--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, Bhairitu <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > The platform is a year old or more. Apple won't listen to > experienced people because they have a "not invented here" > attitude (I used to deal with time in my corporate position).
Tell me about it. I worked for Apple (as a contractor) for a year, in the building on the Cupertino "campus" in which they built the Mac. It was still full of video games and popcorn machines, which reeked of history, because they "fueled" the programmers and hardware geeks who built the Mac. It was a strange and fascinating experience for me. I was, after all, living in Palo Alto because the Rama guy had decided that it was the Happening Place, and like any other stupid cultist, I moved there. :-) Which means that I wasn't just viewing my work environment as that place where one goes to pay the bills, but as a real LEARNING ENVIRONMENT, one in which one can make some spiritual progress. The Apple contract was a great gig -- don't get me wrong. I worked as an Instructional Designer (a geek who writes training materials) and a HyperCard programmer (a geek who does with links the same things an 8-year-old can do today). And I got paid well for it. Unlike Apple fanatics, I have pleasant memories of the Sculley era. But it was the MINDSET, man! Most of the people working on either side of me, and ALL of the tech people, had GROWN UP using nothing but Apple computers. They had first used Apple IIs in school (because Jobs wisely gave the schools their computers as a tax writeoff and a way of getting future Apple junkies hooked) who had never -- in their entire lives -- used a different kind of computer. By that time in my career, I had sat at and worked at twenty different kinds of computers. And I had my own ideas about what was good about each of them and what was...uh...not so much good. 128K and no hard drive on the first Mac was...uh...not so much good. Neither were the lame-brained ideas like hardware dongles for software copy protection that Apple execs loved so much. It was as much a cult environment as I have ever been in in my life, and if you listen to Shemp and Willytex, I've been in quite a few of them. :-) Shocking ignorance of the state of the art. Shocking. I spent my evenings after working at Apple hanging with nerds from SRI (Stanford Research Institute), right down the street from where I lived. Now *those* were cool froods. Hangin' ten on the edge of technology and computer science, gettin' PAID for it, and diggin' every minute of it. *They* knew what was hot and what wasn't. And they tolerated me, even though I worked for one of the companies that wasn't hot. :-)
