I was at Claris (subsidiary of Apple at the time, my paychecks were from Apple) up in Portland right before then.
Everyone in the office was really excited about the BeOS (edit, not Steve Jobs, but a new company by former Apple employees). We had a few devices. I remember the demos where they would click on a button to turn off a processor in the GUI while rendering a mandelbrot image, and it would slow to a crawl. It was such a pretty UI.
The story of the entire team for Claris quitting six months before they tried to release Claris 5 was recently documented on HN here:
I was an intern the prior summer, and they called me when the team quit to join under a co-op at University of Washington and try to release the software.
Everyone was operating on a schedule that had bonuses tied to them. We hit the middle milestone and they got their bonuses.
Since I was only a co-op and not really a full fledged employee (even though I was there with the team until 11 pm on lots of Saturday nights) they didn't give me a bonus. They gave me a leather satchel with Claris Works written on it.
It was one of the most awkward moments in my life, the rest of the team looked mortified that we were at a fancy dinner and they were receiving big 5 figure checks and I was getting a recycled piece of swag. That probably speaks to the culture at Apple at the time.
I didn't really care. As a college student at the time, I thought I was as rich as I would ever get making an annualized $32k. After my internship where I was basically playing basketball in between two hours of coding, I thought the exit interview would be "You were the worst intern ever and we hope we never see you again." But, they hired me back and it was a fun time.
Everyone in the office was really excited about the BeOS (edit, not Steve Jobs, but a new company by former Apple employees). We had a few devices. I remember the demos where they would click on a button to turn off a processor in the GUI while rendering a mandelbrot image, and it would slow to a crawl. It was such a pretty UI.
The story of the entire team for Claris quitting six months before they tried to release Claris 5 was recently documented on HN here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32271139
I was an intern the prior summer, and they called me when the team quit to join under a co-op at University of Washington and try to release the software.
Everyone was operating on a schedule that had bonuses tied to them. We hit the middle milestone and they got their bonuses.
Since I was only a co-op and not really a full fledged employee (even though I was there with the team until 11 pm on lots of Saturday nights) they didn't give me a bonus. They gave me a leather satchel with Claris Works written on it.
It was one of the most awkward moments in my life, the rest of the team looked mortified that we were at a fancy dinner and they were receiving big 5 figure checks and I was getting a recycled piece of swag. That probably speaks to the culture at Apple at the time.
I didn't really care. As a college student at the time, I thought I was as rich as I would ever get making an annualized $32k. After my internship where I was basically playing basketball in between two hours of coding, I thought the exit interview would be "You were the worst intern ever and we hope we never see you again." But, they hired me back and it was a fun time.