[HN Gopher] Joining Apple Computer (2018)
___________________________________________________________________
Joining Apple Computer (2018)
Author : tosh
Score : 387 points
Date : 2025-06-07 20:32 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.folklore.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.folklore.org)
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| > Inspired by a mind-expanding LSD journey in 1985, I designed
| the HyperCard authoring system that enabled non-programmers to
| make their own interactive media.
|
| Watching some YouTube about the Beatles and, of course, their LSD
| trips. More recently the history of Robert Crumb -- on his big
| acid trip he more or less created a large part of his stable of
| comic characters.
|
| Somewhere along the way, someone said that LSD alters your mind
| permanently....
|
| It caused me to wonder if we'll never get the genius of Beatles
| music, Crumb art without the artist taking something conscious-
| altering like LSD. Of course then I have to consider all the
| artists before LSD was "invented" -- the Edvard Munch's, T.S.
| Eliot's, William Blake's, etc.
|
| (Tried acid once in college. That was enough of that.)
| nine_k wrote:
| All traditional practices of use of psychedelic substances
| emphasize the importance of preparation, having the right state
| of mind, right stimuli / environment, and sitters in un-altered
| state of mind nearby.
|
| LSD is not known to permanently alter brain; for that you need
| psilocybin.
| j_bum wrote:
| You had me up until your last clause...
|
| If you understand that LSD doesn't permanently alter the
| brain, why do you think PY "permanently" alters the brain? It
| _does_ alter the brain (like LSD; see the plethora of
| research on PY altering neurogenesis and functional
| connectivity [0]), I'm unsure of what you mean by
| "permanent".
|
| [0] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07624-5
| TechDebtDevin wrote:
| It permanently changed my buddy's brain when we were in
| college doing it. He thought he was talkng to God and blew
| his brains out. Not worth it for me now.
| j_bum wrote:
| I'm sorry to hear that.
|
| I know that there absolutely are people who shouldn't
| take it based on their mindset and underplaying
| predispositions.
|
| There is certainly a point to be made about psychoactive
| (and other) drugs inducing episodes of psychosis. This is
| something on the uptick with marijuana legalization in
| the US [0].
|
| And I think am plainly wrong about my understanding of
| these effects not being "permanent". I suppose I was
| thinking about this too much from a "neurotypical" angle,
| and not from the angle of how substances can alter the
| neurological trajectory of people with predisposed
| sensitivity.
|
| [0] https://www.nbcnews.com/health/mental-
| health/marijuana-induc...
| asveikau wrote:
| If you've known a few people who suffer psychotic
| symptoms and get to know the pattern of how they
| developed, drugs can appear commonly but it's much less
| cut and dry whether the drugs are responsible.
|
| For example college age, like your buddy was at, is very
| typically the onset time for schizophrenia even without
| drugs. And schizophrenia itself may make people gravitate
| towards drugs.
| nine_k wrote:
| AFAICT there exists no conclusive biomedical evidence of
| permanent physiological effects of LSD. This may mean we're
| just not looking hard enough, but there's no certainty.
|
| For psilocybin, there is plenty, e.g.:
| https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8376772/
| j_bum wrote:
| First, you're cutting an in vitro study. Second,
| "permanent" is a serious claim that bears a large burden
| of proof.
|
| I think defining "permanent" would first be useful. The
| brain is extremely plastic.
|
| Beyond that, OP comment was referring to psychosis
| effects. See his comment below.
| pyinstallwoes wrote:
| Pretty ancient practice probably. See the history of drug use
| in cultures and spirituality/art. Soma, etc.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| Survivorship bias? Plenty of brilliant people smoked tobacco. I
| didn't think more smoking will produce more brilliance.
| tough wrote:
| Neither does smoking alter your conscioudness in any
| remarkable way further than irritability or cravings due to
| whitdrawal symtpom
|
| at least acid doesnt make sense to consume daily because it
| stops having the same effects the more you consume it
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Surprised he was only at Apple for 12 years. A wild ride, I'm
| sure.
|
| When I moved out to "the Valley" in 1995, the apartment I picked
| out turned out to be right next to General Magic (on Mary Ave.).
|
| I knew it as a "spin off" of Apple but at the time did not know
| the luminaries that were there. It was just a cute rabbit in a
| hat logo -- lit up when I got home late and was turning off to my
| apartment.
