I'm a big fan of Jean-Louis Gassée and I wish there were more visionaries like him in the personal computing industry. He helped push the Mac further during his tenure at Apple, and his work at BeOS also pushed the state of the art of personal computing. There are two major standouts in his career that I greatly appreciate:<p>1. His transformation of the Mac from the non-expandable appliance it was in the original 1984 Macintosh to Macs that supported expansion slots, such as the Macintosh II and the Macintosh SE. The Macintosh II series led to other expandable Macs such as the Quadra, the Power Macintosh, and the Mac Pro. While the Mac Pro would lose its expansion slots when the 2013 Mac Pro was released, the latest Mac Pro has expansion slots again, and I hope Apple keeps them if it releases an ARM version of the Mac Pro.<p>2. His work at Be, Inc. after his departure from Apple. I never had the chance to use BeOS (I was in elementary school during the heyday of BeOS), but I've read a lot about it. In my opinion, one of BeOS's most interesting features is its searchable file system. Indeed, the creator of BeOS's file system, Dominic Giampaolo (who wrote a well-written, accessible introductory textbook on file system design), moved to Apple after Be's demise and worked on Spotlight, which is macOS's search tool.
Can you imagine moving to the Bay Area in the 80s? To grow up when land was still cheap, before college competition was cutthroat and unaffordable, when relatively simple competence could get you a solid job and VC/PE firms weren't plundering and incentivizing the latest 30-second attention-span app to reach $1B?<p>It would be me living in Los Altos now, instead of the old rich people who I curse for refusing to die or reform Prop 13 and free up some affordable place to raise a new family.<p>Oh well.
Quote: "I watched forklifts move palettes of software in Apple warehouses"<p>Must've been nice to physically see the fruits of your labor :)
I don’t know if Chris Espinosa still works for Apple, but I think he might have been around a couple of years before Gassé. He started as a teenager.<p>I’ve been writing Apple software since 1986. Lots of changes, since then.<p>I remember it as being a fairly “scruffy” little company; especially if you went to MacHack. I worked for GE, at the time, and the corporate culture differences were quite stark. GE was a “shirt and tie” operation, and I was part of a team that had maybe 400 people.<p>I was constantly being sneered at (literally) for sticking with a “dead” company. It was pretty annoying, and a lot of people did give up on them.
Jean-Louis wrote imho a pretty good book on his time at Apple. In fact I think it was better than Bill Gates book at the time.<p><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Third-Apple-Personal-Computers-Revolution/dp/0151898502/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=jean+louis+gassee&qid=1608539783&sr=8-1" rel="nofollow">https://www.amazon.com/Third-Apple-Personal-Computers-Revolu...</a>
>> the benefit of a benign neglect<p>I love this phrase and looking back on my career see that I too have received this treasure. If you're a self-starter but work inside an established company there's no better situation than having lots of ideas, lots of blank space on the map and very little oversight.
Quote: "Perhaps a monkish geek with a taste for satire will build a “Woe-is-Apple” museum on the web."<p>Is that not daringfireball? I kid, John.
> Microsoft will be designing its own processors for its Surface laptop line and its cloud servers.<p>I love Satya’s Microsoft. But every time Microsoft tries to copy Apple they have failed miserably. I wish they don’t and instead focus on their strengths. But you never know, Satya’s proven us wrong on several occasions. So maybe this time is different?
This, and the linked 50-year history, reminds me of “Computer: Bit Slices From a Life” by Herb Grosch [1]. What a journey!<p>[1]: <a href="http://www.columbia.edu/cu/computinghistory/computer.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.columbia.edu/cu/computinghistory/computer.html</a>
Btw, the article made me curious about the prospectus of Apple's IPO some 40 years ago. Here's a link for your archive. :)<p><a href="https://www.sec.gov/apple-computer-inc-ipo-prospectus-form-s-1" rel="nofollow">https://www.sec.gov/apple-computer-inc-ipo-prospectus-form-s...</a>
Sadly, he then was at the center of a non competitive fight between Apple and Google. After he left Apple, Google tried to hire him but was forced not to do it by Steve Jobs<p><a href="https://pando.com/2014/03/27/how-steve-jobs-forced-google-to-cancel-its-plan-to-open-a-paris-office/" rel="nofollow">https://pando.com/2014/03/27/how-steve-jobs-forced-google-to...</a>