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The Apple years while Steve Jobs was away
As one of the founders of Apple Computer Inc., Steve Jobs became synonymous with the brand. But his relationship with the company wasn't always so hallowed and harmonious. After internal disputes with Apple's board of directors in 1985, Jobs left the company to pursue other projects, including NeXT Inc. and Pixar. Although he'd piloted the Apple brand from the start, the company carried on without him until his return in 1997 during which time he rebooted the company and turned out "world-changing" products. Join us in the gallery below as we look at some of the hardware that Apple made while Jobs was away.
Former Apple CEO John Sculley: Steve Jobs sold experiences, not products
In a new video interview with Entrepreneur Magazine, former Apple CEO John Sculley discusses what exactly set Apple apart from its competition starting with the famous "1984" advertisement. Jobs' vision for Apple's marketing was selling experiences versus selling the product itself. It's interesting to look at Apple's advertising throughout its history through this lens. Its advertising seldom focuses on the technical specs of a product, but rather pushes an experience that you would want to be a part of. The legendary "1984" advertisement is a perfect example of this theory, not even showing the product it was selling. Instead the audience is sold on an event that, even if they don't know what it will be, they desperately wouldn't want to miss out on. It's a subtle trick which is still readily apparent in Apple's marketing to this day. You can watch the 3:24 interview with Sculley below.
The TUAW Daily Update Podcast for April 18, 2014
It's the TUAW Daily Update, your source for Apple news in a convenient audio format. You'll get some the top Apple stories of the day in three to five minutes for a quick review of what's happening in the Apple world. You can listen to today's Apple stories by clicking the player at the top of the page. The Daily Update has been moved to a new podcast host in the past few days. Current listeners should delete the old podcast subscription and subscribe to the new feed in the iTunes Store here.
John Sculley regrets ousting Steve Jobs and other news for April 18, 2014
It's Friday! Slip on a pair of loafers and browse today's Apple news in a leisurely fashion. Because it's Friday. And you're a boss. In an interview with Times of India, former Apple CEO John Sculley admitted that ousting Steve Jobs was a mistake. "I think there could have been a way, in hindsight, where Steve and I did not need to have a confrontation, and we could have worked it out," he told the Times. "And, perhaps the board could have played a bigger role in that. But you can't change history." John seems to spend a lot of time saying, "I fired Steve Jobs once." Candy Crush developer admits it can't own "candy." Not long ago, the makers of Candy Crush wanted to trademark the word "candy." They've withdrawn the application in the US, but managed to win it in Europe. Still, it seems there's some wiggle room, as the company has let apps Banner Saga and CandySwipe keep those monikers. Sugar crush! Jim Dalrymple of The Loop has posted a "super, double top-secret of the iPhone 7. He even names his source.
Apple employee badges from 1984
In addition to helping digitize Steve Jobs' now famous Mac introduction, former Apple employee Scott Knaster recently posted this photo depicting old Apple employee badges, providing us with an interesting trip down memory lane in the process. For all you Apple history buffs out there, take note of John Sculley's badge nestled up at the top, flanked to the right and left by legendary Apple engineers Burrell Smith and Andy Hertzfeld, respectively. Apple employee badges from an unused 1984 ad. Of note: Andy Hertzfeld, Burrell Smith, John Sculley, Barbara Knaster. pic.twitter.com/N5JyhO3vVj - Scott Knaster (@scottknaster) January 25, 2014 Incidentally, Hertzfeld still has his badge today.
Daily Update for January 22, 2014
It's the TUAW Daily Update, your source for Apple news in a convenient audio format. You'll get some of the top Apple stories of the day in three to five minutes for a quick review of what's happening in the Apple world. You can listen to today's Apple stories by clicking the player at the top of the page. The Daily Update has been moved to a new podcast host in the past few days. Current listeners should delete the old podcast subscription and subscribe to the new feed in the iTunes Store here.
