cmacaskill

You have to have no trust in science to believe anything Paul Saladino and Joe Rogan say about it.

Tragic. I love my boosted. I’ve spent so many hours riding it and will until it dies.

Hahaha, that story really caught on but Pierre confessed it was made up for the purpose of getting people to relate to eBay. Netflix's story about late fees was same.

Thanks! The fascinating thing is I had been a geophysicist for 10 years before joining NeXT, so all my instincts were to approach this as a scientist. When I see Dr. Fauci speaking the best known truths despite the political winds, it resonates with all I know of science -- speak the truth as best you know it and history will forgive you later.

Speaking of his hilarious voice, how about when Jim Carrey channeled him?

https://youtu.be/m6d5vhJUGH0

Good find. I wonder if Andy Hertzfeld said one of the first and I misquoted him.

That's a good question. It's Andy Hertzfeld who told me she was the first true artist in the computer industry and I've heard him say it a lot. Somebody had to design the icons at Parc tho. https://blogs.plos.org/neurotribes/2011/11/22/the-sketchbook...

Remember Victoria Taylor, Reddit famous for being in charge of AMAs? She joined Cake a couple weeks ago to get conversations going with fascinating people there.

Fascinating! I didn't know that. Telescript was the networking software and it's not even mentioned in the movie. I thought it was crazy when I worked there. It had the structure of a virus.

A film was made about General Magic that was a pretty big hit at this year's Tribeca Film Festival. There was a showing in a big theater in San Jose last week but it sold out. They have another showing at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View this Friday. Let's hope it gets on Netflix.

Doug Leone, the head of Sequoia, said during a Stanford keynote "if your first two engineers aren't A+, you're screwed, you will never recover."

Steve used to say that great engineers are 10x the average and there are a few who are 100x and crucial to hard projects. He did everything he could to find them.

It's funny, for a long time Avie had a calculator on his NeXT screen to show Microsoft stock and the cost of coming to NeXT. But Apple stock did okay later, so it wasn't the disaster it once looked to be.

Thanks! I pass them by people who were there at the time as much as I can because sometimes it seems too insane to be real. Did we really think that? Andy Hertzfeld wasn't at NeXT, but he helped me tell the story better.

Dunno if you saw this one from Wayne Goodrich, who was there and continued to Apple:

https://www.cake.co/conversations/jNZlq6j/the-man-who-produc...

That's a great find. I hadn't seen that. I didn't even remember him saying this. We did try to sell through VARs who were supposedly a higher-end channel. Sun had a lot of luck with VARs, I understand.

Here's my LinkedIn. I dunno why Bloomberg has me as Chairman of bn.com. Fatbrain.com was bought by them but I was never chairman. https://www.linkedin.com/in/chris-macaskill-970ab1/

My opinion after working for him (and writing this story) is he couldn't see obvious things everyone else could see, but he could see things no one else could. I fought with him over stores as did virtually everyone on the board of Apple, and it turned out he was right. Thank God he was stubborn enough to go forward with them. We all said it drove Gateway out of business, yada.

He got to play with the touchscreen virtual keyboard for 2 weeks and told Andy Hertzfeld that he thought it was a good design choice.

Hi, I'm the author. :-) You're very right, he could be incredibly frustrating to work with. I've always thought it was strange that we have so many incredible stories about working with him, but few people tell them. Or if we do, we talk about the good things he did. I was trying to do that too because I liked him and deeply miss him, but wow could he be annoying.