go join Andy Herzfeld, Susan Kare, Mike Boich and some other Apple engineering heroes of mine (Darin Adler, John Sullivan) at Eazel.
Eazel folded within eighteen months and I was back at Apple as part of a group hire Andy helped setup with Steve. Anyone who wanted to work at Apple just showed up the next Monday and got to work! Many of those who didn't come to Apple ended up going to Danger Research, Google and other startups. A lot eventually ended up at Apple anyway.
The Apple I came back to was different in that Steve was officialy CEO, but the divisions between groups were still there. It would take several more years before I felt that things felt healthy. As soon as I did think things felt good, Steve become ill, Scott Forstall erected a secure fortress on my floor on IL2 and the political shenanigans began. My initial stock grant priced at $14 a share had grown, gone through a couple of splits and the company was doing billions of dollars a quarter. A far cry from the bleak days of 1997!
I had a PowerPC Mac in ~1998 and I put BeOS R4.5 on it. What a HUGE change from MacOS ... I couldn't believe a computer could actually act and respond like that! I jumped ship to Intel hardware to stick with BeOS.
I'm very curious what you worked on at Be - the development team wasn't that large, was it?
The development team was very small. I worked on audio mixing code, capturing video encoded from Bt848 cards, audio and video codecs, anything related to audio and video timing. Several great programmers were there and continue to do amazing things at other companies big and small. I ended up working with many of them at Apple. At some point, it seems many had to choose between Google or Apple.
The first version of the driver was written by Be's VP of Engineering, Steve Sakoman. Steve started the "Big Newton" project at Apple and his experience with the AT&T processor was the reason the first BeBox prototypes used AT&T Hobbit CPUs.
Steve returned to Apple as VP of CoreOS or something like that. I was super happy when he came back. I think he is living in the rain forests of Hawaii now, clad only in palm leaves.
ATG sounds like it was an incredibly creative little group, and it's a shame such a thing was more or less disbanded (along with letting HyperCard die, etc). SK8 in particular looks like it was very interesting. Someone needs to write a full retrospective of that group!
I agree. Larry Tesler is no longer around to write such a retrospective. I am not sure who else might be able to do it. One of my favorite ATG project was the Dylan[1] programming language.
Larry was working a lot on what would become Stagecast.[2]
There was so much going on, but the way Steve saw it, nothing was shipping. I think he made the right choice shutting it all down. As I said above, it wasn't at all clear that Apple would end up turing into the Apple we have today.
> There was so much going on, but the way Steve saw it, nothing was shipping. I think he made the right choice shutting it all down.
I think I disagree, but I am pretty Steve-cynical. It seemed to follow a pattern of Steve shutting down things that he wasn't in charge of, or that smacked of Sculley-era Apple?
IL4 used to have a technical library — and a kind museum of Apple products (including a Lisa) that you could play with. My manager let us know one day we might pop over to the library and "check out a few books" - a little bird had told him that we might not have to return them as the library was going bye bye.
And so it did. Eventually I think I donated my Foley and Van-Dam to a library for their book sale.
The loss of that library was sad, but didn't all the books go to the Stanford Apple archive? I also grabbed a book on parsers.
I know some people from ATG found places to stay if they really, really wanted to, but unless you could directly related your work to something on Steve's agenda, you were gone. Kim stayed and worked on voice recognition, Larry Yaeger stayed and worked on InkWell, Jerome stayed and worked on latent semantics analysis for email spam detection, etc.
Relating your work to something on Steve's agenda is kind of what I was describing. As another pointed out, there were some amazing technologies that came out of ATG. It is impossible to know if they would have been interesting to Jobs though at the time.
Right. If I have to be honest, I don't think I have recovered from the PTSD caused by all of those Thursday Steve UX meetings. Oh the stories that could be told...
I think I need more counseling to share a lot of them. Let me just say that Steve could be quite brutal. His level of brutality seemed to increase with the level of expectation he had of you. I never saw him be mean to any employee he randomaly encountered on campus. In fact, I saw him open doors, let people ahead of him in the salad bar and cashier line at Cafe Macs and be generally pleasant. It was in those closed door meeting or in rehearsals for MacWorld or WWDC events that you would experience the full wilting blast of scorching invective. Not fun!
Look up S3TC/DXTC texture compression, S3 copied Apple video codec verbatim and patented it for 3D graphics use. Somehow Apple missed that and didnt fight initial patent, result was losing couple iphone court cases 10 years later and purging S3TC from mobile.
Avid Media Composer was born and grew up on Mac hardware. Same goes for Adobe Premiere, all thanks to ATG work.
>David Boies, attorney for the DoJ, noted that John Warden, for Microsoft, had omitted to quote part of a handwritten note by Fred Anderson, Apple's CFO, in which Anderson wrote that "the [QuickTime] patent dispute was resolved with cross-licence and significant payment to Apple." The payment was $150 million.
I initially joined as a refugee from Be, as it became obvious the PowerPC would no longer be a viable platform for BeOS. I joing the Final Cut Pro team, which has just joined Apple as part of an aquisition of the "Key Grip" video editor from Macromedia.
The FCP team located in IL1 on the third floor I believe. Most of the floor was occupied by the Apple Advance Technology Group. ATG had a really cool space with private offices ringing the outside walls and interior areas with lots of whiteboards and space for doing whatever ATG did. Larry Tesler had a double wide private office and there was a lot of commotion.
The "Blue" team working in MacOs 9 was below us. It was very busy down there as OS 9 was the engine that still powered the company. Those first cool iMacs and MacBooks weren't running OSX! I don't think we even had a "Beaker" build yet.
Steve simply didn't like ATG and over the next few months the spaces rapidly cleared out. We were once stuck in a corner and soon we had a lot of room to set up a couple of large commercial quality edit suite with Avid Media Composers and other high end gear to help make FCP a commercial success.
I wasn't part of any sort of political competition; we just kept making FCP, but watching the exodus of ATG people and seeing how stressed out Steve Glass was running the Blue team was getting me down.
The NeXT people were setting up their world in IL2, with Avie taking an office on the 4th floor and an unofficial sort of NeXT hardware museum springing up outside of the area where the pool table was. It was a cool place to visit; lots of neat NeXT hardware and some SparcStations as well. A Symbolics workstation also showed up in a conference room on the second floor, although it may have been at Apple earlier. If you looked in various hardware labs, there was always intersting hardware to be found; DEC, Infographics, VAX and more.
It wasn't at all obvious to me that Apple was going to figure things out; Steve was being disruptive (in a good way?), but Gil, Ellen, Steve Glass and others were still around and all the NeXT people were doing their thing. I was convinced by some former Be people to go join Andy Herzfeld, Susan Kare, Mike Boich and some other Apple engineering heroes of mine (Darin Adler, John Sullivan) at Eazel.
Eazel folded within eighteen months and I was back at Apple as part of a group hire Andy helped setup with Steve. Anyone who wanted to work at Apple just showed up the next Monday and got to work! Many of those who didn't come to Apple ended up going to Danger Research, Google and other startups. A lot eventually ended up at Apple anyway.
The Apple I came back to was different in that Steve was officialy CEO, but the divisions between groups were still there. It would take several more years before I felt that things felt healthy. As soon as I did think things felt good, Steve become ill, Scott Forstall erected a secure fortress on my floor on IL2 and the political shenanigans began. My initial stock grant priced at $14 a share had grown, gone through a couple of splits and the company was doing billions of dollars a quarter. A far cry from the bleak days of 1997!