Joining Apple 40 years ago (opens in new tab)

Spent many hours on BeOS and visited their booth at PCexpo in NYC around 1999. The big draw was the multimedia centric OS where the GUI always remained responsive. It also did things like allow you to open up a dozen AVI files on a single core sub 1GHz Pentium 2/3 and not have the computer grind to a halt. Instead the videos skipped frames and you continue to work on other programs. It was a pleasant experience compared to the rough shape of early Linux/BSD and the obtuse horror show that was Windows 95/98. We even had a somewhat working port of Netscape and there was some momentum building behind it. But then came Windows 2000 and Be sorta lost steam on the desktop and then went in some bizarre internet appliance direction and it was over shortly after.

Don't quote me on this but the another powerful feature was the decoupling of media codecs from programs. Adding support for a new media codec was as simple as dropping a .so lib file into a /lib/codec directory and all your media programs now supported that codec. This applied to all media including audio, video and images. This was all part of the BeOS API.

It also had a decent c++ API and multithreading was a first class concept in the system allowing one to easily write programs to take advantage of multiple processors. That allowed the machine to easily scale as you added more processors, something Windows 98 couldn't do at the time. This was well before the concept of multi-core. Back then you needed more sockets to add more processors and it wasn't cheap.

Try out https://www.haiku-os.org it's the spiritual successor and binary compatible.

The BeOS is also featured in Neil Stephenson's "In the beginning there was the command line"

https://steve-parker.org/articles/others/stephenson/index.sh...

You have a distorted picture. I moved to the bay area in 85, stayed 20 years, then left. If you moved there and were already well established, sure, real estate would have been more affordable then than now. But as a young engineer, things were still pretty expensive.

My starting salary as a BSEE working for a minicomputer company was $30,000. Two weeks after arriving they had layoffs. They were nice to the new hires and said we'll keep you on for a bit, but you should start looking for new jobs, plus there is a 10% pay cut, so $27K/year ($65.3K in 2020 dollars).

My shared apartment was off Maude and Mathilda was nothing special. It was 700 sq ft and was $750/month, which works out to $1800/month in 2020 dollars. Palo Alto, Los Altos Hills, and Atherton were all expensive addresses, even then.

California in the early 80s wasn’t fun. We left SF in ‘83. Interest rates around 15%. Minimum wage around $2.50/hr. Gas rationing. you could only buy gas on certain days based on your license plate. There was an apartment above a garage in SF that sold for $200,000 that was fixup and the garage wasn’t part of the deal.

My parents moved us to they east coast where they did finally purchase their own home.

>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.

Yeah, you would then be the "rich [person] who others curse for refusing to die or reform Prop 13 and free up some affordable place to raise a new family"

I moved to the Bay Area in '84, bought a house in ~89 - house prices had just run up to what people considered then as high levels - Real Estate then leveled out and stopped rising for half a decade - it's done that on and off for 40 years - it was never 'cheap' at the time.

Prop 13 was already in place in '84 - the only way to get rid of it is to vote it out, it's long past time

Given the time that's passed since then, you'd be one of the old rich person.

Austin sounds like an up-and-coming Valley, as do a few other really gorgeous locations around the US. The trick is to pick one and settle in early.

there's always an untapped place somewhere. in the 80s people were saying this about someplace else probably.

Wtf. Why do you curse old people for not dying? What is wrong with you? Do you feel the same about your parents? In 30 years when you are old, are you gonna move to Kansas and sell your property under market value to some younger people?

My parents purchased a house in Milpitas in the 80s. Inexpensive, yes, and they told me that Palo Alto was still considered expensive and out of reach for them at the time.

My father worked at HP for 25 years. Solid middle class lifestyle, no complaints.

My extended family moved to the Bay Area in the early to mid 80s (some a little earlier). No one ever thought it cheap, and what they said then about cost of living is not that different from what everyone says now.

> To grow up when land was still cheap

People didn't think it was cheap at the time. The 70's had seen a boom in real estate prices, especially in California, due to the boomers moving into their home buying years. (And that was before Prop 13, which was a response to high home prices.)

> 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.

Supply & demand economics won't deliver the result you want even if your wish for everyone over 60 to drop dead is fulfilled.

Don't worry in 25 years the next generation will be cursing your generation for having all the advantages.

Ha ha. So many BBS's a local-call away....

I moved to the Bay Area in the 90's and Fry's was still a destination for the hardware hacker — selling wire-wrapping sockets and Playboy magazine. (I know - wut?) Disk Drive Depot, Computer Literacy Bookstore, Weirdstuff Warehouse, HSC.... I would do the electronics-surplus run on Saturday morning and see the same HAM's and "home brewers" picking through old alphanumeric LED displays, etc....

It's definitely a different place now. Sigh.

Combination of high income and low cost of living is ever elusive. We saw the dream get a glimmer of hope with remote work, only to be soon crushed by CoL adjustment announcements. You would be hard-pressed to find, anytime in history and anywhere on planet earth, a time and place where salaries are really high and CoL is really low.

> when land was still cheap

Twenty years from now, you will be able to tell the same story about wherever high-earning, highly educated young people settle in the meantime. All you have to do is predict and buy in.

Maybe you should just be thankful for the benefits you have. Most of the world is not lucky enough to be capable of working in tech in the Bay area.

Nice pun :)

> 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.

He's still at Apple, and was actually employee #8, making him its longest-serving employee according to his Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Espinosa

I started to work at a minicomputer company in the mid-80s. Product managers and the like still wore suits. Many older engineers still wore ties but engineering in general was shifting towards what we call business casual today.

I joined a Mac software startup in 1986. The two founders told me about going to the first Mac developers conference, they claimed it was them, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and a dozen or so other people from other companies.

Did this change as Apple got bigger and then fell on hard times?

Also are you adding those proper quotation marks by hand?

See parts 15 - 18 here:

https://medium.com/@marie.gassee/jean-louis-gass%C3%A9es-50-...

While I generally agree, I think MS has to copy Apple here, but not because they need to make the same products. The M1 chip was Apple planting the flag for consumer-level ARM performance, and every indication is that they'll be able to scale that performance up to more demanding use-cases. MS's fortunes are tied to Intel and Qualcomm for the time being, both of whom are falling behind on performance and performance/watt, so they need to do something to remain competitive.

What would throw the world for a loop would be if MS secured an x86 license from Intel and developed their own chip with the performance/watt of the M1.

Copying is in Microsoft's DNA. I can barely think of a successful product they have made that wasn't a knock off of something else (lotus 123, azure, .NET, etc)

Interesting story but Jean-louis gassee is not the same person as Jean-marie hullot