diskzero

This is somewhat what it is like for me in Arizona. There is no clock change here, so I just watch my out of state meetings shift around twice a year.

It is good to hear about her changed perspective and that the cancer is currently undetectable. I hope she continues to have health and you both have a good long life together. I lost my wife to cancer over nine months. We had thirty years together, but I certainly wanted more. Best to you both.

Any cognitive scientists here, or actual people with eidetic memory, who can comment how the brain would store everything you ever read or heard and how it can be recalled? What does it feel like to be able to recall and recite the entire text of a Tale of Two Cities?

Lot's of good and bad stories, which are also good. Eazel and Be were quite different but both companies really got jammed up by Microsoft. Microsoft was constantly threatening other companies who wanted to work with us. Be actually ended up getting a settlement out of Microsoft a decade later. I am not sure why Eazel didn't pursue that. It could be because it wasn't in the DNA of Andy to litigate.

Eazel stories are very interesting because the company was trying to interact with the open source movement and this caused some friction several times. Looking back at some of those meetings, it is interesting to compare the youthful idealism of people like Miquel DeIcaza and Nate Friedman to the people they have become today.

The General Magic movie covers some things. It is worth a watch.

I am trying to think of something interesting that hasn't been mentioned before. One thing I keep thinking about, when comparing it to other companies I have been at, is that I really liked the founders and the people there. So much in fact, that I ended up working with subsets of them at other companies a few more times. There was definitely stress and overwork and unpleasant things like that, but I never ended up feeling abused or treated poorly in the ways I experienced at Apple, Amazon, other startups or DreamWorks actually.

I'll have to rewatch, but I remember watching and debriefing with others and no one seemed like it misrepresented much. The movie created drama and tension and told a neat story. I do wish we had that cool electronic music playing in the background all the time. That might have helped us get more work done.

It was a really interesting group of people, with Pierre Omidyar and Tony Fadell going on to make large impacts in the tech world in different ways. Everyone there was really interesting and smart, even the ones who continued to build and work without all the publicity.

Sure, if you can find the opportunity and the means to do it.

My observation about being in Silicon Valley in the 80s/90s was the overall changing environment and ethos of the people there. I am sure there are going to be some massive simplifications here, so bear with me.

One is the overall environment back then. Things weren't cheap, but rent was much more affordable in relation to pay. NeXT paid well, you could rent in decent place in Burlingame, Foster City, Redwood City, etc. The commute down Seaport was fairly quick and traffic was light. Things seemed less crowded and frenetic and that made going into the office less of a chore. The cost of living in Silicon Valley is pretty intense. The tiny townhouse I bought in Cupertino near the current Apple campus was $150,000. It recently sold for 1.2 million. I haven't charted it, but the relation between compensation and housing costs have to be wildly out of proportion to when I bought the place. I was pulling a very good salary at the time and a lot of that money went into savings and investments. Now, I imagine a lot of that income would go into mortgages and expenses. Maybe current residents can comment.

The overall attitude seemed to be more about doing new and interesting things and maybe the money will follow. There wasn't as much of a go to Silicon Valley and get rich doing a startup. Maybe this was just an echo of some Berkeley hippie vibe that was present in a lot of the tech startups back then.

The new and interesting things also seemed more accessible. It seemed like there was less gatekeeping and more ways to get involved with "cool" stuff. Maybe this was also an echo of the Homebrew Computer club and early computer hacker ethos.

I do work person to person in a company, but I feel super lucky to have gotten this role. Really good in-person roles just seem super rare. The ones that I have been exposed to at Amazon, Google, Facebook and other current hiring centers just seem miserable to me. Please correct me if I am wrong and am missing the big picture.

> What would be the purpose of acquiring both? Was the idea to acquire Be only for the talent and not for the OS?

A bit of both and it is a fascinating thing for me to think about, because of the knock on effects. Because Steve was insightful, even if JLG was on board with it, Steve probably would have told Amelio, don't bother, because we can scoop up the people later on. Steve did something later on with Eazel, although with Andy Herzfeld's request to do so, and ended with much of the Safari team, Finder/Spotlight team, key CoreGraphics and iPhone team members and more.

