cmacaskill's comments

cmacaskill | 6 years ago | on: A secret call to Andy Grove that may have helped Apple buy NeXT (2018)

Thanks! The fascinating thing is I had been a geophysicist for 10 years before joining NeXT, so all my instincts were to approach this as a scientist. When I see Dr. Fauci speaking the best known truths despite the political winds, it resonates with all I know of science -- speak the truth as best you know it and history will forgive you later.

cmacaskill | 7 years ago | on: A time in 1994 when Steve Jobs got to use a device like an iPhone

A film was made about General Magic that was a pretty big hit at this year's Tribeca Film Festival. There was a showing in a big theater in San Jose last week but it sold out. They have another showing at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View this Friday. Let's hope it gets on Netflix.

cmacaskill | 7 years ago | on: The secret call to Andy Grove that may have helped Apple buy NeXT

Doug Leone, the head of Sequoia, said during a Stanford keynote "if your first two engineers aren't A+, you're screwed, you will never recover."

Steve used to say that great engineers are 10x the average and there are a few who are 100x and crucial to hard projects. He did everything he could to find them.

cmacaskill | 7 years ago | on: The secret call to Andy Grove that may have helped Apple buy NeXT

My opinion after working for him (and writing this story) is he couldn't see obvious things everyone else could see, but he could see things no one else could. I fought with him over stores as did virtually everyone on the board of Apple, and it turned out he was right. Thank God he was stubborn enough to go forward with them. We all said it drove Gateway out of business, yada.

cmacaskill | 7 years ago | on: That time I had Steve Jobs keynote at Unix Expo

Hi, I'm the author. :-) You're very right, he could be incredibly frustrating to work with. I've always thought it was strange that we have so many incredible stories about working with him, but few people tell them. Or if we do, we talk about the good things he did. I was trying to do that too because I liked him and deeply miss him, but wow could he be annoying.
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