
The secret call to Andy Grove that may have helped Apple buy NeXT - GoRudy
https://www.cake.co/conversations/g4CP6zJ/the-secret-call-to-andy-grove-that-may-have-helped-steve-jobs-change-the-world
======
linuxhansl
Hah... I remember I went to a tradeshow - I think it was the CeBit and can't
remember the year, must've been before '93.

NeXT had a booth there and I remember asking the folks if it ran on Intel
processors.

I distinctly the remember all the folks there laughing at me as if that was
the most ridiculous thing they had ever heard and asking me to move right
along.

Edit: Spelling.

~~~
pavlov
NeXTSTEP 3.1 with Intel support shipped in May 1993, so it must have been a
few years before that.

------
adrianmsmith
According to the article, Apple's CEO said they chose NeXT over Be because "In
the end it came down to NeXT already supporting Intel and that was important
to us".

Why was running on Intel important to Apple? Apple didn't use Intel at that
time (Dec 1996), and didn't decide to use Intel until much later (announced
2005)? Whereas BeOS already did run on the CPU platform that Apple did use at
that time?

~~~
cmiles74
I purchased one of the first Macs that ran on a PowerPC processor and I was
profoundly disappointed. Performance was no better than a 68040-based Mac and
it was pretty crashy. As time went on and software was updated that machine
became less crashy but performace was always poor.

I don't have any insider information, but I wouldn't be surprised if Apple
felt like they needed a backup plan in case the PowerPC alliance was
unsuccessful at matching the speed growth of Intel's products. I'd say the G3
was the first PowerPC CPU that impressed me, I think Apple only stuck with
PowerPC for two more generations (the G5).

~~~
Tloewald
I got one of the first PowerPC computers in a lab full of high end spare no
expense PCs and it cranked. If your experience was otherwise, I suspect you
were running software under emulation so the fact it was “no better” was a
borderline miracle. The second gen PowerPC macs were “the fastest 680x0 boxes
ever shipped” (an Apple engineer boasted to me at WWDC and he wasn’t wrong)

The PowerPC allowed Apple to overtake the Pentium and gave it boasting rights
until the failure of the G5.

~~~
cmiles74
Yes, I believe the majority of software and even parts of the OS ran in
emulation. Still, even when they moved a lot of that code native, performance
wasn't amazing. Someone else mentioned that the rest of the hardware may have
been holding these machines back and I could easily believe that.

My opinion: when released, performance didn't meet my expectations and failed
to meet my expectations for another five years (when the G3 was released).
IMHO, I don't believe the Mac was competitive against the PC until the release
of the G4. I could understand why Apple would want to hedge against the
PowerPC.

~~~
bitwize
That's funny, I too remember things differently. As Mac advocates often, and
loudly pointed out, the Mac consistently smoked the PC -- especially at the
only benchmark that mattered, Photoshop filters. It was the 90s and RISC
architecture really was gonna change everything. At the time, Intel was
playing the "megahertz myth" heavily in its marketing, the false belief that
more MHz made for a faster CPU, which just wasn't true when comparing across
different microarchitectures like Pentium and PowerPC.

And of course, as those from the Lost Amiga Civilization recall, it took about
a 500 MHz Windows 9x PC to feel as responsive as a 25 MHz Amiga.

~~~
cmiles74
It's been a long time, my memory is less a collection of data and more a hazy
soup of anecdotes.

I do suspect that Photoshop filters might get some real performance gains out
of AltiVec instructions, maybe my boring developer style workloads weren't
reaping similar benefits from the availability of those instructions.

------
goatherders
Great story. All too often - and particularly when it comes to Apple - there
is a mythology that a company grows based solely on the decisions and
leadership of one individual. The reality is that the vast majority of
critical decisions are rooted in stories like this. Apple, Dell, MS, Sun,
Oracle, etc.

------
asveikau
The funny thing is I remember BeOS running on x86. Wikipedia says the first
release containing that was 1998, which puts it a year or two after the NeXT
acquisition. I wonder if these two facts have something to do with each other.

------
bitL
I can't imagine "doing the right thing" would not end up with immediate
termination in the current "top" corporations running internal surveillance
24/7... Will there be ever a good time for accidental inventions again?

