Behind the scenes at the NeXT Computer office

Your comment about Amazon sucking resonated as I recently talked with them about a job, but walked away being super disinterested. I do not think this is an Amazon problem (fwiw, I worked at Microsoft for a super long time), I think it's a "problem" with the massive success of technology in the world.

Back in the day of NeXT, Be and early Apple, it was alot about building something cool and fun and a less about the huge money that could/would be made. Now the whole world relies on technology and there is so much money that the environment of a tech company is alot more about the business than it is the technology.

I personally don't think thats necessarily a bad thing, it's just evolution of the technology business.

Venture Capital, working in the office, how companies operate.

The 1980s and 1990s were largely a scene of people who wanted to be there and were less concerned with KPIs and raising money.

They were engineers or designers first for the most part.

Today’s world one of the first things that happen to any startup is an MBA rolls in to “help get it off the ground”

Amazon is and always have been bean counters and toxic work culture, and any level, from warehouses to their devs. The rot starts with Bezos.

But the wonderful thing about these places is they can create/acquire/prop-up small subsidiaries. If they're self-aware enough to know the oppressive force at their size, they leave these offshoots alone (until too big, where the cycle repeats anyways). These are the parts where you can still experience the magic being discussed.

Presumably working at X Development (formerly Google X) still has a lot of this energy and autonomy.

No-one writes blog posts about a boring and unproductive job they had in the 90s, and if they did it wouldn't reach the HN front page.

I’ve mentioned in comments here and elsewhere that I wish I could’ve worked at Bell Labs or Xerox PARC…what a time that must’ve been. Alas. At least my side projects keep me busy; they don’t pay the bills yet but they’re the best chance I got to work on something meaningful and (eventually) get paid to do so.

For example, you could have been dealing with COBOL banking software. Or order management software. Or even spreadsheet software.

The difference being that all the tools were a lot worse and everything was built from the ground up so it took a lot longer.

Exciting stuff was about as common as it is today, and the reason you aren't doing exciting stuff today is likely because you know that 90% of those companies will end up failing and might not actually pay you. The most successful of those companies will likely do something like selling insurance adjustment software.

I cant see it. I was in the embedded dev world from the early 90s to mid 2000s before I moved into infrastructure architecture. The mostly homogeneous world we currently live in is just not even close to what we had in the 90s. At one point I had a Next Cube, an IBM RS/6000 (AIX 4.x Unix), a BeBox (BeOS), an OS/2 system (PPC), a Sun SparcStation and 2 x NT 3.x system (x86 and PPC) all sat in my office at the same time. The diversity of hardware and operating systems is just not comparable to today. It was an exciting time of rapid development and change and we were aware of it. Much different to what we have now where we just like to pretend we are in a time of rapid development and change but the reality is incremental change and small increments at that outside of AI

I havent found anything in the IT world to excite me for close to 20 years. The expanding core counts were interesting to start with but soon got boring. The introduction of ARM was hardly an excitement. RISC-V is dead as far as performance designs go though its a great micro controller arch. Software is abstraction layer piled on top of abstraction layer piled on top of abstraction layer. There is almost nothing new and hasn't been for a long time

While I'd like to think so I can't see myself romanticising the open plan cattle pen we're in now.

I do romanticise when I had my own cube and desk, still loud but nothing compared to the cattle pen we're in now with long floor wide benches, having your opposite neighbour's face in your field of view all day and everyone yelling on zoom calls from all directions.

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.

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.

- pop-up/vertical main menu

- PANTONE colour library

- Display PostScript

I actually used similar machines running NeXT/OPENSTEP, Mac OS, and Windows shortly after graduation and the performance was smoother and more consistent in NeXTstep 3.3, though I will admit OPENSTEP 4.2 felt just a tad more sluggish, but it was far and away the more useful and capable machine, even when running the same software (e.g., Altsys Virtuoso vice Aldus Freehand, or FrameMaker or WordPerfect).

Probably helped that the Cube had 52MB RAM, the Mac 8MB, and the Windows 12MB.

  I don't blame Steve Jobs
  For what he's done to our bodies and our brains
  I blame you and me for making Steve Jobs feel like what he done was right
  
  ...
  
  And I don't blame Steve Jobs
  For turning rock-and-roll into a store at the mall
  I blame you and me for accepting the seduction
  Of being normal
  
  I don't blame Steve Jobs
  For driving a spike through the heart of the public space
  I blame you and me
  For retreating into fantasy, fingering our half-formed thoughts
  In our sleek sexy crumbling civilization
  
  ...
  
  I don't blame Steve Jobs
  For making us timid and effete
  I blame you and me
  For paying Steve Jobs to turn those sins into a lifestyle
  
  And a product
  And an industry
  And an identity
  A badge of honor
  
  ...

So NeXT -> Doom -> Nvidia -> AI

What I meant was he made some really horrible _business_ decisions while at NeXT, things that would be considered obvious today, like constant opinion changing on whim, constant product delays, product decisions that for the most part seemed to make the product more expensive and less functional, skipping important business meetings because oh-I'm-so-important when they really needed the sales etc. Granted I got all this from a podcast and didn't dig into the details myself, but I think for the large part he did objectively make some pretty horrible decisions in the early days at NeXT, although in the end it seems that he did seem to learn from them and turn things around, and arguably made him the guy he is more known for today.

Again, my amazement mostly stems from how he even had the chance to turn things around given the way the company was going and how he clearly still had some pretty talented people stick through the whole ordeal and end up producing valuable products through all that was going on.

For all his warts and all, Jobs is starting to age well in comparison to the current crop of wankers.

Excuse my French.

IMO this is a disingenuous take on Steve Jobs. No, all of us are not as horrible to other people as Jobs, who was notorious for his abusiveness. This is like saying, we all tell lies, so how can we criticize Trump? There's a huge difference between normal human foibles and extreme antisocial behavior. Perhaps Jobs calmed down a bit as he got older, but the reports from his coworkers at NeXT for example were ugly. Some of them retained a lifetime of bitterness, and his death was a kind of catharsis for them, not that they wished him dead but rather they could finally let go of the old emotions.

Even good-natured Woz was pained when he finally learned years later that Jobs had cheated him on a pre-Apple business deal. The problem wasn't the money, which Woz was always happy to give away. It was the betrayal of trust and friendship. Jobs was not a normal dude. He was a deceitful narcissist; this is on the public record in an FBI background check: https://vault.fbi.gov/steve-jobs (credit to the book "Steve Jobs in Exile" for the link)

This was clear on usenet con comp.sys.next.* since I had an aol.com address.

That said, Millenium Notebook was one of my favourite apps.