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Comment by vinceguidry | Hacker News Reader

Had I gotten that call from Steve, I probably would've laughed in his face. Hard. For close to a minute.

When I was calmed down enough, I'd have been like, "Well, Steve, I was just reading through the instruction set, interesting how it does X, Y, Z, seems like that would make it easy for it to do that thing you said wanted in a disassembler, I was just about to borrow a little simulator time to test out my theories, knock up a quick and dirty proof of concept, but since it looks like you think I can't do it, I'll just go ahead and toss these pages of notes I wrote up away because they're obviously useless." Then shut up and wait for him to crack. You have to talk to people in a language they understand.

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Oh man, I wish I'd had the presence of mind to do that.

Instead, after we got off the phone, I went ahead and wrote enough of the disassembler to have a good proof of concept. Then, since the phone call with Steve hadn't gone so well, I decided to go show him the code in person.

I looked up the address of Apple Computer - 770 Welch Road in Palo Alto - and dropped in to show Steve the code. When I walked in I didn't see anything computer-related, just a row of telephone switchboards.

I told the nearest operator that I was looking for Apple Computer. She hesitated a bit and said "uh, this is their answering service."

So I walked out and told myself, "Those guys are flakes. They're never going to make it."

I think I like your idea better! :-)

edit: I just remembered a strange coincidence. I was reading Michael Moritz's Return to the Little Kingdom last year and ran across this:

> At first there was great uncertainty at the Regis McKenna Agency about Apple’s prospects. The account executive, Frank Burge, explained, “People who knew Markkula and Apple wondered whether they would make it. We kept saying ‘These guys are flakes. They’re never going to make it.’”

Nah, your solution was not so bad really!

But of course nobody expects an answering service in place of the real thing.

I'm surprised that no one seems to have considered that was exactly the outcome Jobs was after. You do the work for free just to prove him wrong, then he says "OK fine.." and offers some minimal amount. You take it, because you've done the work already.

Who wins there exactly?

In terms of who would have won and who would have lost, it's far worse than you might suspect.

I actually would have given Steve the disassembler for free, just to see where it might lead. It wasn't that much work, not much more than some of the coding tests companies ask for these days.

Or maybe I would have asked for a few hundred bucks. Not much difference one way or the other.

Suppose Steve then asked me to join up with him and Woz. I'd just read some crazy business book that said people shouldn't have stock in companies because you can't really influence the outcome of the whole company. Instead you should just get paid what you're worth, and the best way to do that was to be a contractor instead of an employee.

How exciting that would have been - I could have been Apple's first contractor!

> I'd just read some crazy business book that said people shouldn't have stock in companies because you can't really influence the outcome of the whole company.

Oh man, if only you'd have read about Standard Oil.

Back in Rockefeller's day, there was this event that was later called the "Cleveland Massacre". John was borrowing enormous sums of cash and buying out local refiners.

He had this routine. You'd get invited to sit down with him at his office, he'd have his checkbook with him. Very cool and refined-like, he told you you'd have no chance remaining in business and you had two choices, sell to him or get crushed. You could choose a check or stock in Standard Oil. "I suggest you take the stock."

Anyone who took stock at that time and held onto it would have gotten wildly rich. Most of them didn't. John had to scramble to ensure he kept enough cash on hand to continue his shopping spree. He had an unusual relationship with banks, they trusted him and were willing to extend credit to him that they wouldn't to anyone else. It wound up being his biggest trump card in those early days.

That is an amazing story, and a lesson to all of us. Thanks for sharing it!

You don't have to take it at all. You can walk away, putting Steve in the position of having an already working solution slip through his fingers and having to find someone else to do it. You considered it a fun side project, maybe you'd have done it even without someone like Jobs asking for it.

And you also now have something that somebody wanted, so there's a good bet someone else wanted it too. You don't have to sell to Jobs to get paid. Just sell it to someone else.

That does sound like Jobs. He might have been an asshole but he knew how to handle engineers.

Indeed - Paul Allen, using a PDP-10, actually wrote an entire 8080 emulator that Gates/Allen used to develop the original Altair Basic.

Writing a disassembler at that time would have been trivial in comparison.

> Then shut up and wait for him to crack.

I don't know if this is what would happen. We don't know whether Jobs believed what he was saying about the fellow who programmed mainframes. But I suspect that Jobs was also playing upon the fellow's desire to do the project in order to better his own bargaining position.

I'm pretty sure Steve wasn't bargaining. He was simply so certain of his own opinion that mainframes and microcomputers were totally unlike each other, that it was inconceivable that someone who was an expert at one could ever bridge the gap to the other.

There was some evidence for his position if you knew anything about the computing culture in the Cupertino area in those days, especially at Tymshare where I was working at the time.

Tymshare had a profitable business going, selling dial-up access to their mainframes for $30/hour. They knew about these newfangled microcomputers, but one thing they definitely knew was that they didn't want to get involved in them. Because if they did, the microcomputers could turn into a threat to their mainframe business.

And you know, it turned out they were right! The microcomputers were a threat to their business, but they didn't get in on it.

Tymshare wasn't the only company like this. There were several little timesharing companies in the Bay Area, and they all must have looked like dinosaurs to anyone who was playing around with microprocessors.

I had told Steve in our first conversation that I was working at Tymshare, so really the most straightforward explanation is not that he was negotiating, but that he thought I was just one of those dinosaurs.

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