[HN Gopher] From: Steve Jobs. "Great idea, thank you."
___________________________________________________________________
From: Steve Jobs. "Great idea, thank you."
Author : mattl
Score : 528 points
Date : 2025-05-08 18:40 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.hayman.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.hayman.net)
| FlamingMoe wrote:
| Great story, put a smile on my face.
| luotuoshangdui wrote:
| That's a fun little story
| Aurornis wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| It 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.
| GuinansEyebrows wrote:
| I love how sarcastic this reply comes across. Did it feel at all
| like that in the moment or was it received as earnest?
| khazhoux wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| Did you get a reply?
| edm0nd wrote:
| and? did he reply?
| kccqzy wrote:
| In 2010 I emailed Steve Jobs about an idea for improving iWork
| 09. I forgot what it was. No reply ever.
| p_ing wrote:
| I'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
| sgerenser wrote:
| At 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 wrote:
| 34 years at Apple/Next. Amazing tenure!
| cmarschner wrote:
| $$$$$
| girvo wrote:
| Yes, that is one of the main incentives for working.
| mattl wrote:
| Steve 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
| no_wizard wrote:
| In many ways, WebObjects feels ahead of its time.
|
| Sometimes I wonder what happened to these ideas.
| mattl wrote:
| AFAIK, 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 wrote:
| It 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 wrote:
| Watched 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 wrote:
| At 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 wrote:
| The 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.
| MagerValp wrote:
| Steve is easily the most entertaining conference speaker I've
| had the pleasure to attend in person. He was a regular at
| MacSysAdmin for many years, and always in the Friday afternoon
| slot when you need a jolt of energy. Good times.
| MrScruff wrote:
| "It's got a steep learning curve but that's ok, because it
| means you learn a lot in a short period of time."
| sailfast wrote:
| Oh my god what a gem: "it's got a steep learning curve which is
| good because that means you learn a lot in a short period of
| time" hahaha
| zikani_03 wrote:
| What a great video :). Interesting how some old ideas are new
| again. Thank you for sharing this and congrats to Steve Hayman
| for his tenure at Apple!
| AIorNot wrote:
| Ok but for Pete's sake, he was a CEO not a God - the geek hero
| worship is a bit excessive
| mattl wrote:
| Where are you seeing geek hero worship here?
| bayindirh wrote:
| Steve 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 wrote:
| Hey, 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 wrote:
| Kevin Nash and I peed next to one another in an airport
| bathroom one time.
| cosmicgadget wrote:
| Well don't leave us hanging.
| jonathanlydall wrote:
| I 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.
| khazhoux wrote:
| We tell stories of things that are noteworthy. We find this to
| be entertaining.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| Dude wrote a small anecdote on their blog and this is your
| response?
| mattl wrote:
| Yeah, a small anecdote on their blog after 34 years on the
| job. Does not seem like worship at all.
| voidspark wrote:
| It is respect, not worship.
| rightbyte wrote:
| Have Jobs ever been a compter geek hero? Wozniak is the one
| people raise to the skys.
| skeletal88 wrote:
| Steve is the hero of salesmen, consultants and CEO-s, should
| not be a hero for geeks and actual developers.
| voidspark wrote:
| Geeks and developers can have multiple dimensions to their
| personality.
|
| I respect Steve Jobs for his ruthless and uncompromising
| focus on quality and his attention to detail. He wasn't
| just a sales guy.
| saalweachter wrote:
| I mean, the salesman-CEO/founder is way better at selling
| themselves as a hero of tech & innovation than the
| engineer-CTO/founder.
| numinix wrote:
| Sending every new user an email with a "very personal
| welcome" and audio message for example.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| Steve Jobs knew how to ship products people want. I have no
| respect for developers in a corporate settings who don't
| ship.
| oortoo wrote:
| On the one hand, an amusing anecdote about an interaction with
| someone that ended up becoming massively famous does come
| across as somewhat noteworthy, but on the other hand, the fact
| that Job's response basically translates to: "Um, ok." does
| make this kind of... sad?
