> I left Apple with Marc Porat and Andy Hertzfeld to co-found General Magic and help to invent the personal communicator.

It’s always wild to me how many of the people that are the beginnings of these large prodigy companies and the connection to other powerful rich people. You look up some of these people and see the relationships and it’s wild. Like the name Porat rang a bell so I look up Marc and oh? That’s Ruth Porat’s brother. The ex CFO of Morgan Stanley and current CIO and president of Google. Is it truly talent that drives these leaders to the top of these organizations or is it connections to other crazy powerful people? Maybe both.

Sometimes I feel like I’m over here building cool stuff with talent galore but nothing ever gets what it needs financially. It’d be nice to know these types of people I suppose

What a wonderful read.

I find myself pining for a lot of the "old days" when anything seemed possible and it was open and exciting. You could DO surprisingly, not a lot, but everything still felt possible.

Now everything seems trapped in advertising dominated closed box. Login and live in this limited little space...

The internet is still there, I can still put up a site that isn't covered with ads. I wish I could surf just that internet and so on.

I'm always blown away by the vision behind stuff like HyperCard. It was all about giving non-techies the keys to the kingdom.

But looking at today's tech landscape, with its walled gardens and app stores, I can't help but feel we've gone backwards.

Surprised he was only at Apple for 12 years. A wild ride, I'm sure.

When I moved out to "the Valley" in 1995, the apartment I picked out turned out to be right next to General Magic (on Mary Ave.).

I knew it as a "spin off" of Apple but at the time did not know the luminaries that were there. It was just a cute rabbit in a hat logo — lit up when I got home late and was turning off to my apartment.

> Inspired by a mind-expanding LSD journey in 1985, I designed the HyperCard authoring system that enabled non-programmers to make their own interactive media.

Watching some YouTube about the Beatles and, of course, their LSD trips. More recently the history of Robert Crumb — on his big acid trip he more or less created a large part of his stable of comic characters.

Somewhere along the way, someone said that LSD alters your mind permanently....

It caused me to wonder if we'll never get the genius of Beatles music, Crumb art without the artist taking something conscious-altering like LSD. Of course then I have to consider all the artists before LSD was "invented" — the Edvard Munch's, T.S. Eliot's, William Blake's, etc.

(Tried acid once in college. That was enough of that.)

I was wondering recently about where the original sin of “light mode” came from. Guess it was him!

> The Apple II displayed white text on a black background. I argued that to do graphics properly we had to switch to a white background like paper. It works fine to invert text when printing, but it would not work for a photo to be printed in negative. The Lisa hardware team complained the screen would flicker too much, and they would need faster refresh with more expensive RAM to prevent smearing when scrolling. Steve listened to all the pros and cons then sided with a white background for the sake of graphics.

"In 1990, with John Sculley's blessing, I left Apple with Marc Porat and Andy Hertzfeld to co-found General Magic and help to invent the personal communicator."

Sculley really wasn't the right person to lead Apple. He should have been begging them to do it in-house.

> my code accounted for almost two thirds of the original Macintosh ROM

Respect. RIP.

Legend. I still remember first putting my hands on a Mac, and the joy of computing that ensued in high school. I could get lost in the computer for days. Thank you, Bill.

> Inspired by a mind-expanding LSD journey in 1985, I designed the HyperCard authoring system that enabled non-programmers to make their own interactive media.

I'm interested in how to do "good" journeys vs non-good ones...

"I worked at Apple for 12 years, making tools to empower creative people [...]"

I think this was the hook that got many of us to admire Apple as a company (and more broadly, to get excited about computing as a discipline/industry). For a long time, that was arguably (one of) their primary mission.

I suspect to what extent it could still be considered to be the case today would be subject to much debate.

If the two year lag is still true, the state of the SwiftUI SDK is even more ridiculous.

It feels a bit like he wrote his own obituary with this.

Just had a flashback to the thunk sound of turning on Apple Lisa!

Grateful for all his work.

> It was exciting working at Apple, knowing that whatever we invented would be used by millions of people.

I admit it is exciting to make something you truly believe is good and helpful.

And that it's disappointing when that thing isn't used by anyone.

It's even worse when it turns out it's just not that useful.

But in the end, everything is replaced anyway. So I guess it's fine.