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Tiger was the first release of OSX that I was truly proud of. I came to Apple, not as part of the NeXT acquisition, but from the post-pivot Be, which had decide

Tiger was the first release of OSX that I was truly proud of. I came to Apple, not as part of the NeXT acquisition, but from the post-pivot Be, which had decided to focus their attention on "internet appliances". My love at the time was operating systems and specifically GUI libraries and components. Apple internally at that time was frightening. Coming neither from Apple or NeXT, I has an interesting position, being able to talk to various people more candidly. The Blue [1] team (System 7/8/9) on the second floor of the IL2 building seemed to be in constant distress. The ATG [2] team on the 3rd floor of IL3 was being swept out in mass layoffs and departures. There were still factions of Pink [3] and Copland [4] adherents trying to get their technology into the "Beaker" builds of what would become OSX Cheetah. The Beaker builds at the time were roughly re-skinned versions of NeXTStep and pretty uninspiring. After my experience at Be, I really wanted to be involved in creating something great that would ship and be of real value to users. At Apple, I discovered that I just wasn't happy trying to exist in the chaos. Steve wasn't yet CEO, Avie and Bertrand were establishing a new OS organization on the 4th floor of the IL2 building and Steve Glass was still fighting to keep "OS 9" alive. In fact, OS 9 was critically important as it was needed to run on the new iMac and support all of the Apple hardware that was bringing in (diminishing) revenue. On that note, Steve was actively batting the Mac clone makers (or leeches according to Steve.) In a moment of bleakness I received a call from a friend from Be. He said I should come join him, Andy Herzfeld, Susan Kare, Bud Tribble, Bart Decrem, Stan Christensen, Darin Adler, John Sullivan and more at Eazel. [5] Eazel wanted to create a user-friendly Linux distribution with a services model to generate revenue. The main product of Eazel was the Nautilus file manager and contribution to GNOME. After failing to raise addition capital after the initial 10 million dollars, Eazel went through a couple of layoffs. On the evening of shutting the doors, Andy gave Steve a call and told him about the Eazel team and Steve set up a large meet and greet with various Apple teams on the 4th floor of IL2. Those who were interested went to the meeting; the majority of those who weren't, ended up joining with previous comrades who had left Be to form Danger, who were now at a startup called Android. The group who went to the meet and greet contained some significant contributors to various Apple software and hardware efforts; Darin Adler, Don Melton, Ken Kocienda, Bud Tribble, Maciej Stachowiak, Pavel Cisler, John Harper and more. Pavel helped in convincing Dominic Giampaolo [6] to come to Apple. This group of people also convinced other key contributors to come to Apple who were leery due to Apple's past history. All that wanted to take a job were hired on the spot and we all showed up on campus got our pictures taken and started doing whatever project we thought was cool.It had only been 18 months since I had left Apple, which meant I qualified for an employment bridge; my stock options, employee number and previous employment time all rolled into my current employment phase. This iteration of Apple was more stable; there was no more OS 9 group, the clones were gone, ATG was cleared out, Betrand had a functioning software organization, the product lines were much cleaner, Bas and the UX team were cranking out good designs and Steve was CEO and ruled with an iron fist. It was this organization that produced Tiger; the first release that I felt really represented the vision and aspirations of what a desktop operating system should be. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_7 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_7 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Advanced_Technology_Group https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Advanced_Technology_Grou... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taligent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taligent [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copland_(operating_system) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copland_(operating_system) [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eazel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eazel [6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominic_Giampaolo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominic_Giampaolo