|
| Side effects of living in a world where wealth and power have
| become virtues. I think we subconsciously judge our own value
| based on how many degrees we came to stepping onto the world's
| "stage".
| sublinear wrote:
| I completely agree. Both emails from Steve Jobs and Tim Cook
| are totally impersonal and routine. It's entirely possible they
| weren't even "personally sent" by either.
|
| There's nothing wrong with the stories, just the overall
| sentiment behind them.
| kccqzy wrote:
| It'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 wrote:
| Are you requesting a process and architecture retrospective on
| a company from 30 years ago? :-)
| kadoban wrote:
| The 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 wrote:
| >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 wrote:
| Yep! 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 wrote:
| Worked at an aerospace concern in the early 90s... for
| the first year or so there was no firewall. Yes, my Mac
| and PC directly on the internet with routable addresses.
|
| I soon set up a website and webcam as they were shipped.
| CU-See-Me blew my mind. At some point I stood up a Quake
| server and invited friends to play. ;-)
| kccqzy wrote:
| The number of people on the Internet doesn't matter. This
| is company email. It might as well as intranet only.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| It was 1991. They were an up start tech company. It was a
| different time.
| joezydeco wrote:
| You could also register a domain for free by sending an email
| form to a bot. It was truly the wild frontier.
| mattl wrote:
| And I'm sure it was the responsibility of a single person
| editing /etc/aliases in Emacs, not a big drawn out process
| too.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| The biggest factor is the small company... same could happen
| today.
| caseyy wrote:
| Everyone's super concerned about security and control, but the
| best places I worked in were more concerned with freedom. Yes,
| be savvy about security, protect key assets, but "permissions
| oversight" about claiming an alias seems excessive.
|
| You'll have 1,000x more headaches and burned operational cash
| getting everyone to approve everyone else's every step than
| handling one security incident in a decade. And even with very
| tight security, something will still happen. It's best to have
| backups, a good restore plan, and a relaxed culture*. Or that's
| what I think, anyway.
|
| I'm in SME land though, not big tech. But then again, 99.99%
| companies are.
|
| * common sense exceptions apply.
| kccqzy wrote:
| > but the best places I worked in were more concerned with
| freedom
|
| Sure. But if that's the case why do you even have individual
| email? Make everything a group email and group IM. Not
| allowed to send messages to a specific person; can only send
| messages to everyone. What would happen?
|
| Can you see the flaw in this logic? Email isn't only for
| discussing work projects. It needs to be private for
| discussions involving HR, legal, and other personnel matters.
| shawnz wrote:
| Even with the privacy concerns aside, you need individual
| mailboxes for reasons of maintaining organization.
|
| I think your point would be better made if in your
| hypothetical, we still had individual mailboxes, but
| everyone could see into everyone else's mailbox.
| caseyy wrote:
| Steve Jobs's email was not taken away. A guy was allowed to
| register an alias self-service style. Everyone could reach
| Jobs on his email.
| mattl wrote:
| And every NeXT machine came with an email waiting in your
| inbox out of the box from sjobs@next.com complete with
| Lip Service voice message from Steve Jobs.
|
| Of course you likely had no immediate way to reply to an
| internet email address like that at the time out of the
| box.
| kccqzy wrote:
| Registering an alias self-service style is fine. What's
| potentially problematic is changing that alias once it
| has become established.
| dogleash wrote:
| I feel you. I keep hearing people in software say "wild west"
| when they mean "absence of paternalistic bureaucratic
| controls."
|
| The virtual space is locked down so so so much harder than
| the physical because it's "free" to automate, but the vibe is
| it's outrageously uncontrollable. I get it when we're talking
| the whole Internet, but the same group of insiders as the
| physical space?
| ryandrake wrote:
| One of the biggest time sinks and "velocity" killers in
| BigTech, and sometimes also in MediumTech, is the need to get
| approval (sometimes multiple people's approvals) for
| absolutely everything. Often, approvers are among the most
| senior, busy people in the company, and "approving a dozen
| things" is not even top 100 on their list of things to do
| today. There are people who spend >75% of their time just
| "chasing" approvers and reminding them to please, please,
| please approve my Thing X so we can launch Product Y on time!