Steve Jobs was beyond scared before his triumphant 1984 Mac introduction
Steve Jobs was a master showman with an unparalleled ability to introduce a new product with flair and panache. I personally think his 2007 iPhone introduction was a public speaking triumph, setting a new bar for product announcements. This Friday marks the 30-year anniversary of another of Jobs' great product announcements: the 1984 unveiling of the Macintosh. If you take a look at Jobs' Mac introduction, it's vintage Jobs to the core. Confident and charming, Jobs was enthusiastic and all smiles as he showed off the latest and greatest from Apple. But behind the scenes, before taking taking the stage, Jobs was beyond scared about the moment that stood before him. After all, it's not every day one gets up and announces a machine that would forever change personal computing. In an article penned for CNET, former Apple CEO John Sculley writes that while Jobs was nothing but grace once he took the stage, it was an entirely different story behind the scenes. You may be surprised to learn that as Steve and I stood behind the curtain moments before he was to go on stage, Steve was terrified. "I'm scared sh*tless," Steve whispered to me. "This is the most important moment of my entire life. Everything I have dreamed about and worked on for years will actually happen in the next few moments." ... Steve started to shake almost uncontrollably. He was wearing a gray blazer, white shirt, and a green bowtie. His black hair was long and flowing. At just 27 years old, he looked handsome and more like a Hollywood celebrity than a Silicon Valley geek. "I am so scared," he repeated. "I'm not sure I can talk." I grabbed him firmly in a big hug. "Get over it," I said. "You are Steve Jobs. You have told us you are about to change the world. Now go out there and do it." And change the world he did. Of course, the Jobs/Sculley friendship would soon collapse on account of dwindling Mac sales during the 1984 holiday shopping season. Sculley blamed Jobs for lower-than-expected Mac sales while Jobs in turn blamed Sculley's poor management skills. By May of 1985, following a few months of corporate in-fighting and an attempted coup by Jobs, he was officially relieved of his duties as Apple VP and general manager of the Mac department. A few months later, he would leave Apple altogether, whereupon he would found NeXT.
How to make a CES keynote
Last night, director Michael Bay made an abrupt stage exit during Samsung's day zero CES press conference. It was awkward, but little more than a square of toilet paper on the bottom of a tennis shoe compared to last year's Qualcomm keynote. A bizarre mix of stilted theatrics, celebrity appearances and product demos, the presentation was like nothing we'd ever seen -- until we took a look back. Qualcomm may have jacked its keynote up on steroids, but many of the tricks it pulled out were already tried-and-true standards. As Sony's Kaz Hirai prepares to kick things off at CES 2014 this morning, we reflect on 20-plus years of innovative speeches, futuristic predictions and just plain strange behavior. This is how you make a CES keynote.
Apples to BlackBerrys: John Sculley reportedly considering bid for failing phone maker
For anyone who has followed Apple's history, John Sculley is a familiar figure. He was the CEO who famously ousted Steve Jobs from the company he co-founded in 1985; he championed the ill-fated Newton; and he eventually left Apple as its profits turned to losses in 1993. Yesterday afternoon, The Globe and Mail published a report that has the potential to change that legacy. According to the piece by Steven Chase and Iain Marlow, the man who fired Steve Jobs is considering a bid for BlackBerry.
Daily Update for October 11, 2013
It's the TUAW Daily Update, your source for Apple news in a convenient audio format. You'll get all the top Apple stories of the day in three to five minutes for a quick review of what's happening in the Apple world. You can listen to today's Apple stories by clicking the inline player (requires Flash) or the non-Flash link below. To subscribe to the podcast for daily listening through iTunes, click here. No Flash? Click here to listen. Subscribe via RSS
Former Apple CEO John Sculley: Tim Cook doing a terrific job
Former Apple CEO John Sculley recently told CNBC Asia that he thinks Tim Cook is doing a fine job. "I think Cook is doing a terrific job. He's not trying to be Steve Jobs; only one person could be Steve Jobs and that was Steve," he said. Sculley was the CEO of Apple from 1983-1993 and Jobs' initial successor, once Jobs was ousted from the company. Many believe that Sculley fired Jobs in 1983, which he denies. "I was never the person who fired Jobs, that was a myth," he said. Today, Sculley has praise for Cook and Apple's current lineup of products: "Steve could make the big creative leaps. What Tim is doing is continuing the Apple philosophy of no compromise and quality of their products and great styling. I think people are giving Apple a bum rap on what is still a great company with great products," he said.