rewgs 5y ago
Amazing to be able to interact with those who were actually there. Thank you for the story!
rvense 5y ago
What was being at Eazel like? Says a lot about the time that they were able to even get the first 10 million!
- diskzero 5y ago
  The funding did occur during the dot-com boom, however the quality of the team was quite high. Mike Boich, Andy Herzfeld, Susan Kare and Bud Tribble were all members of the early Macintosh team. Mike had several successful previous startups return large amounts to the funders and Andy was also well regarded for Radius and General Magic as well. Working at Eazel was great! I was there when the team was quite small; less than fifteen people. Eventually our tiny workspace was bursting at the seams and all the cubes were dismantled and rows and rows of picnic tables from Costco were brought. OK, that part sucked big-time. It reminds me of high density floor plans at Amazon. Most of us were on IRC all the time and it was always funny to see a majority of the office silently stand up to go on a lunch trip that had just been arranged on an IRC channel. Andy was a huge proponent of the Free Software Foundation and Richard Stallman gave us our employee orientation. Yes, he did put on a robe and wear a hard disk platter on his head during the final convocation. Because of the reputation of the founders and the quality of the staff, there was always someone interesting stopping by; Jeff Raskin, Steve Jobs, Alan Kay, Bill Atkinson, Mitch Kapor, Heidi Roizen, etc. I remember most of these people because I would always have to ask myself "How did a kid who grew up on a farm and didn't have a college degree end up at a place where I could talk to people like this?" I had a similar feeling when I was at Be and Apple as well. The early GNOME developers who were worked closely with were also an amazing group of people. Nat Friedman and Miguel de Icaza, Raph Levien, Havoc Pennington and many more. I mentioned the Eazel team having a huge impact on Apple as well. I was able to learn from these people, go to Apple with them and watch them do great work. Darin Adler and John Sullivan, who already were legends to me because of System 7 went on to found the Safari team along with Don Melton, Maciej Stachowiak and Ken Kocienda. John Harper, who was respected for the the sawmill/sawfish window manager, went on to create CoreAnimation and I believe large parts of SwiftUI. Bud Tribble became a senior executive behind many of Apple's technology. The Apple Watch is just one of his projects. Pavel Cisler brought his input from Tracker at Be and Nautilus at Eazel to Finder, where he is still managing the team. There are many more that didn't make the trip to Apple, but ended up at Android and other places doing great things. As for the day to day work, it was a lot like any other programming job. We used gcc, edited code, compiled, checked things into CVS, managed bugs in Bonsai, automated builds in Tinderbox, etc. When I think about it, you could probably take 2001 me and drop me into 2022 and I wouldn't be all that shocked. Same processes, different tools. I would be super disappointed things hadn't progressed the way that I had envisioned though.

rewgs 5y ago

Amazing to be able to interact with those who were actually there. Thank you for the story!

rvense 5y ago

What was being at Eazel like? Says a lot about the time that they were able to even get the first 10 million!

diskzero 5y ago
The funding did occur during the dot-com boom, however the quality of the team was quite high. Mike Boich, Andy Herzfeld, Susan Kare and Bud Tribble were all members of the early Macintosh team. Mike had several successful previous startups return large amounts to the funders and Andy was also well regarded for Radius and General Magic as well. Working at Eazel was great! I was there when the team was quite small; less than fifteen people. Eventually our tiny workspace was bursting at the seams and all the cubes were dismantled and rows and rows of picnic tables from Costco were brought. OK, that part sucked big-time. It reminds me of high density floor plans at Amazon. Most of us were on IRC all the time and it was always funny to see a majority of the office silently stand up to go on a lunch trip that had just been arranged on an IRC channel. Andy was a huge proponent of the Free Software Foundation and Richard Stallman gave us our employee orientation. Yes, he did put on a robe and wear a hard disk platter on his head during the final convocation. Because of the reputation of the founders and the quality of the staff, there was always someone interesting stopping by; Jeff Raskin, Steve Jobs, Alan Kay, Bill Atkinson, Mitch Kapor, Heidi Roizen, etc. I remember most of these people because I would always have to ask myself "How did a kid who grew up on a farm and didn't have a college degree end up at a place where I could talk to people like this?" I had a similar feeling when I was at Be and Apple as well. The early GNOME developers who were worked closely with were also an amazing group of people. Nat Friedman and Miguel de Icaza, Raph Levien, Havoc Pennington and many more. I mentioned the Eazel team having a huge impact on Apple as well. I was able to learn from these people, go to Apple with them and watch them do great work. Darin Adler and John Sullivan, who already were legends to me because of System 7 went on to found the Safari team along with Don Melton, Maciej Stachowiak and Ken Kocienda. John Harper, who was respected for the the sawmill/sawfish window manager, went on to create CoreAnimation and I believe large parts of SwiftUI. Bud Tribble became a senior executive behind many of Apple's technology. The Apple Watch is just one of his projects. Pavel Cisler brought his input from Tracker at Be and Nautilus at Eazel to Finder, where he is still managing the team. There are many more that didn't make the trip to Apple, but ended up at Android and other places doing great things. As for the day to day work, it was a lot like any other programming job. We used gcc, edited code, compiled, checked things into CVS, managed bugs in Bonsai, automated builds in Tinderbox, etc. When I think about it, you could probably take 2001 me and drop me into 2022 and I wouldn't be all that shocked. Same processes, different tools. I would be super disappointed things hadn't progressed the way that I had envisioned though.