| caseyy wrote:
| For sure. It kills projects and companies large and small.
| jajko wrote:
| In multinational megacorps this is more or less modus
| operandi. I am not even mad anymore, I realized this aint
| malice but simply inevitable as size goes up and time
| passes on.
|
| The best companies that realize this can minimize it, but
| its inevitable.
| msh wrote:
| It must have been a big difference between working for a cutting
| edge tech company like next and a regular company back then.
| neilv wrote:
| That 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 wrote:
| I 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.
| khazhoux wrote:
| Honestly, 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 wrote:
| The experience as CEO of a company with 10e2-10e3 headcount is
| a lot different than the experience with 10e4-10e6 headcount.
| jawns wrote:
| But 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 wrote:
| Personally I'd either say nothing or farm the research out to
| an assistant for long tenure employees.
| rdlw wrote:
| Any number of negative employees would be troubling, but I
| admit 9.9 million of them would be especially bad.
| chinchilla2020 wrote:
| That's actually his personality based on my knowledge of
| interactions with him. He is sort of a workaholic robot.
| lapcat wrote:
| There's no evidence that Steve Jobs knew Steve Hayman from
| Adam. "This was the only email I ever personally received from
| Steve Jobs."
| mattl wrote:
| Hayman 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.
| no_wizard wrote:
| A big part of me has suspected, especially after reading
| biographies about him, that Pixar was simply better aligned
| with his creative side. NeXT was a business, one he knew
| well, but Pixar made things with computing and I think that
| really appealed to Jobs.
|
| All speculation of course.
| numinix wrote:
| He probably only knew him as Shayman
| bena wrote:
| It would have been funnier if he replied with "Great idea,
| thank you."
| HaZeust wrote:
| If this kind of thing is up your alley, check out techemails.com
| ViktorRay wrote:
| Wow this is such a neat website! Thanks for sharing!
| scop wrote:
| Great story.
|
| Have to ask...what's up with that avatar for Tim Cook?
| gield wrote:
| It'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 wrote:
| i 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 wrote:
| Or something like "ab-production@company.com", where ab is
| whatever a mage system.
| williamdclt wrote:
| I'm confused why cron jobs would be sending emails to
| root@hpe.com?
| ecnahc515 wrote:
| Cronjobs 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 wrote:
| Minor 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.
| sph wrote:
| IIRC cron writes stdout to the local mail spool
| (<user>@localhost). If the server is configured correctly,
| with an SMTP service for the domain, these emails are
| basically forwarded to <user>@<domain>
|
| In practice, I have never seen a Linux server with an actual
| SMTP server configured correctly in 20 years, so the worst
| that usually happens is that cronjobs never actually leave
| the machine. You used to get a mail notification when you
| logged in if cron had written something, but that doesn't
| happen anymore on recent distros.
| lgeorget wrote:
| It's usually configured correctly at some point in time and
| then the configuration "rots": it becomes inconsistent,
| some emails are forwarded, other are lost, nobody cares,
| etc.
|
| In my case, I configured Postfix to redirect all mails
| looking like (root|admin|postmaster)@server to
| myemailaddress+(root|admin|postmaster)_server@domain and
| Postfix ignores what comes after the + in the user part. So
| I get all the emails but I still know where they come from.
| It has worked well for quite some years now but I'm not
| deluding myself, I know that at some time, that will rot
| too.
| tuyiown wrote:
| (not an unix sysadmin, just guessing what happened from my
| shaky knowledge)
|
| cron jobs reports activity by email to the user (UID) they
| are running, historically UNIX boxes have the ability to
| handle mail locally (people would leave messages to each
| other by connecting to the same server via terminal), so that
| the root cron activity would land into the root (/root)
| account mbox file.