| plentysun wrote:
| a wild ride definitely!
| Waterluvian wrote:
| It feels a bit like he wrote his own obituary with this.
| bravesoul2 wrote:
| Maybe he did. We are all going to die. And if you have an
| interesting story (of interest to many) it's good to share it.
| duxup wrote:
| I find myself, as I get older, telling stories that have a
| similar perspective flow. It happens.
| mehulashah wrote:
| Legend. I still remember first putting my hands on a Mac, and the
| joy of computing that ensued in high school. I could get lost in
| the computer for days. Thank you, Bill.
| 9d wrote:
| I had that feeling too.
|
| How do we get it back?
|
| How do we share it with others?
|
| There has to be a way.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| > How do we get it back?
|
| Time machine.
|
| > How do we share it with others?
|
| Just like the church, capture them in their most formative
| years.
| 9d wrote:
| No. There has to be a way.
| WillAdams wrote:
| I am looking forward to trying to make use of a Raspberry Pi
| 5 as much as is feasible once I get a small tablet shell for
| mine.
|
| If it works out well, I'm going to see about getting a Wacom
| One display tablet with touch.
| jonstewart wrote:
| I have been thinking about this more, about how I spent hours
| and days exploring everything of my family's new Mac SE, and
| then HyperCard, and creating with it.
|
| There is an aspect of creativity that comes from being
| inspired, taking off from others' ideas.
|
| But there is also an aspect of creativity that's more
| ascetic, and requires being bored--when there's nothing else
| to do, turn the computer into a toy, to play with it, so you
| are not bored. And I am increasingly of the opinion getting
| to that state, at least for me, requires turning off the
| internet.
| 9d wrote:
| 100% agree, you must be bored to be inspired.
|
| I think I know how to recapture that "whole new world"
| feeling and share it.
|
| It's on the tip of my tongue, and has been for a while.
|
| But I can't fully see it yet. I need to go offline for a
| while. You're right.
| criddell wrote:
| > How do we get it back?
|
| If by _it_ you mean excitement about a personal computer, I'm
| not sure.
|
| If you are speaking more generally about having some activity
| that is creative and all-consuming, then look to the arts.
| There are people picking up a guitar or paintbrush or bread
| recipe for the first time today and it's going to become
| everything to them.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Yeah, I think it was MacPaint actually.
| 9d wrote:
| > It was exciting working at Apple, knowing that whatever we
| invented would be used by millions of people.
|
| I admit it is exciting to make something you truly believe is
| good and helpful.
|
| And that it's disappointing when that thing isn't used by anyone.
|
| It's even worse when it turns out it's just not that useful.
|
| But in the end, everything is replaced anyway. So I guess it's
| fine.
| walterbell wrote:
| _> whatever we invented would be used by millions of people_
|
| Two billion active Apple devices in 2025.
| 9d wrote:
| I was reflecting on his thoughts and my life's work.
| zoky wrote:
| I mean, as long as the average number of Apple devices per
| person is > 2 (which seems pretty likely, I have three on me
| right now), that's still technically in the millions range.
| roughly wrote:
| > I admit it is exciting to make something you truly believe is
| good and helpful.
|
| I want to double down on this - I'm lucky enough to have worked
| places where I truly believed the world would be a better place
| if we "won," and not on the margins, and it really, really
| makes a difference in quality of life. I've worked at other
| places, too, and the cognitive drag of knowing that your skills
| and efforts - your ability to change the world - is at best
| being wasted is something you don't truly feel until it's gone.
| 9d wrote:
| I've wasted countless years on pursuits I thought were good
| but later determined to have been bad, and therefore deeply
| regretted. I don't wish this on anyone.
|
| I've also wasted countless years on pursuits I still think
| were good but overall never truly helped make the world
| better. This was less bad and seems inevitable.
| roughly wrote:
| Yeah I got a couple places on my resume I don't like to
| talk about anymore. Turns out an awful lot of things are
| bad for the world in the wrong hands.
|
| Still, if I'm going to spend a third of my life on
| something - and, more importantly, if I'm going to be
| responsible for my efforts contributing to something - I'd
| prefer it be something I find value in. I'll take the risk
| of being wrong - although I'm certainly looking at the
| world through less rose-tinted glasses than I used to.
