

Apple's 1978 office floor plan - ryannielsen
http://cdespinosa.posterous.com/plan

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Yopie
It's interesting to see the toilet is in the center of the building. When Jobs
took over Pixar the new campus development was planning to build three
separate buildings: for creatives, for producers and for business people. But
Jobs insisted that they be brought under one roof, with toilets at the centre
— because that’s where everyone meets and talks.

~~~
far33d
It works too. The atrium is a very common chance meeting place, and that's
nearly 100% due to the coffee, conf. rooms, and bathrooms being centrally
situated.

~~~
Empact
This is a also applicable to residential architecture - I lived in several
large student houses in Austin, and the houses whose floorplans required new
arrivals to pass through common spaces (living room, kitchen) on the way to
their private rooms invariably had closer and more general ties than those
that did not.

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jaysonelliot
It's interesting to see that in such an early year, Jobs and Woz's offices are
almost as far apart as they could possibly be in the building.

~~~
orionlogic
It's because Woz always wanted to stay as an engineer, not as a manager.
That's why Jobs and Markkula is one place while Woz near the software team.

~~~
jaysonelliot
You could also say, conversely, that Jobs placed himself next to Markkula
instead of Woz, finding it more important to sit next to the VP of marketing
than the chief engineer.

I'm not making any judgements on the way they organized the physical space in
the office. It clearly worked, after all, Apple in 1978 was on the precipice
of an unprecedented success.

I'm just interested in the way that the physical location of people in an
office affects the work that is done there. I wonder, would the early history
of Apple had been any different if Jobs and Woz had sat right next to each
other every day?

How many startups today seat the technical and business co-founders next to
one another, versus those that sit far apart, and how does that change the
personalities of those companies?

~~~
jstevens85
According to Isaacson's biography, it was Markkula who insisted that Jobs be
heavily involved in the non-engineering areas of the company.

~~~
bluekeybox
According to the same book, Wozniak specifically insisted at some point that
he would prefer to be treated as an engineer and not be involved with high-
level management.

One could also say it would be interesting how things might have turned out if
Wozniak was more ambitious.

~~~
defen
On the subject of counterfactuals, I recently finished reading Jobs' bio and
Woz's autobiography and found myself contemplating how their lives would have
turned out if they hadn't met each other.

It seems easy to project the most likely outcome for Woz if he hadn't met Jobs
- he'd probably still be an engineer at HP (assuming he didn't get laid off by
one of their disastrous CEOs), his Apple ][ board a forgotten relic sitting in
his garage. Less likely but still possible is that someone else would have
helped him commercialize it, but there never would have been a Macintosh as we
know it and the company would have ended up like Commodore, Tandy, and Atari.

With Jobs, though, it's much more difficult to imagine where he'd have ended
up without Woz. I could see him pushing Atari into PCs (but Bushnell didn't
want the Apple ][, so that seems unlikely), or he could have been a religious
leader, or a burned-out hippie living in Humboldt County, or a tyrannical
Silicon Valley middle manager, or any number of other things.

~~~
erikpukinskis
Here's a random theory:

They would've met each other a little later, and done the same thing. Jobs and
Wozniak orbited each other a few times before they really connected
professionally. If you change one little thing so they wouldn'tve met each
other, they would've met each other some other way.

And if you change enough things so that they NEVER would've met each other,
you'dve changed enough things that they wouldn't really be Steve Jobs and Woz
anymore.

~~~
mseebach
We're doing counter-factuals. So what if it's not "never met", but "never went
into to business together". Is it really hard to believe that fate could have
conspired in such a way that Woz and Jobs didn't become business partners? Was
the universe really curved in such a way to inevitably push Woz and Jobs to
start Apple together?

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dsr_
Sign of the times: three secretary/receptionists for a 20 person company. I
suspect they were the only female employees, too.

~~~
xxx__xxx
Not true ( I don't think.) I know Susan Kare designed the icons, and she was
working for Apple around the time of the Macintosh.

~~~
jaysonelliot
dsr_ 1 is correct. On that floor plan, at least, the only women are
secretaries or receptionists.

Susan Kare desiged the icons, as you say, but that was years later. In 1978,
the Apple ][ was still only a year old itself.

The Macintosh isn't really that early in Apple history, for those of us who
grew up with Apple ][s.

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ethank
My grandparents had an Advent when I was a kid. That thing probably spat out
more radiation than I ever would care to research.

It was a beautiful beast though and could heat a room.

~~~
ChrisCooper
Youngen here: Might I ask what an Advent is? It's a hard thing to Google.

~~~
ethank
An Advent was a three tube projection system. It had a triangular arrangement
of the CRT's, one red, one green, one blue. You had to focus and align them
yourself, but with a good screen you could get a pretty good looking 60"
television. It required a dark room.

Since it sat in the middle of the floor, it was subject to kids bumping into
it (in my grandparents home anyhow) and also then subject to grandfathers
shouting.

He later replaced it with a front projection set that bounced the CRT
projectors off a mirror onto a screen. It was a beast.

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johnyzee
Funny how everyone is mentioned by their first name except Steve and Woz.

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sfg
It would be a bit confusing to have two 'Steve' offices.

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umjames
I also think it's interesting that with Jobs and Woz's offices being across
the building from each other, that forces them to walk past everyone else to
talk to each other in person. That has to make it easier for founders and
executives to keep track of how things are going in the trenches. That could
also make employees feel that management doesn't consider themselves "above"
them.

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jonerickson
Tennis Courts!

~~~
j-dev
Maybe it was ping-pong table "courts".

~~~
pingswept
From the article:

"The building had four quadrants: Marketing/Admin, Engineering, Manufacturing,
and a large empty space that we did not know what to do with when we moved in.
That’s why it’s labeled 'Tennis courts?'"

