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Folklore.org
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History & Retro Computing 27Life, Learning & Writing 13Software Engineering 6Tech Industry & Business 3Design & UX 2Programming Languages 1
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-2000 Lines of code (2004)
In early 1982, the Lisa software team was trying to buckle down for the big push to ship the software within the next six months. Some of the managers decided that it would be a good idea to track the progress of each individual engineer in terms of the amount of code that they wrote from week to week. They devised a…
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Joining Apple Computer (2018)
40 years ago today, I joined Apple Computer on April 27, 1978. It was a big turning point in my life and I am glad I said "Yes".
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Round Rects Are Everywhere
Bill Atkinson worked mostly at home, but whenever he made significant progress he rushed in to Apple to show it off to anyone who would appreciate it. This time, he visited the Macintosh offices at Texaco Towers to show off his brand new oval routines, which were implemented using a really clever algorithm.
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Thunderscan: A clever device transforms a printer into a scanner (2004)
The first project that I worked on for Apple after starting in August 1979 was writing low level software for the Silentype printer (see What Hath Woz Wrought ) , a cute, inexpensive thermal printer for the Apple II, that was based on technology licensed from a local company named Trendcom. In typical Apple fashion…
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Swedish Campground (2004)
We thought it was important for the user to be able to invoke every menu command directly from the keyboard, so we added a special key to the keyboard to invoke menu commands, just like our predecessor, Lisa. We called it the "Apple key"; when pressed in combination with another key, it selected the corresponding menu…
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Mister Macintosh (2004)
Steve Jobs often came by Texaco Towers after dinner, to see what was new, and we'd usually show him whatever recent progress we made. Sometimes he'd be pissed off about something, but other times he'd be really excited about a new idea.
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Steve wants us to make the Macintosh boot faster
We always thought of the Macintosh as a fast computer, since its 68000 microprocessor was effectively 10 times faster than an Apple II, but our Achilles heel was the floppy disk. We had limited RAM, so it was often necessary to load data from the floppy, but there we were no faster than an Apple II. Once we had real…