------
empath75
Does anybody know how jobs decided to base next on open source code (bsd)? It
seems sort of antithetical to everything he stood for.

~~~
enf
I don't know the story, but 4.3BSD, which went into NeXTStep, was not open
source. It wasn't until 4.4BSD that BSD was available without a paid Unix
license.

NeXT tried to get away with a closed-source fork of GCC for Objective C, but
eventually backed down under legal threat.

~~~
saagarjha
Which was probably one of the reasons why they ended up writing LLVM.

~~~
davidgay
LLVM was a UIUC project.

~~~
saagarjha
Ok, hiring the project lead early in development and steering the project
towards Apple's goals, then.

~~~
kps
Don't forget RMS's refusal to accept patches to gcc to run on the Mac.

------
vasuvasu
Why'd Steve call Bill about TrueType? Apple invented TrueType and then
licensed it to Microsoft.

------
ballenf
If anyone else doesn't recognize the author, here's a CV:

[https://www.bloomberg.com/research/stocks/private/person.asp...](https://www.bloomberg.com/research/stocks/private/person.asp?personId=229844)

~~~
cdbattags
Is this a paid-for service? I get redirected to
[https://www.bloomberg.com/markets/stocks](https://www.bloomberg.com/markets/stocks)

~~~
ballenf
No, it just opened up for me. Maybe uBlock helped, but here's the relevant
text:

> Mr. Chris MacAskill serves as President of SmugMug, Inc. Mr. MacAskill
> serves as Chief Executive Officer of Cakes Inc. Mr. MacAskill served as
> Chief Executive Officer of Barnes & Noble.com Professional, Technical and
> Business Bookstore since co-founding Fatbrain in June 1995. From September
> 1983 to September 1990, Mr. MacAskill served as Vice President of
> Engineering at Western Atlas International. In September 1981, Mr. MacAskill
> founded PSI, which was acquired by Western Atlas International in October
> 1983. Mr. MacAskill also serves as the Chairman of the Board of Barnes &
> Noble.com Professional, Technical and Business Bookstore. He serves as a
> Director of Cakes Inc. From June 1991 to June 1995, Mr. MacAskill served as
> Director of Developer Relations at NeXT Computer and General Magic. Mr.
> MacAskill received his B.S. in Geophysics from the University of Utah and
> received his M.S. in Geophysics from Stanford University.

Sorry for the formatting, but it's the same on the site.

If there's a better bio somewhere, I didn't see it.

~~~
cmacaskill
Here's my LinkedIn. I dunno why Bloomberg has me as Chairman of bn.com.
Fatbrain.com was bought by them but I was never chairman.
[https://www.linkedin.com/in/chris-
macaskill-970ab1/](https://www.linkedin.com/in/chris-macaskill-970ab1/)

~~~
ballenf
Awesome, thanks! Those automated profiles are indeed often wrong or outdated.

Thanks for all the great stories from the NeXT era -- either you have an
incredible memory or took very good notes during those years. The level of
detail in the stories sets them apart from many you read.

~~~
cmacaskill
Thanks! I pass them by people who were there at the time as much as I can
because sometimes it seems too insane to be real. Did we really think that?
Andy Hertzfeld wasn't at NeXT, but he helped me tell the story better.

Dunno if you saw this one from Wayne Goodrich, who was there and continued to
Apple:

[https://www.cake.co/conversations/jNZlq6j/the-man-who-
produc...](https://www.cake.co/conversations/jNZlq6j/the-man-who-produced-
steve-jobs-keynotes-for-20-years)

------
starshadowx2
I've read a few of these articles from Cake now and I like how it looks but I
find using CTRL+F doesn't work correctly. On this article it doesn't seem to
pick up anything past the second post unless you go to that post, click on it,
and then type in your search.

~~~
rgrove
Hey, I'm the guy who built that. Sorry about the Ctrl+F troubles. That's
happening because we don't actually render all the posts in the conversation;
to improve performance, we only render visible posts and a few posts above and
below the visible region of the page.

Unfortunately browsers don't currently offer any good way for us to make
Ctrl+F work for not-yet-rendered posts in this scenario, so this is a tradeoff
between better performance and worse find-on-page functionality.

I'll give some thought to how to improve this.