Origin Stories: Steve Sande
I certainly didn't start my career with plans to become a blogger and editor at one of the world's most active Apple websites. When I was a child dreaming about a future career path, computer science barely registered on the "What I want to do when I grow up" list since only corporations owned room-sized mainframes at that time and there was no such thing as a home computer. The first time I had any physical contact with a computer was in 8th grade in Aurora, Colorado in the Apollo moon landing year of 1969. The Aurora Public Schools had purchased a Data General Nova (see console photo of a similar model at top of this post) in that year for accounting and scheduling purposes, and some brilliant person came up with the idea of buying some Teletypes that could be used as dialup terminals to allow personnel at the schools to access the main computer remotely. Well, the administrators and teachers at the school weren't all that interested in computers, so guess who started using the Teletypes and Nova to learn how to program in BASIC? The students. Since they wouldn't let us save our programs to paper tape (that would come in about two or three years), any programs we ran were usually quite short out of necessity – we'd type 'em in, run them, try to figure out what the TOO MANY NESTED GOSUBS error meant, and then start all over again. It was fun, but frustrating with no real way to store the programs permanently. In 9th and 10th grade, I was only able to play rarely with the Nova or whatever computer they may have purchased as an upgrade. But when the school announced in 11th grade that the regular algebra class would also be offered in a "computer algebra" version providing access to the school system's minicomputer, I jumped on the opportunity to have a full semester of working with ... the future! Things were a little better at that point. We could save our programs out on paper tape, kind of the "floppy disk" of the era. I think part of the reason we wanted to save to paper tape was that the tape punch created some very good confetti for high school football games... About this time I became very interested in two things; transportation engineering and writing. I had a wonderful high school English teacher by the name of David Faull (still alive and kicking) who really taught me how to write, something I'd need to do in college in those pesky elective courses. I had decided to go into Civil Engineering, and was accepted at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Every engineering student at the time had to take an introductory computer class – CS 101 – in which they were introduced to two things: punch card input and FORTRAN IV. There was nothing worse than sitting down at a keypunch machine with a handwritten FORTRAN coding form, typing in several hundred cards, all of which needed to be read by a machine in order and without typos for your program to run. I can recall hearing of several computer science grad students who had nearly committed suicide after having ultra-long programs scattered to the wind when they accidentally dropped boxes of punch cards... One of my best high school buddies, Rick Brownson, was a student at CU at the same time in the Electrical Engineering department, and I recall that in 1976 he introduced me to an amazing game –- Lunar Lander –- that displayed vector graphics in real time onto a round green-screen terminal. We wasted many a weekend hour playing that game in one of the EE computer labs. Rick also introduced me to the nascent world of personal computing around that time, as he and I soldered chips into a MITS Altair 8800 kit in late 1975. I really wasn't all that impressed with the Altair, since when we finished it there was no way for us to connect it to a display (usually an old TV), and we had no keyboard for it. So we flipped switches on the front of the device to enter 8080 opcodes and then looked at the LEDs to see the results. I remember taking a weekend drive to Albuquerque, New Mexico in 1976 to go to a Altair convention of some sorts; the highlight was getting a pirated copy of Bill Gates' Altair BASIC on paper tape from another attendee. At the time I graduated from engineering school in 1978, word was getting out about Apple, but at the time I really didn't see any reason to buy a computer. Even while I was working in my first job and going to grad school, I refused to buy a computer. When I was able to get a Commodore VIC-20 for about $300 I bought one, then when Commodore reduced the price on the C-64 to about $250 the next week, I returned the VIC-20, got a refund, and picked up a Commodore 64. After a short amount of time I found myself hooked. I bought an Epson printer, got the cassette tape drive, and bought the height of communications technology at the time – a 300 baud modem. I quickly found myself on some of the early bulletin board systems of the time. But the Commodore 64 wasn't a "real computer", so when IBM compatible devices started hitting the market I went out and bought a Sanyo MBC-555 PC