| 9d wrote:
| I agree, and I'm convinced selling my own software is the
| only way I can do that. At least for me. I just need to
| put it all together now, all the skillsets I've honed for
| decades, and the insight I might have gleaned from what
| people need.
| amelius wrote:
| > I admit it is exciting to make something you truly believe is
| good and helpful.
|
| It's sad when management takes that work and locks it down, and
| puts it in a walled garden.
| acheron wrote:
| I was wondering recently about where the original sin of "light
| mode" came from. Guess it was him!
|
| > The Apple II displayed white text on a black background. I
| argued that to do graphics properly we had to switch to a white
| background like paper. It works fine to invert text when
| printing, but it would not work for a photo to be printed in
| negative. The Lisa hardware team complained the screen would
| flicker too much, and they would need faster refresh with more
| expensive RAM to prevent smearing when scrolling. Steve listened
| to all the pros and cons then sided with a white background for
| the sake of graphics.
| monkeyelite wrote:
| The real sin is having both.
| throwanem wrote:
| I don't get it. I grew up with green and amber CRTs and I
| don't miss those days at all. What makes it mean so much, to
| you kids who never knew those days to miss?
| floren wrote:
| Looks cooler, and you tell yourself that you're saving your
| eyes as you sit in your blackout-curtained hacker den...
| but the pitch black hacker den is also part of the desired
| aesthetic.
|
| Real Hackers didn't use rgb dweeb keyboards though
| throwanem wrote:
| Oh, I see. In my day we smoked cigarettes, compared with
| which RGB keyboards seem like a pretty clean win.
| _Literally_ a clean win; the main reason for keeping the
| lights off and the windows covered, as I recall it, was
| to hide all the filth that constantly accumulates in such
| an environment. Not to say I don 't look back on it
| fondly, but when I _actually_ look back on the photos I
| still have of how I lived then, it sort of makes my teeth
| itch, if you know what I mean.
| wpm wrote:
| "Sin" of being readable
| dedicate wrote:
| I'm always blown away by the vision behind stuff like HyperCard.
| It was all about giving non-techies the keys to the kingdom.
|
| But looking at today's tech landscape, with its walled gardens
| and app stores, I can't help but feel we've gone backwards.
| ronbenton wrote:
| Apparently we need to be doing more LSD
| criddell wrote:
| I wish safe, tested sources were generally available. I'm 55
| this year and would like to try it, but I'm not going to buy
| street drugs nor am I capable of producing it. Is there a
| pharmaceutical version of LSD available somewhere in the
| world through legitimate channels?
| LoganDark wrote:
| Not exactly LSD, but psilocybin clinics have been legalized
| in certain locations, such as the US state of Oregon.
| Psilocybin is of the same psychedelic class (tryptamines),
| so it is not an entirely dissimilar experience, although
| for me it's less stimulating than LSD, so YMMV.
|
| I understand though that clinics aren't the ideal for many
| (they are for some), since you aren't allowed to have the
| trip at home or leave the clinic until it is over.
| criddell wrote:
| I actually think I would be more comfortable in a clinic.
| LoganDark wrote:
| Then that may be an option for you. It just needs ... a
| diagnosis of treatment-resistant depression and a
| prescription for psilocybin therapy by a specially
| licensed psychiatrist...
| apples_oranges wrote:
| Not sure about "safe and tested" but LSD prodrugs
| (substances that metabolise into LSD which then works as
| usual) are available in many places. One example is this
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1D-LSD .
|
| Eventually they are made illegal but new ones appear.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| If you haven't done it by 55, you probably aren't going to
| do it. There are easy ways to get safe LSD if you want it.
| But you do not actually want it.
| LoganDark wrote:
| It's possible to want something but not enough to break
| the law and risk your safety for it. I use LSD regularly,
| but that doesn't mean sourcing it is for everyone.
| LoganDark wrote:
| LSD can be quite helpful to the right mind and when used with
| the right mindset. It can also be quite harmful if used
| improperly. Still wish it were legal though.
| gyomu wrote:
| It's really hard to extract computing from the capitalistic,
| consumerist cradle within which it was born.
|
| Every other human creative practice and media (poetry, theater,
| writing, music, painting, etc) have existed in a wide variety
| of cultures, societies, and economic contexts.