~~~
js2
If I disable JavaScript everything is apparently rendered server-side and is
indistinguishable from the page loaded with JavaScript enabled, except that
ctrl-f works as expected. What's the benefit of progressive rendering via
JavaScript here?

~~~
rgrove
With JavaScript disabled, you'll get a server-rendered page that renders up to
25 posts per page and relies on traditional prev/next pagination. When you
scroll to the bottom of the page you'll have to click "Next" to see the next
page of posts.

With JavaScript enabled, you'll get a hybrid or client-rendered page that only
renders the posts that are visible or likely to be visible soon. More posts
will be loaded and rendered seamlessly as you scroll until you reach the end
of the conversation.

The benefit of the JS approach is that we can load and render only the stuff
you're likely to see, which keeps data usage down and performance up. This is
especially nice on mobile devices and slow connections. We think the infinite
pagination is also a nicer experience than manual pagination.

But we also want things to work when JS isn't available, primarily because
that improves SEO. It's a nice bonus that the tiny percentage of people who
prefer to browse with JS disabled can still read Cake.

~~~
js2
Since this conversation has 19 posts, I didn't notice the pagination. There's
less than 20k of actual text with all 19 posts though (which is somewhat sad
since the full page source grabbed via curl is nearly 300k). If this 19 post
conversation is typical, how much are you saving by using client-side
rendering?

As well, how many conversations are more than 25 posts? Looking at your front
page I only see one and it's just 26 posts
([https://www.cake.co/conversations/x97rrxl/why-can-t-apple-
ma...](https://www.cake.co/conversations/x97rrxl/why-can-t-apple-make-great-
laptops-anymore)). Pulling it up, there's just not that much text there across
all 26 parts (less than 30k of actual text).

I don't mean to be grumpy-old-man here, but it seems like you've added a bunch
of complexity and broken ctrl-f for questionable gains.

~~~
rgrove
I know it's not easy to see the justification when looking at the front page,
especially since Cake is still pretty young, but we designed Cake to scale to
conversations with thousands of posts in order to allow for the kinds of long-
lived conversations that continue to attract a trickle of new posts for months
or even years.

Cake also uses client-side routing when JS is enabled. While the initial
pageview might be on the large side since it contains all the data necessary
to render the entire page (albeit gzipped for most clients, so typically much
smaller than the uncompressed sizes you shared), subsequent pageviews will
load a much smaller amount of data.

We also use a few heuristics to avoid serving a server-rendered page if we
know the client can render it more efficiently, which can further reduce the
size of the initial pageview (pretty significantly actually). So you're pretty
much measuring our worst case scenario. :)

~~~
js2
Well, fair enough. I wish you luck getting to those thousand post
conversations. Aesthetically the site design is pleasing and I find it easy to
read. And I hope you can find a solution to ctrl-f. :-)

~~~
rgrove
Thanks!

------
vsdzvgfWE
So now we've seen a few Steve Jobs stores like this, including the one from
John Carmack. A recurring theme is that Steve is such a bonehead that his
underlings have to do things to "manage him." Whether that be doing things
behind his back, withholding information from him, controlling who he meets
and talks to. You also read about people working insane hours to complete
things which probably didn't merit it, just to please steve's whims.

Since there's a cult-of-personality around the guy, I think it's important to
remind everyone that these behaviors are actually signs of poor leadership. If
you work for someone like this, don't! You're better than that.

Not saying Steve Jobs didn't do great things. But let's all agree he
accomplished them in spite of these flaws, not because of them.

