This is a fascinating read, filled with backstory, and accompanied by a series of excellent close-up shots of some old school Macintosh chips, including the infrared mouse chip, the real time clock chip / parameter ram, and an early Apple sound chip.

Best bit:

> Steve would regularly hold “all hands” meetings in the central atrium of the Bandley 3 building. This was a large open tiled area that later also housed the Bosendorfer piano, the BMW motorcycle, and some video games such as W88. There Steve would, among other things, exhort us to work harder. During one exchange someone said to him, “Steve, at some point we need to go home and do our laundry and pay our credit card bills”. He immediately responded saying he would have a washer/dryer installed by Monday if we wanted it, and he didn’t understand the credit card thing because he just deposited a bunch of money (I think he said something like ~$35K) in his credit card at the start of the year and never had to worry about it. The thing was – he appeared dead serious about his responses. Either that or he could deadpan so well that he fooled all of us. Steve would use the all-hand meetings to laud team members he thought were “great”. This would frequently involve very publicly handing out what we called “the grey envelopes”, containing usually some form of monetary remuneration. But Steve had an innate uncanny ability to sense whatever it was that would most motivate a subordinate – be it cash, recognition, flattery, fear – whatever.

Great read.