|
| But computing has never existed outside of the immensely
| expensive and complex factories & supply chains required to
| produce computing components; and corporations producing
| software and selling it to other corporations, or to the large
| consumer class with disposable income that industrialization
| created.
|
| In that sense the momentum of computing has always been in
| favor of the corporations manufacturing the computers dictating
| what can be done with them. We've been lucky to have had a few
| blips like the free software movement here and there (and the
| outsized effect they've had on the industry speaks to how much
| value there is to be found there), but the hard reality that's
| hard to fight is that if you control the chip factories, you
| control what can be done with the chips - Apple being the
| strongest example of this.
|
| We're in dire need of movements pushing back against that. To
| name one, I'm a big fan of the uxn approach, which is to write
| software for a lightweight virtual machine that can run on the
| cheap, abundant, less/non locked down chips of yesteryear that
| will probably still be available and understandable a century
| from now.
| bigyabai wrote:
| Part of the problem trying to isolate computing is that it's
| fundamentally material. Even cloud resources are a flimsy
| abstraction over a more complex business model. That
| materialism is part of the issue, too. You can't ever escape
| the churn, bit rot gets your drives and Hetzner doesn't sell
| a lifetime plan. If you're not computing for the short-term,
| you're arguably wasting your time.
|
| I'm not against the idea of a disasterproof runtime, but
| you're not "pushing back" against the consumerist machine by
| outlasting it. When high-quality software becomes
| inaccessible to support some sort of longtermist runtime,
| low-quality software everywhere sees a rise in popularity.
| swyx wrote:
| you can only blame capitalism so much for the unpopularity of
| hypercardlike things vs instagram/facebook/twitter etc
|
| on some level it is just human nature to want to consume than
| create. just is. its not great but lets not act like people
| havent tried to make creative new platforms for self
| expression and software creation and they all kinda failed
| Nevermark wrote:
| > is just human nature to want to consume than create
|
| That may be true.
|
| But it doesn't really explain why the tools for simple
| popular creation are not there. There are a lot of people
| in the world who would use them, even if its only 1%.
| iancmceachern wrote:
| I totally agree
| kibwen wrote:
| What's worse, in context here, is Apple's distinguished primary
| role in bringing this about.
| thowawatp302 wrote:
| Idk 2003-2009 was very much the days of the sort of malware
| and spyware that showed developers in a company didn't
| deserve rights anymore
| bigyabai wrote:
| I don't see what that has to do with Hypercard. If
| anything, Hypercard (or modern HTML) is living proof that
| you can create and share a secure software runtime with the
| world.
|
| If developers "didn't deserve rights" for what they did
| with that, then I don't see how we should let Apple off the
| hook for PRISM compliance and backdoored Push
| Notifications.
| KerrAvon wrote:
| HyperCard is completely insecure by any reasonable
| security/privacy standard.
| PontifexMinimus wrote:
| It's like they remembered their 1984 advert, and decided they
| wanted to be the baddy in it.
| GeekyBear wrote:
| Swift Playgrounds is very much in the spirit of HyperCard,
| but also gives access to the same APIs the professional
| developers are using.
|
| It's also designed to be usable and educational for kids.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Yeah, Hypercard or MacPaint (really a demo for Quickdraw). Had
| he done only one of those two he would still rank as a genius.
| KerrAvon wrote:
| From a particular POV, they're it's the same evolutionary
| chain. QuickDraw -> MacPaint -> HyperCard.
| Lu2025 wrote:
| > feel we've gone backwards
|
| The word you are looking for is enshittification.
| mrcwinn wrote:
| Just had a flashback to the thunk sound of turning on Apple Lisa!
|
| Grateful for all his work.
| duxup wrote:
| What a wonderful read.
|
| I find myself pining for a lot of the "old days" when anything
| seemed possible and it was open and exciting. You could DO
| surprisingly, not a lot, but everything still felt possible.
|
| Now everything seems trapped in advertising dominated closed box.
| Login and live in this limited little space...
|
| The internet is still there, I can still put up a site that isn't
| covered with ads. I wish I could surf just that internet and so
| on.
| 9d wrote:
| > I wish I could surf just that internet and so on.
|
| You just solved it for me.
|
| I've been wondering what to use 90s.dev for.
|
| That's it.
