History

Brad Nash, GQ:

First built as prototypes for Apple employees in the early ’90s, they obviously drew on the most prolific training shoe styles of the time, and have such become a cult relic from the sneaker scene of that time.

Follow the link, check out the pic. These kicks scream ’90s, early Apple. Paging Matthew Panzarino.

UPDATE: Here’s a link to the auction itself. Looks like the sale was in AUD, not USD. Headline updated. [H/T AppleInsider’s Mike Wuerthele]

Stumbled on this Cake post over the weekend, wherein Cake co-founder Chris MacAskill talks about setting up a call with Intel CEO Andy Grove behind Steve Jobs’ back.

A tiny taste:

I got Andy’s assistant on the phone. His assistants were executives-in-training who spent 2 years mentoring under Andy. I explained that if Steve heard about this call I would be fired. I justified the call by saying sometimes history has shown you have to do the right thing and keep it secret from Steve until later, as the Mac team famously did when they hid a Sony engineer in the Apple building so Steve wouldn’t find out.

I said I had no idea what Steve’s relationship with Andy was. For all I knew, Steve thought Intel chips were shit (the word Steve would have used). But I knew Steve liked people at the top of their fields who admired and mentored him. Could I meet with Andy and explain our situation so Andy could call Steve?

Great read. If you’ve got some time on your hands.

The so-called “Steve Jobs auction” opens for bidding on March 5th and includes a fully functional Apple-1 computer, a Steve Jobs signed Macintosh PowerBook, some signed contracts, and a bunch of other interesting items.

Take a look, treat yourself.

Before you dive into Sam Henri Gold’s fantastic Unofficial Apple Archive (it’s a rabbit hole), take a minute to read Michael Steeber’s 9to5Mac introductory post.

Been watching this archive take shape over the years, have posted to it a few times as it’s evolved, glad to see the front door open.

Back in the day, Apple was beleaguered, and made the decision to acquire an OS from outside the company to come in and save the day, pave a new path for Apple.

The choice was narrowed down to, of course, Steve Jobs and NeXT, and a little known company called Be, Inc, with an OS called BeOS. The company was founded by long-time Apple exec Jean-Louis Gassée.

The linked article tells a bit of the Be side of the story.

Interesting post from John Gruber about the Consumer Electronics Show being all about concepts, and most frequently, concepts that will never become products.

But where it really hit home for me was when John turned to Apple and, more specifically, this anecdote from Lev Grossman’s Time Magazine profile of Steve Jobs from 2005:

“You know how you see a show car, and it’s really cool, and then four years later you see the production car, and it sucks? And you go, What happened? They had it! They had it in the palm of their hands! They grabbed defeat from the jaws of victory!”

And:

When Jobs took up his present position at Apple in 1997, that’s the situation he found. He and Jonathan Ive, head of design, came up with the original iMac, a candy-colored computer merged with a cathode-ray tube that, at the time, looked like nothing anybody had seen outside of a Jetsons cartoon. “Sure enough,” Jobs recalls, “when we took it to the engineers, they said, ‘Oh.’ And they came up with 38 reasons. And I said, ‘No, no, we’re doing this.’ And they said, ‘Well, why?’ And I said, ‘Because I’m the CEO, and I think it can be done.’ And so they kind of begrudgingly did it. But then it was a big hit.”

Great read, all the way through.

Incredible piece of work, a real labor of love, pulled together by Benjamin Mayo for 9to5Mac.

Follow the headline link, scroll through the headlines that defined Apple’s past decade. Wave after wave of Apple nostalgia.

Amazing how an autograph can transform the value of a piece of memorabilia. Interestingly, if the memorabilia itself is valuable, a signature can actually lower the price.

Some good pics in the post.

Mike Judge, creator of Silicon Valley and a bunch of other shows, in a New York Post interview:

Steve Jobs didn’t build anything. The fact that an iPhone right now is what a Cray supercomputer was in 1993, and it’s all due to some hardware innovations.

This is a tiny nugget from an interesting interview. At its core, the comment is that Steve Jobs gets the credit for what was built by many other people, many of whom got little credit/publicity.

I’ve heard this argument countless times, applied to Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, etc. While there is truth to the statement that the hands that formed the iPhone, that designed all the prototypes, came up with the software keyboard and proposed those countless innovations that you hold in your hand did not belong to Steve Jobs, it is thoughtless to discount Steve’s role in changing the world.

[VIDEO] Came across a video on Twitter, a gif someone made of Steve Jobs talking about asking for help.

I did a bit of digging, found that the clip was from a documentary pulled together back in the day by the Santa Clara Valley Historical Association.

Here are two clips from the documentary that really speak to me (both embedded in main Loop post). They are very short and both worth watching.

At the core, both messages are about not being afraid to poke life, to try things. When I was young, I had a vision of writing a book on Mac programming. The information I needed just wasn’t available, everyone was just figuring it out by themselves, with clues in the still forming technical documentation from Apple.

I’d never written a book, but I did some detective work, found a publisher (Addison-Wesley) who published technical books, started making phone calls. After a lot of dead ends, I finally found a human being who could see what I saw, was willing to take a chance on me.

And that act changed my life. Watch the videos, great messages in both.

Fascinating interview. A slice of history, for sure, but my favorite bits of this read are when Steve explains concepts. He was so very good at translating the abstract into something you could wrap your head around.

Wonderful read.