If all of Be had went to Apple, perhaps Apple would have use used elements of the Media Kit, the file system (Dominic ended up at Apple doing the new file system, and more anyway), the UX team (Bill Bull ended up at Apple anyway), etc. But the effect on the industry would have been interesting. Danger, Inc. and the Hiptop wouldn't have happened, Android under Andy Rubin wouldn't have happened, Hiroshi would have ended up an exec at Apple and not running Android for Google, Eazel probably wouldn't have happened (not such a big deal). Benoit would have been an exec at Apple and not Google, Erich Ringewald would have ended up an exec at Apple and not Amazon, etc. These are must minor fluctuations I guess, but fun to think about.

Oh wow, I wish I was in that meeting to see that. You are completely correct about the printer drivers and so many other elements of BeOS. BeOS was very incomplete and very shallow. I also shiver to think about what would have happened when the kernel and driver code was audited. It would be a very interesting experiment to get ahold of the leaked BeOS 4 source code and use a LLM to compare the driver code against the Linux source code of the same era.

> The 100x more value is only in hindsight, no?

Well, honestly, in hindsight, let me correct to 10000x! But seriously, this is a discussion about a historical event, and that is what my comment expressed.

> If this had been known by Apple beforehand, then wouldn't Be have been worth $0, and the sale price irrelevant?

I don't really understand this comment. I mean, Be actually ended up being worth about 11 million as a result (the Palm acquisition). Apple, meaning Gil Amelio, Ellen Hancock and the other business and technical people who met with us at Be, and our counterparts at NeXT, had to to an analysis and predict the future as to which technology would replace the current Macintosh OS and eliminate the failing Taligent, Pink and whatever else efforts were going on. And even then it wasn't easy; there was infighting between the Apple teams and the NeXT teams that didn't get resolved until Steve came out of limbo during the 18 months he was acting as a advisor to Gil Amelio.

What isn't commonly discussed, is there was an option for both acquisitions to happen, but a combination of JLG, the Be board and shareholders and Steve made that not happen. Instead, Be went into making internet appliances, audio hardware and the company and its stock price slid into decline. Be did get one additional windfall of 23 million in 2003 which was the result of lawsuit settlement, so I guess the overall company value ended up being 34 million.

Most of us would have preferred to work with the NeXT people at Apple and convert our Be shares into Apple shares, instead of seeing the stock price fall and the code become irrelevant.

I was at Be then, and the biggest botch was JLG asking for too much money IMHO. Steve ended up asking for 4x as much and Apple got 100x more value than what Be would have given them. I loved BeOS; I helped make it! But it had so many flaws, missing features and shallow implementations, OSX would certainly never have shipped. The NeXT team was very good, the code was much more mature and comprehensive and much less work needed to be done to mold it into OSX. Many of the key Be people ended up at Apple over time.

Were the shaders written in “script”? :) We had to deep dive into that runtime a reverse engineer and fix it during the fun you must have missed during the 32 to 64 bit transition we did right around Bee Movie timeline.

Cool observations and he said and did similar things in pretty much every meeting or demonstration we did in the UX team when I was at Apple. I only wish we had more of those and less of the nasty comments and personal abuse he was so good at dishing out. We also got a lot of that every meeting too.

He was a sales guy, a charismatic visionary, an abusive cult leader, a passionate motivator, a single-minded steam roller, an obsessive product manager, an introspective thinker, a borderline sociopath, a company builder, an insightful analyzer of design, music, pop culture, architecture, fashion and more. He was deeply flawed, but definitely more than only a “sales guy”.

He was abusive before NeXT, after and sadly, almost to the day he died. As Andy Herzfeld says, he was the best possible boss and the worst possible boss. Working for Steve was exhilarating and deeply traumatizing.

I experienced these environments first hand, not at NeXT, but at NeXT adjacents like Apple, General Magic, Danger, Be, Eazel and other startups. What I miss is the shared vision and energy put into a project with a team of people who unify to accomplish a very difficult goal. You could seemingly tackle these projects with a small group and make great progress. We had building blocks, but many of the other fundamental pieces needed simply didn’t exist. You felt like you were constantly discovering something new.

Maybe this is how early Google people felt or how early OpenAI felt. I don’t know. They do have an embarrassment of riches, but I am sure they also felt they were doing great things.

I also worked at modern-ish Amazon and it sucked. Horrible office environment, tedious tasks and overall sense of oppression is what I felt. It is such a huge company, maybe there were pockets of joy.

My current job is back working on hardware products and the software that runs in them. It isn’t quite the same feel as 80s computer companies, but some of the joy is there.