clone complete with two floppy drives (a Sanyo MBC-550 with only one floppy is shown below)! This is where I got my first introduction to business software, with WordStar as a word processor and CalcStar as a spreadsheet. At this time, I was working for a natural gas pipeline company called WestGas. The company was a subsidiary of a larger electric and gas utility (Public Service Company of Colorado, now part of Xcel Energy), and as a subsidiary we had of control over our destiny. In the fall of 1983, the Vice President of our company came to me to see if I would perform a study of possible uses for personal computers in our company and create a five-year plan to budget the introduction of those devices, so I jumped to the task. Everything was based on costs and benefits, and a calculated rate of return on the investment in IT. In retrospect, a lot of my numbers were probably quite suspect, as they were based on estimates of time savings that most likely never occurred... The final study saw a need for no more than about 15 PCs over the next five years as well as a handful of dedicated IBM DisplayWriter word processors. About the time that my study was completed, there was a lot of speculation in the computer world about Apple's forthcoming Macintosh. I was interested in seeing one, so a few days after they were introduced my boss and I went over to a Nynex Business Center store to take a look. While the mouse, the bitmapped display, and the 3.5" floppy drive were all amazing, the lack of memory (128K) was a real turnoff. Still, I felt as if I had seen the future, and I vowed to get myself a Mac if they ever built a model with more RAM. Towards the end of the year Apple introduced the 512K "Fat Mac", and the company was doing a "Test Drive A Mac" promotion where you filled out loan paperwork, took a Mac home to use for about three days, and if you decided you wanted to keep it they processed the loan. Having the Mac at home really made me fall in love with it, so in December of 1984 I bought my first Mac. Being enthralled with the Mac, I started lugging it with me to work. By this point I was the supervisor of a group called "Special Projects", and my team was charged with a number of things: regulatory compliance, studies, project management, and now IT. Pretty quickly, my co-workers got began to turn into Mac fans, and I started tweaking the five year plan to buy fewer PCs and more Macs. I was also going to a lot of Mac User Group meetings in those days; that was the place to really try out software, as most everyone would bring boxes of floppies as well as the original disks for new applications they had purchased. Copying was rampant, but I don't remember anyone doing outright pirating; if you tried a program and liked it, you'd end up buying it. That was the case for me in 1985 when I tried out a copy of Aldus Pagemaker (the first "professional" page layout application) and then bought the application. At one point, I bragged to our financial manager that I could use the app to lay out our subsidiary's annual report at a much lower cost than sending it out to a traditional printshop; he called my bluff and for the next month I worked with the very buggy 1.0 software to create the report. In the end, I was successful and the finance department decided to get Macs for everyone. In a few more years, the engineering role ended for me and I was a full-time IT manager. Starting in 1987 and through 1994, I attended Macworld Expo in San Francisco. From about 1990 to 1994, I also went to the Apple WorldWide Developer Conference, which was held in San Jose at that point. These were the years of trying to get a new Mac OS off the ground, the intro of the Newton MessagePad, the MPW vs. CodeWarrior battles, and extremely boring keynotes by such luminaries as Michael Spindler and Gil Amelio. I also spent a lot of time using Pagemaker to create printed newsletters for WestGas and for a number of groups I was a member of. While that was a bit of work that I never really ended up getting paid for, it taught me a lot about design, layout, printing, and writing. From 1986 to 1994, I also ran a Mac bulletin board system known as MAGIC (Mac And [Apple II] GS Information Center). This started off on my original Mac 512, and by the time I quit running the BBS and moved to a website, it was a three-phone-line setup running on two networked Macs Including my favorite Mac of all time, a Mac IIcx. The BBS was the "official site" for the MacinTech Users Group, a MUG that's still going strong to this day. My first website was PDAntic.com, a play on John Sculley's acronym for the Newton – Personal Digital Assistant – and the fact that my wife often refers to me as being pedantic. I chose to run the site with news posts written in a reverse chronological order, which means that I was essentially doing blogging in 1994! I was doing some half-hearted development for the Newton at the time, and still have a working MessagePad 2100. 