| promiseofbeans wrote:
| https://kagi.com/smallweb
| duxup wrote:
| Thank you.
| zaptrem wrote:
| I'm around the age these guys were during this story. I feel
| the exact opposite way. I spent middle/high school feeling
| similarly, only pining for the 2000s ("wow, with smartphones
| and the internet the industry was wide open with opportunity,
| anything was possible. Now it seems like everything's been done
| and giants rule the world"). However, the GenAI boom completely
| changed my mind. I feel like we're the most lucky of all the
| generations of engineers so far considering how many crazy
| things are now possible with just a few determined individuals.
| TechDebtDevin wrote:
| What is now possible that wasnt before, other than writing
| really really bad code fast?
| bigyabai wrote:
| I don't really think AI solves the engineering problems of
| our day. Compared to the impact of the tape measure, slide
| rule or digital calculator, I wager AI will be a blip in the
| engineering landscape.
| bdangubic wrote:
| you should try to find a job today and see what the impact
| is already let alone in a year or two...
| bigyabai wrote:
| 4 out of 5 technical interviews I have done in the past 3
| years were whiteboard reviews. I'm really not that
| worried about Joe Shmoe using ChatGPT to cram for a
| Typescript examination.
| mhandley wrote:
| I came of age in the 8-bit era of the early 80s, rode the
| Internet wave of the 90s and early 2000s, kind of missed the
| mobile wave but spent that time developing ideas that would
| eventually turn out to be useful for AI, and now I'm having
| great fun on the AI wave. I'm happy to have grown up and lived
| when I did, but I feel that each era of my life has had its own
| unique opportunities, excitement and really interesting
| technical problems to work on. And perhaps most importantly,
| great people to work with.
| swyx wrote:
| > Inspired by a mind-expanding LSD journey in 1985, I designed
| the HyperCard authoring system that enabled non-programmers to
| make their own interactive media.
|
| I'm interested in how to do "good" journeys vs non-good ones...
| gyomu wrote:
| "I worked at Apple for 12 years, making tools to empower creative
| people [...]"
|
| I think this was the hook that got many of us to admire Apple as
| a company (and more broadly, to get excited about computing as a
| discipline/industry). For a long time, that was arguably (one of)
| their primary mission.
|
| I suspect to what extent it could still be considered to be the
| case today would be subject to much debate.
| tilne wrote:
| Is it even up for debate that that's definitely not what their
| primary mission is? Their market cap sits at 3.5 trillion,
| ranking them third behind Microsoft and nvidia. Unlike those
| other two, Apple makes most of that on selling iPhones and the
| like to consumers.
| dagmx wrote:
| That's not really at odds with the goal of empowering
| creatives.
|
| A significant chunk of every iPhone and iPad release is
| features specifically for creatives.
|
| This specific site doesn't cater to creatives and will often
| be full of developers comments bemoaning those things, but I
| really challenge anyone to look at any of their Mac/iOS
| product releases in the last decade and point out how
| creatives aren't still a big component of their DNA.
| r0m4n0 wrote:
| > I left Apple with Marc Porat and Andy Hertzfeld to co-found
| General Magic and help to invent the personal communicator.
|
| It's always wild to me how many of the people that are the
| beginnings of these large prodigy companies and the connection to
| other powerful rich people. You look up some of these people and
| see the relationships and it's wild. Like the name Porat rang a
| bell so I look up Marc and oh? That's Ruth Porat's brother. The
| ex CFO of Morgan Stanley and current CIO and president of Google.
| Is it truly talent that drives these leaders to the top of these
| organizations or is it connections to other crazy powerful
| people? Maybe both.
|
| Sometimes I feel like I'm over here building cool stuff with
| talent galore but nothing ever gets what it needs financially.
| It'd be nice to know these types of people I suppose
| wnc3141 wrote:
| Access to capital/other's talent and/or access to your market
| (users) is the primary competitive advantage among those
| talented enough to design and build a product.
| 0xCE0 wrote:
| The General Magic movie/document (2018) is amazing and
| underrated. Always getting teardrops while watching it (watched
| it ~3 times). A true old-school startup story. And the
| soundtrack is also beautiful.