It ebbed and flowed with Bill. He would tackle super hard tasks at Apple or General Magic and isolate and hyper focus. I saw this from others at General Magic, Be, Apple, Danger, and even more current Amazon. You can even read about this in Soul of a Machine. I suppose the trait of someone on a critical path doing this has been going on forever.

Bill also had some different definitions of “getting stuff done”. At General Magic when others were driving super hard to get things done, he would make soup and ensure that everyone was eating and not totally driving themselves into the ground.

We all had to imagine making our next show using each others pipeline and that was fun. In the end, I think Richard, Jono and other PDI folks ended up having a bit more influence because Shrek was so darn successful.

Custom vs. commercial was a constant issue. Were you around for the whole NextGen effort? DWA spent a fortune on some custom tools that only were used on a show, or maybe just a few sequences, before they were replaced with commercial tools.

It wasn’t the renderer as much as the pipeline. The renderer is just one process in a stunning amount of complexity that must be managed. We may even agree that Renderman was better than the PDI renderer but there was so much much more.

Dreamworks used Renderman(Pixar’s Renderman) along with several other commercial package for a Shark Tale. When Dreamworks acquired PDI, who made Shrek under contract for DWA, there was essentially a war between the two pipelines and PDI won. I was on the PDI side of the company, but there was a lot of positive things about the Renderman pipeline.

No need to bet. You are right. It wasn’t possible at the time.

I posted then deleted some anecdotes I heard at NAMM or AES from Gary Katz thirty years ago, but found this Sound on Sound article about the sessions which is way better than my memory. https://www.soundonsound.com/techniques/classic-tracks-steel...

I just looked at my copy... Yes, Chapter 4: How Technology Shapes Music. He also discusses how he decides which "flubs and mistakes" he wanst to fix, remove, replace or keep.

Donald Fagen is/was well known for doing take after take after take when recording looking for what he found perfect. He would sample notes, replace notes, replace drums and cut and paste until he made the mix he wanted. I was in the music software/hardware industry at the time and the Wendel and Wendel Jr. computers/samplers/drum replacers along with Garfield Doctor Click rhythm controllers were heavily used. I am sure he also did a ton of old school punch in/out and used other mechanisms to get things just the way he wanted.

The point I am trying to make is that the processes that used to take a maniacal amount of time, resources and attention to detail can now be done quickly and automatically. Does Steely Dan's Aja sound better or worse than a modern album produced using modern techniques?

This comes down to taste and who am I to determine what someone else finds appealing in their music? Producers have been "producing" songs and moving them from their originally recorded state into something entirely different for decades.

I personally miss singers being slightly out of tune and beats being slight out of time in songs. I love hearing imperfections in older music. But, would Trevor Horn have pulled some of the singers he produced back into tune before pressing the vinyl? Someone should ask him. I am inclined to say yes.

Ok. So we just need enlightened legislatures to enact these processes into law and fund them. I actually agree with what you propose, but am having a hard time seeing how to get such a system in place.

Who does the selection? Who approves the applications? Who ensures the process is open? It always comes down to winners of elections. The USA isn’t a technocracy or meritocracy, for better or worse.

Who does the selection? In the USA, doesn’t it always come down to voter choice one way or another? We typically elect a sheriff but a mayor appoints a police chief. The mayor is elected however. What process could be used to determine process and selection that would avoid voter input?

Steve Jobs himself talked about the bozo explosion that occurs when A players stop hiring A players. Was Alan Dye an A player? Certainly not to me. Who was the last Apple UX A player? Bas Ording? Mike Matas? Greg Christie? Imran Chaudri? The DNA is gone and the depletion started the moment Steve died and the infighting began leading to what we have today.

I worked with all of the aforementioned people at various companies and cannot see myself working at any of the companies where this experience would be useful or could be transferred to others. Apple, when I left in 2006, was almost unbearable to me.

I don’t know if this means I am jaded, burnt out, overly cynical or what, but the thought of working at Apple, Google, Facebook or any other big tech company is anathema to me.

Steve Lemay worked with a bunch of us, including a very curmudgeonly Don Norman, but just look at what happened to Apple UX while he was there. Yes, he is now running the team and the small improvements may be a direct influence of his, but he sure was steam rolled by others the last twenty years.

I worked on perception systems five years ago and we had de-noising algorithms that are much better now. We would never have dared to drive in obscured lanes, but I assume Waymo’s high resolution maps and sensor fusion are extremely good, but yeah, are the vehicles going to plow through the unofficial lanes?