Ike Impe
ike_impe@hotmail.com
My (?) Years at Apple

     We worked for the R&D department mostly at Apple, but got moved around a lot due to corp reshuffling. Sometimes in Silicon Valley, others in St. Louis (now no longer there). Steve Jobs was a hard boss to work for. He nitpicked at everything, he would say things like "Its taking over a minute to load the OS, our customers won't wait that long, they only have 15 second attention spans. You got to thin out the code a bit." Then we did thin out the code and took out parts that Steve told us to in order to get it to load faster. A lot of it was error correction routines, memory protection routines, and crash protection and error trapping. Our detailed error messages got replaced by Steve's number table, so we got "Error Type 11" instead of a much more user friendly message. Finally it fit and loaded in 15 seconds. Then Steve got pissed that it crashed so much. We told him it was because he made us remove the code that prevented crashing and protected the system, he then got mad and threw the Macintosh prototype down the stairs and then took away our Apple /// systems we had used for timekeeping, etc. He threw a monitor /// out a window once! He said from now on we will use nothing but Macintosh systems and all /// and // systems are to be trashed. He really turned into Dilbert's boss from then on.

     Later on after Sculley finally got rid of Steve, we threw an office party. We went over new system designs with Sculley, and we showed how we could use the PC's bus or IBM's Microchannel to keep costs down and work with the PC world and PC hardware. Sculley took the designs to the engineers, who only wanted to do things their way, so they picked Nubus from TI because Steve used it in his prototype NeXT cube. Even while not at Apple anymore, Jobs cast his shadow over us. The Nubus design cost us 10 times as much as projected and wasn't as fast as microchannel but it was Plug and Play enough like Microchannel to work. The version we had did lack DMA, but the Apple Engineers hated DMA as much as they hated Parity Checking memory and Microsoft.

Later on we tried to push Intel's proposed PCI bus with the Power Macintoshes to get an edge over ISA and Microchannel based PC systems. The Engineers rejected it and stuck with NuBus until many users complained about Nubus shortcomings. Finally the Engineers saw things our way and started working with us to get the PCI standard.

To this day Apple Engineers are still like that according to our contacts in Apple.

We got out a few years ago when Apple was really ready to hit rock bottom. Other companies laughed at us when we said we worked at Apple, we might as well have said we worked at Mattel or Tonka. Only after learning skills with WINTEL systems did we get any serious respect from most employers.

More to come later, if people are interested. My e-mail address is at hotmail, because I and my friends wish to remain anonymous. We don't want our real e-mail address getting out and being put on spam lists, and being subscribed to thousands of mailing lists like has been done to us before.