1995 was the start of a bad period for me personally – our pipeline company was swallowed back into our parent company, and then all of us who had any dealings in information technology were outsourced to IBM's ISSC services group (later IBM Global Services). While I won't go into details, it was the worst part of my career, with incompetent and occasionally unethical managers, a strategy that consisted of trying to do more and more work with fewer employees (with predictable bad results), and the most demoralized staff I've ever seen. I survived for nine years, after which I chose to go out on my own. At the beginning of my time with IBM our client (the company I worked for) had a total of over 1,200 Macs company-wide; by the time I left we were down to a handful in the corporate communications department. One of my first IBM projects in 1996 was to move all of the Mac users to Windows 95 –- I should have quit when I was ordered to do that. One bright spot during the years 1999 through 2006 was my participation in a number of Microsoft's Mobius conferences. These were meetings of those of us who ran mobile-oriented websites, with Microsoft showing off concepts and picking our brains for ideas about UI, built-in applications, and the direction of the mobile world. I also met a number of the top bloggers in the mobile space, including Ryan Block and Peter Rojas, who were both instrumental in starting up Engadget. Peter was one of the co-founders of Weblogs, Inc., the blog network that TUAW was a part of before being purchased by our current owner -- AOL. In 2005 I started my own consulting firm, Raven Solutions, to do Mac consulting and support. I became a member of the Apple Consultant Network (ACN), which helped my business to grow quite quickly. I also started writing books at about this time, creating a book called "Take Control of your iPod: Beyond the Music" that is still for sale from Adam and Tonya Engst's Take Control Books. One top moment about this time was seeing Steve Jobs introduce the iPhone at the 2007 Macworld Expo. That was something I'll never forget, and I have a Nitrozac painting of the event within my field of view in my office. In late 2007 I was on a weekend trip to Vegas with my wife when a friend pointed out that one of my favorite Apple sites –- TUAW –- was accepting applications for freelance writers. I turned in my requisite three sample articles, but didn't hear anything ... until April of 2008. I was on a business trip when I received a call from former TUAWite Scott McNulty, who wondered if I was still interested in being a TUAW blogger. He gave me a test that I remember quite well; I had one hour (sitting in an airport waiting for a flight) to write a news post about a new and completely hypothetical Apple product. I zapped it to him via email with time to spare and was offered the job. Since that time I've become a full-time employee of TUAW parent company AOL, I've met thousands of TUAW readers at Macworld/iWorld and other events, written a number of books (many with fellow TUAW blogger Erica Sadun), and published almost 1.8 million words of blog posts. I love sharing time with TUAW fans every Wednesday afternoon on TUAW TV Live, as well as delivering the daily Apple news on the Daily Update podcast. And when I get to join with my teammates for one of the Sunday night Talkcasts, that's like getting together with family. The only way to describe my life right now is as "blessed." I work with a great team of professionals doing what I love to do the most, writing about a company that has had such a huge effect on the course of my career and my life. I don't know how long this ride will last, but I sincerely hope it's for a long, long time.
Jobs was interested in the phone industry as early as the 80's
Former Apple CEO John Sculley spoke recently during Young Turks Conclave 2013 and shared his thoughts on Steve Jobs, Apple's future and India's entrepreneurs. His conversation was reprinted by YourStory.in, a website dedicated to India's startup scene. Speaking about Steve Jobs, Sculley shared that He and Jobs were working on Mac phones as early as 1984. "I remember we were working on Mac phones back in late 1984. Steve was thinking about those kinds of products back then. He used to say, the most important things are not the things you build but also the things you don't build. He was rigorous in the discipline of simplifying." As noted by The Mac Observer, these phones likely were not mobile phones like the iPhone, but a Mac-based landline phones. It probably was an idea hatched by engineers at Apple and eventually killed by Jobs Many of Jobs' visions for Apple continue today under the leadership of Tim Cook. Cook, Sculley believes, will lead Apple into the next game-changing product, which will likely involve televisions or wearable technology. "Apple is like BMW, and BMW doesn't compete with the lowest price brands. I think Apple will do just fine. Tim Cook has done a terrific job of setting up the stage for some exciting products next year. I don't think there would be a creative leap in the smartphone industry, and the industry is maturing and is stabilizing right now. But I am sure we will see a creative leap from Apple maybe a TV or a wearable." Sculley also shares some anecdotal stories about the friendly, yet competitive relationship between Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. Sculley's comments on YourStory.in are worth a read for those interested in Apple history. [Via The Mac Observer]