| piyiotisk wrote:
| I totally agree. I watched it 3 times as well. One in London
| with a panel of the general magic employees. It was an
| amazing experience
| 0xCE0 wrote:
| Oh wow, that must have been magical. Have you seen "Halt
| and Catch Fire"? These two masterpieces are my top 2
| watchings. Both so amazing but generally
| unknown/underrated.
| dev_chhatbar wrote:
| I agree with you! I love that they're both extremely
| underrated. I remember buying the Documentary and
| watching it immediately. The fact that they're not well
| known, gives I guess our side of world our own sorta
| "special something" to watch/enjoy.
| BolexNOLA wrote:
| I love h&cf but it's important for people who are curious
| about it to know that it is definitely an overdramatized
| AMC piece akin to mad men. It's basically mad men but PCs
| lol.
|
| It has some brilliant writing and the acting is off the
| charts (whoever handled casting is unbelievable), but man
| it can definitely make you roll your eyes occasionally
| lol
| ghaff wrote:
| Rarely. I actually expected it to go in a somewhat
| different direction. But as somewhat who was at COMDEX
| and in the industry in general during that period, it
| felt pretty true.
| piyiotisk wrote:
| Yeah in London, I was sitting next to Tony Fadell. I
| couldn't believe it!
|
| I didn't know about this show. Thanks for the
| recommendation I'll check it out.
|
| Is it based on a true story?
| wanderingstan wrote:
| Not based on a true story, but anyone familiar with
| computing history will see how real-world events were
| turned into plot lines; e.g. Compaq's reverse engineering
| of IBMs sdk, the competition between directory-based
| index of Yahoo and algorithms of Google.
| buran77 wrote:
| You can be a superstar and still not succeed alone, without
| other superstars around you. They are so successful _because_
| they know each other. And survivorship bias guarantees that all
| those who didn 't make it are unknown, or not mentioned.
|
| This is the role of successful companies like this, just like
| top universities. They help create the connection between
| people with huge potential (or money), superstars, and amplify
| it.
|
| Remember those pictures will all the famous 20th century
| geniuses in one place. They each got to reach the peak by
| building a new step on top of someone else's previous step, and
| so on. Eventually they all climbed the same ladder together.
| They were like a talent packed sports team dominating the
| sports for many seasons. It's not a coincidence they're in the
| same picture.
| bobbiechen wrote:
| The Fifth Solvay Conference
|
| From back row to front, reading left to right: Auguste
| Piccard, Emile Henriot, Paul Ehrenfest, Edouard Herzen,
| Theophile de Donder, Erwin Schrodinger, Jules-Emile
| Verschaffelt, Wolfgang Pauli, Werner Heisenberg, Ralph Howard
| Fowler, Leon Brillouin, Peter Debye, Martin Knudsen, William
| Lawrence Bragg, Hendrik Anthony Kramers, Paul Dirac, Arthur
| Compton, Louis de Broglie, Max Born, Niels Bohr, Irving
| Langmuir, Max Planck, Marie Sklodowska Curie, Hendrik
| Lorentz, Albert Einstein, Paul Langevin, Charles-Eugene Guye,
| Charles Thomson Rees Wilson, Owen Willans Richardson.
|
| https://mymodernmet.com/the-solvay-conference-photo/
| cellu wrote:
| It's purely luck driving success. The book _thinking fast and
| slow_ illustrates it quite eloquently. Real geniuses are rare
| and even then they do not necessary become successful
| vl wrote:
| Thinking Fast and Slow is in the center of Replication
| Crisis. Basically large parts of it were written based on
| research that later was found out to be fabricated.
| newsuser wrote:
| I'm curious, could you plz share the source for the last
| claim? In my field - distant from the book - it's quite
| respected.
| dumdedum123 wrote:
| This is correct. Thanks for pointing it out. Even Daniel
| Kahneman admitted it.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| It's very localised and Californian. There were really two big
| tech scenes - one around MIT and Mass, and one around
| CalTech/Stanford and adjacent areas - with some also-rans in
| other areas that were mostly gov mil/aerospace spinoffs.
|
| The Mass scene sort of fizzled in the 90s for various reasons -
| not dead, but not dominant - and the centre of gravity moved to
| the West Coast.
|
| So if you were born in CA and studied there - and Atkinson did
| both - your odds of hitching your wagon to a success story were
| higher than if you were born in Montana or Dublin.