~~~
cmacaskill
My opinion after working for him (and writing this story) is he couldn't see
obvious things everyone else could see, but he could see things no one else
could. I fought with him over stores as did virtually everyone on the board of
Apple, and it turned out he was right. Thank God he was stubborn enough to go
forward with them. We all said it drove Gateway out of business, yada.

~~~
sah2ed
> I fought with him over stores as did virtually everyone on the board of
> Apple, and it turned out he was right.

He actually goes into depth about why Apple stores were necessary in a talk he
did at MIT in 1992 [0][1]. Was it that he was not nearly as articulate in
person with his team, as he was in this video?

EDIT: Luckily, the transcript is available. The money quote is:

" ... current distribution channels for the computer industry over the last
several years have lost their ability to create demand. They can fulfill
demand, but they can't create it. If a new product comes out, you're lucky if
you can find somebody at the computer store that even knows how to demo it. So
the more innovative the product is, the more revolutionary it is and not just
an incremental improvement, the more you're stuck [in getting people to try
learn about it enough to try it out]."

Here's a fuller quote:

 _There are some things I can 't talk about here. In addition to that, if you
look at how we sell our computers right now, we have a sales force in the US
of about 130 professionals in the field out selling NeXT computers. They spend
90% of their time selling NeXTSTEP software, and then 10% of their time
selling the hardware._

 _In other words, if they can get the customer to buy into NeXTSTEP, then they
're going to sell the hardware, because right now we have the only hardware it
runs on. So they are out there selling NeXTSTEP right now. And this is what is
required to launch a new innovative product. The current distribution channels
for the computer industry over the last several years have lost their ability
to create demand._

 _They can fulfill demand, but they can 't create it. If a new product comes
out, you're lucky if you can find somebody at the computer store that even
knows how to demo it. So the more innovative the product is, the more
revolutionary it is and not just an incremental improvement, the more you're
stuck. Because the existing channel is only fulfilling demand. Matter of fact,
it's getting so bad, that it's getting wiped out, because there are more
efficient channels to fulfill demand, like the telephone and Federal Express.
So we're seeing the channel become condensed on its way to I think just
telebusiness._

 _So how does one bring innovation to the marketplace? We believe the only way
we know how to do it right now is with the direct sales force, out there in
front of customers showing them the products in the environment of their own
problems, and discussing how those problems can be mated with these
solutions._

[0] [https://infinitehistory.mit.edu/video/steve-jobs-next-
comput...](https://infinitehistory.mit.edu/video/steve-jobs-next-computer-
corp-sloan-distinguished-speaker-series)

[1] [https://youtu.be/Gk-9Fd2mEnI](https://youtu.be/Gk-9Fd2mEnI)

~~~
AceJohnny2
Thanks for this perspective. I wish I could save comments the way I can
favorite posts, so I'm replying as a workaround.

It gives me new perspective on the value and purpose of the Apple Stores,
which I previously viewed as just a luxury shopping experience as window
dressing on the usual consumer electronics buying experience. That's still a
big part of it, but your quote explains the deeper value.

It also explains to me why Microsoft chose to follow suite with their own
Microsoft Stores, although I still wonder why theirs aren't as successful.
It's always amusing and a bit sad to go to the Valley Fair Mall in Santa
Clara, where the Microsoft Store is literally right across from the Apple
Store, but Apple is packed where Microsoft is a ghost town. What secret sauce
are they missing? My thought is that the Microsoft brand is still poison to
the average consumer.

~~~
Spooky23
The thing to remember about the Apple store is that it made world class
computers accessible to the masses.

In the old days, a Thinkpad or Toshiba Tecra were only seen by commercial
accounts and college kids. Your only way to see and touch an expensive ($2k in
98-2000) purchase was some awful bolted down display at CompUSA or BestBuy.
And you only saw shitty consumer product, and were stuck dealing with a
salesman of questionable knowledge looking for a warranty spiff.

The Microsoft vs Apple store thing is easy — they are selling the same dreck,
spiffed up with a few first party products.

~~~
pjmlp
Given that the average salary in many countries is way below 1000 € per month,
I would disagree with "world class computers accessible to the masses".

------
gooftop
Huh.. is that title linkbait? Other than the photo of Andy Grove, I don't see
anything about a call with Andy? (Or I'm really slow today)

(edit: oh I _am_ slow today. Its told in story form, the meeting with Andy
Grove is several posts down on the page).

~~~
GoRudy
It's a multiple part post... read a bit further down

"I closed my office door, picked up the phone, and asked for Andy Grove. I
wanted to know why they weren’t in the conversation. I guessed it was because
we used the Intel i860 chip on one of our graphics boards and it didn’t
impress us. But what were Michael Dell, Bill Gates and Andy going to do about
the Intel 80486 facing the same fate as Motorola’s 68040? I had to know."

~~~
ProAm
It's a super hard article to follow. I felt like I was reading a list of
tweets or something.