|
| When email got interconnected more across servers, generally
| the service that would dispatch mail to the users account on
| their home folder on the server started to be able to forward
| to to others servers, if a domain name was provided. Add to
| it the ability to fallback to a _default_ domain name for
| sending email into the organization, and voila, the root
| email account for the default domain name receives the
| entirety of the cron jobs running under root of all the
| servers running with the default configuration and domain
| fallback.
| layer8 wrote:
| If you ever come across a ~/dead.letter file, that's one
| way it can be misconfigured. ;)
| bigfatkitten wrote:
| In the late 90s I worked for a now defunct Australian
| electronics retailer, who were also a well-known AS/400 shop.
| Our stock reports etc would come via email from
| qsecofr@<domain>.com.au.
|
| The QSECOFR (Security Officer) user is effectively root on
| OS/400.
|
| I would've thought they would run these jobs as some other
| user, but apparently not.
| jrockway wrote:
| They must have learned from your experience. When we were
| acquired by HPE they did not let us choose and our director of
| engineering got an email address that misspelled his name...
| fixing it involved him being locked out of all systems while
| the people trying to fix it emailed someone else with a similar
| name about it. His advice for other team members in the same
| spot was "if you don't like your email address, do not attempt
| to fix it."
|
| HPE was truly a trip. I paid $2000 to be able to disparage them
| online and it was worth every penny.
| knotimpressed wrote:
| What were the details of paying $2000?
| georgewsinger wrote:
| This was such a great story.
|
| Steve was a mischievous person himself, so surely a part of him
| respected this.
| karmakaze wrote:
| Oh this is about email. Thought it might be from the Xerox PARC
| tour, or the Sherlock app, etc.
| levlaz wrote:
| Most wholesome HN post this year
| 1-more wrote:
| This is how I find out next.com returns a 301 to apple.com.
| Fascinating!
| mattl wrote:
| For 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.c...
| msephton wrote:
| Whilst 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 wrote:
| I 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)
| gield wrote:
| I managed to claim my 4-letter-first-name@apple.com. Not having
| an English name definitely helps.
| testfrequency wrote:
| This 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 wrote:
| A colleague had an email when they started that was very
| similar to an SVP. When they highlighted the confusion, it got
| fixed _promptly_.
| testfrequency wrote:
| If 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.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| I 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.
| jorgesborges wrote:
| That 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.
| NKosmatos wrote:
| These two short emails are the best tech flex I've ever seen ;-)
| Nice one and enjoy your retirement!
| foobahhhhh wrote:
| Mind 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 wrote:
| What if a new employee was named Steve Teve?
| incanus77 wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| I 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.
| ubermonkey wrote:
| Heh. I have a somewhat related story.
|
| In the market we sell into, mergers, acquisitions and spin-outs
| are the norm. People shift employers all the time without
| changing offices. It's a whole Thing.
|
| USUALLY this is somewhat drama-free, and USUALLY there's not an
| issue with email addresses, but this is not a story about the
| usual case.
|
| Most places now seem to use the firstname.lastname@corp.com
| style of address. This is a good idea, and creates collisions
| less often than flastname@ style addresses would. However, one
| of my customers -- someone who had been happily a
| first.last@companyA.com user -- got acquired by an org that
| insisted on the old style flast@companyB.com addresses.
|
| I will not provide the name of my customer, but the problem
| that ensued was of the same type, and yet a bit more severe,
| than it would have been if his name were "Steve Hithead."
|
| To this day, though, his address honors the local convention.
| STANDARDS MUST BE FOLLOWED NO MATTER WHAT, apparently.
| 3pt14159 wrote:
| Hahahaha. I wish HN allowed the use of the joy emoji in
| response for these types of posts.
| cynicalsecurity wrote:
| That was a very sweet post, thank you.
| bilekas wrote:
| It'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 wrote:
| I'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.
| lutusp wrote:
| My 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 wrote:
| So the mythical Apple car project actually goes way back :)
| iwontberude wrote:
| The audio snippet was value enough to visit this page. Awesome
| story too!
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