|
| This is sold as a major efficiency of US capitalism, but in
| fact it's a major _inefficiency_ because it 's a severe
| physical and cultural constraint on opportunity. It's not that
| other places lack talented people, it's that the networks are
| highly localised, the culture is very standardised - far less
| creative than it used to be, and still pretends to be - and
| diverse ideas and talent are wasted on an industrial scale.
| criddell wrote:
| You said it yourself - universities are the major hubs that
| bring talented driven people together and provide access to
| some of the greatest teachers and researchers and other
| resources. MIT and Stanford _are_ special, somehow, in this
| regard.
|
| You see this as inefficient and maybe you're right. I think
| about how little it has cost to run these schools compared to
| the wealth (financial, cultural, technological) they spin off
| and to me it looks very efficient.
| nostrademons wrote:
| FWIW CalTech is in southern California and far away (both
| geographically and socially) from Stanford. Its strengths
| also tend to be primarily in physics, rocketry, and
| astronomy, rather than in CS - its primary ties are with JPL
| and NASA. The Bay Area tech scene is anchored by Stanford and
| UC Berkeley, though most Stanford alums would probably say
| it's just Stanford.
| ghaff wrote:
| There's probably a book in there. The CA axis was probably
| Stanford/Berkeley with Caltech relatively small and in
| another part of the state and probably much more
| theoretical in focus.
|
| Don't really buy Levy's thesis of the migration from east
| to west and Stallman as "the last hacker" hasn't aged well.
|
| But Boston/Cambridge (really Massachusetts generally) did
| sort of empty out of a lot of tech for a time as
| minicomputer companies declined and Silicon Valley became
| the scene. I actually decided not to go that direction
| because, at the time in the nineties, it would have been a
| relative cost of living downgrade.
| majormajor wrote:
| > This is sold as a major efficiency of US capitalism, but in
| fact it's a major inefficiency because it's a severe physical
| and cultural constraint on opportunity.
|
| I don't think social relationships and their geography are a
| particular characteristic of capitalism - let alone _US_
| -specific capitalism.
|
| They - and the resulting hub/centralization effects - predate
| it by millennia. There is no shortage of historical cities or
| state that became major hubs for certain industries or
| research. How much of the effort in those places is "wasted"
| seems hard to quantify in an objective way, but again, the
| pattern of low-hanging fruit being more available to the
| first wave and then a lot of smart, hard-working people in
| the future generations working more around the edges is not
| capitalism-exclusive.
| dumdedum123 wrote:
| Huh? Caltech/Stanford? These are two different tech scenes.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| _" In 1990, with John Sculley's blessing, I left Apple with Marc
| Porat and Andy Hertzfeld to co-found General Magic and help to
| invent the personal communicator."_
|
| Sculley really wasn't the right person to lead Apple. He should
| have been begging them to do it in-house.
| eschneider wrote:
| Sometimes the smart think is to encourage folks to do their
| thing, and if it's successful buy it back in-house.
| KerrAvon wrote:
| That has never really worked in the long run for anyone who's
| tried it. (Counterexamples welcome; I can't think of any.)
| KerrAvon wrote:
| I don't disagree with that assessment of Sculley but I'm not
| sure if that would have helped anyone. What the movie makes
| clear is that General Magic very badly needed adult supervision
| (all these "geniuses"! doing absolutely nothing of value!
| together!), and I'm not sure Apple of that era would have been
| capable of providing it in a productive way.
| tiffanyh wrote:
| Sculley also joined the Board at General Magic too ... and them
| missing out on the web/internet, in hindsight, was the death
| nail.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Magic
| adwawdawd wrote:
| If the two year lag is still true, the state of the SwiftUI SDK
| is even more ridiculous.
| FabHK wrote:
| > my code accounted for almost two thirds of the original
| Macintosh ROM
|
| Respect. RIP.
| khazhoux wrote:
| The last 15 years I'm nagged by this thought that we don't let
| software developers be software developers anymore. Between
| sprint planning and JIRAs and project managers and constant
| meetings and "stakeholders" and senior engineering leadership who
| confuse progress-tracking for progress... when the hell are
| people supposed to do the amazing work??
|
| I know it's beating a dead horse to pick on these, but it's a
| real problem. I look back at how productive we were with tiny
| teams up until right before 2010, and the main thing that stands
| out compared to today is all this goddamn overhead.
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