Daily Update for January 16, 2013
It's the TUAW Daily Update, your source for Apple news in a convenient audio format. You'll get all the top Apple stories of the day in three to five minutes for a quick review of what's happening in the Apple world. You can listen to today's Apple stories by clicking the inline player (requires Flash) or the non-Flash link below. To subscribe to the podcast for daily listening through iTunes, click here. No Flash? Click here to listen. Subscribe via RSS
John Sculley: Apple needs a cheap iPhone
Former Apple CEO John Sculley says Apple must make a cheap iPhone to tackle emerging markets. The CEO who ran Apple into the ground in the 1990s made the comments on a Bloomberg Television interview from Singapore. The comments come after AAPL sunk to below US$500 a share yesterday -- the lowest its been in 11 months (although there may be some shady reasons behind the stock fall). Sculley said, "Apple needs to adapt to a very different world. As we go from $500 smartphones to even as low, for some companies, as $100 for a smartphone, you've got to dramatically rethink the supply chain and how you can make these products and do it profitably." Noting that there was "nothing wrong" with the current iPhone, Sculley however said that Samsung has become "an extraordinarily good competitor" and the differences between its devices and Apple's aren't as wide as they used to be. Sculley didn't say whether he thought the US and Europe needed a cheap iPhone, but he sees it as essential in economies such as India, South America, Russia, China, Africa and other parts of Asia. He also said that because of Tim Cook's supply chain expertise and Apple's apparent choices recently to improve update cycles from 12 months to six months, Apple's current CEO is "exactly the right leader" for Apple at this time.
Former Apple CEO John Sculley: Apple is well-run
Although Tim Cook has been at Apple's helm for a while now, concern over his long-term guidance continues to permeate opinions of both shareholders and analysts. For his part, former Apple CEO, John Sculley, is confident in Apple's management. The Motley Fool reports that during a recent interview with CNBC, Sculley was very upbeat about the future of his former company. "I think they're going through a very significant change now in terms of product cycles," Sculley explains. "Traditionally Apple introduces products once a year; now it's really introducing products twice a year. The complexity of that from a supply chain is immense, and Apple seems to be doing it well. So, I think that people are underestimating just how well Apple is run, and just how successful the company can be when it gets to that twice-a-year product introduction cycle." Sculley went on to note that he believes Apple's valuation should remain relatively constant despite the change in leadership, mentioning that product guru Jony Ive brings a lot to the table. Whether investors see it the same way is an entirely different story, and while some analysts consider whether Apple's valuation deserves the so-called "Steve Jobs premium" it once had, the company has its work cut out for it to calm the fears of Wall Street.
John Sculley discusses ARM and the Newton
One of the products often pointed out as the sterling example of an Apple failure is the Newton MessagePad. The product, which launched in 1993 only to be axed in 1998 by the newly returned Steve Jobs, was ahead of its time in many ways. The man who took the project under his tutelage in the early 1990s was then-CEO John Sculley, who recently spoke at a South Florida Technology Alliance event about the Newton and the ARM processor that powered it. According to Sculley, the handwriting recognition capabilities of the Newton were never meant to define the device. Instead, "It was really much more about the fact that you could hold this thing in your hand and it would do a lot of the graphics that you would see on the Macintosh." There was no microprocessor available at the time that would let Apple do graphics-based software, so Newton project lead Larry Tesler came up with the idea of having Apple design its own microprocessor. The result was the ARM processor, a joint venture between Apple, VLSI, and Acorn Computers. The processor not only provided the functionality required for Newton, but was also power efficient. Without the ARM processor, the iPhone might never have taken off -- every iPhone uses a derivative of the ARM core used in the Newton. Sculley's talk is included in the video embedded below. Especially interesting is his comment about foreseeing mobile computing as a multi-billion dollar business -- something he was ridiculed for in the early 1990's.
Stanford archives provide rare glimpse into Apple's early days as mere seedling (video)
Housed in a climate controlled storage facility operated by Stanford University, nearly 600 feet of shelf space is dedicated to preserve documents, videos and memorabilia of Apple and its early days as a young startup. The collection holds rare gems such as interviews with Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, both of whom discuss some of the rationale behind Apple's name -- Jobs asserts that it was selected to place his company ahead of Atari in the phone book. Originally intended to furnish Apple's corporate museum, the materials were donated to Stanford in 1997 after Steve Jobs' return to the company, which was most concerned with financial survival at the time. According to the university, more than 20 significant collections have been added to the archives in the subsequent years. The warehouse holds blueprints of the Apple I, user manuals, magazine ads, TV commercials and T-shirts, along with thousands of photographs that document Steve Jobs during his years as CEO of NeXT. Other rarities include a $5,000 loan document -- signed by the two Steve's and the partnership's third co-founder, Ron Wayne -- a spoof of Ghostbusters that starred former CEO John Sculley and other company leaders, who played "Blue Busters" to eliminate IBM, and handwritten sales entries of the very first Apple II's. While the location of the facility is undisclosed, we can only hope that, some day, the collection will be showcased for fanboys, fangirls and the public alike.
Steve Jobs's story of the stones
Next week, Landmark Theaters in 19 US cities will screen a 70-minute "lost interview" featuring Steve Jobs. The interview was done in 1996 by Robert X. Cringely for his PBS series "Triumph of the Nerds" and is being released in unedited form as Steve Jobs: The Lost Interview. Philip Elmer-Dewitt, writing for Fortune, said that his favorite section of the interview is when Jobs answers the question "What's important to you in the development of a product?". His response features a scathing blow to John Sculley -- "John Sculley got a very serious disease. It's the disease of thinking that a really great idea is 90% of the work" -- as well as a sweet parable about the process of designing a product. In the interview, Jobs reminisces about an old man who lived down the street when he was a young boy. The man showed him a rock tumbler, and he and Jobs went out and got a handful of plain old rocks, then put them into the can with liquid and grit powder. They closed up the rock tumbler, turned it on, and then the man told Jobs to "come back tomorrow." The next day, the man opened the can and inside were these "amazingly beautiful polished rocks. The same common stones that had gone in through rubbing against each other like this (clapping his hands), creating a little bit of friction, creating a little bit of noise, had come out these beautiful polished rocks." Jobs goes on to say how that is a "metaphor for a team that is working really hard on something they're passionate about. It's that through the team, through that group of incredibly talented people bumping up against each other, having arguments, having fights sometimes, making some noise, and working together they polish each other and they polish the ideas, and what comes out are these beautiful stones." The interview will only be shown for two days in the US, so be sure to get your pre-sale tickets now. The theatrical trailer for the interview can be viewed below.
Hired at 14 by Apple
There's a story that was published almost two years ago by programmer Derek Sivers that is worth repeating now, especially for those of us who are depressed by the job market. Indeed, that's why Sivers originally penned his story two years ago: to show that persistence and a little knowledge can pay off big. The story is about the time Apple hired a fourteen year old kid named Tom Williams. Williams was a boy from Victoria, Canada who worshiped former Apple CEO John Sculley. As a young teen, through necessity, Williams started his own software company called Desert Island Software, but his real goal was to meet John Sculley and get hired by Apple. So starting at the age of twelve Williams started calling John Sculley's assistant every morning for a year and a half. Talk about persistence. That eventually led Apple to invite the boy down to Cupertino for the 1993 WWDC. There, Williams was promised five minutes with Sculley. That five minutes turned into half an hour and Sculley was only pulled away because he needed to walk onstage to introduce the Newton. But that brief period with Sculley impressed some people at Apple so much that just a year later, Apple hired the fourteen year-old Williams. Tom Williams' story is a great one that teaches what perseverance can accomplish, but it's also got some interesting gems in it, like how Apple got around child labor laws by hiring the fourteen year old as a consultant contracted by Apple through a Canadian company. That way the Canadian company was responsible for any child labor issues. Click on over to Derek Sivers site to read the whole story, as told by Tom Williams.
