> 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
You can be a superstar and still not succeed alone if you don't have other superstars around you. They are so successful because they know each other. And survivorship bias guarantees that all those who didn't make it are unknown, or not mentioned.
This is the role of successful companies like this, just like top universities. They help create the connection between people with huge potential (or money), superstars, and amplify it.
Remember those pictures will all the famous 20th century geniuses in one place. They each got to reach the peak by building a new step on top of someone else's previous step, and so on. Eventually they all climbed the same ladder together. They were like a talent packed sports team dominating the sports for many seasons. It's not a coincidence they're in the same picture.
The General Magic movie/document (2018) is amazing and underrated. Always getting teardrops while watching it (watched it ~3 times). A true old-school startup story. And the soundtrack is also beautiful.
Oh wow, that must have been magical. Have you seen "Halt and Catch Fire"? These two masterpieces are my top 2 watchings. Both so amazing but generally unknown/underrated.
Access to capital/other's talent and/or access to your market (users) is the primary competitive advantage among those talented enough to design and build a product.
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 around the age these guys were during this story. I feel the exact opposite way. I spent middle/high school feeling similarly, only pining for the 2000s ("wow, with smartphones and the internet the industry was wide open with opportunity, anything was possible. Now it seems like everything's been done and giants rule the world"). However, the GenAI boom completely changed my mind. I feel like we're the most lucky of all the generations of engineers so far considering how many crazy things are now possible with just a few determined individuals.
It's really hard to extract computing from the capitalistic, consumerist cradle within which it was born.
Every other human creative practice and media (poetry, theater, writing, music, painting, etc) have existed in a wide variety of cultures, societies, and economic contexts.
But computing has never existed outside of the immensely expensive and complex factories & supply chains required to produce computing components; and corporations producing software and selling it to other corporations, or to the large consumer class with disposable income that industrialization created.
In that sense the momentum of computing has always been in favor of the corporations manufacturing the computers dictating what can be done with them. We've been lucky to have had a few blips like the free software movement here and there (and the outsized effect they've had on the industry speaks to how much value there is to be found there), but the hard reality that's hard to fight is that if you control the chip factories, you control what can be done with the chips - Apple being the strongest example of this.
We're in dire need of movements pushing back against that. To name one, I'm a big fan of the uxn approach, which is to write software for a lightweight virtual machine that can run on the cheap, abundant, less/non locked down chips of yesteryear that will probably still be available and understandable a century from now.
you can only blame capitalism so much for the unpopularity of hypercardlike things vs instagram/facebook/twitter etc
on some level it is just human nature to want to consume than create. just is. its not great but lets not act like people havent tried to make creative new platforms for self expression and software creation and they all kinda failed
> is just human nature to want to consume than create
That may be true.
But it doesn't really explain why the tools for simple popular creation are not there. There are a lot of people in the world who would use them, even if its only 1%.
Part of the problem trying to isolate computing is that it's fundamentally material. Even cloud resources are a flimsy abstraction over a more complex business model. That materialism is part of the issue, too. You can't ever escape the churn, bit rot gets your drives and Hetzner doesn't sell a lifetime plan. If you're not computing for the short-term, you're arguably wasting your time.
I'm not against the idea of a disasterproof runtime, but you're not "pushing back" against the consumerist machine by outlasting it. When high-quality software becomes inaccessible to support some sort of longtermist runtime, low-quality software everywhere sees a rise in popularity.
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.)
All traditional practices of use of psychedelic substances emphasize the importance of preparation, having the right state of mind, right stimuli / environment, and sitters in un-altered state of mind nearby.
LSD is not known to permanently alter brain; for that you need psilocybin.
If you understand that LSD doesn’t permanently alter the brain, why do you think PY “permanently” alters the brain? It does alter the brain (like LSD; see the plethora of research on PY altering neurogenesis and functional connectivity [0]), I’m unsure of what you mean by “permanent”.
It permanently changed my buddy's brain when we were in college doing it. He thought he was talkng to God and blew his brains out. Not worth it for me now.
I know that there absolutely are people who shouldn’t take it based on their mindset and underplaying predispositions.
There is certainly a point to be made about psychoactive (and other) drugs inducing episodes of psychosis. This is something on the uptick with marijuana legalization in the US [0].
And I think am plainly wrong about my understanding of these effects not being “permanent”. I suppose I was thinking about this too much from a “neurotypical” angle, and not from the angle of how substances can alter the neurological trajectory of people with predisposed sensitivity.
AFAICT there exists no conclusive biomedical evidence of permanent physiological effects of LSD. This may mean we're just not looking hard enough, but there's no certainty.
> 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...
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.
I have been thinking about this more, about how I spent hours and days exploring everything of my family’s new Mac SE, and then HyperCard, and creating with it.
There is an aspect of creativity that comes from being inspired, taking off from others’ ideas.
But there is also an aspect of creativity that’s more ascetic, and requires being bored—when there’s nothing else to do, turn the computer into a toy, to play with it, so you are not bored. And I am increasingly of the opinion getting to that state, at least for me, requires turning off the internet.
"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.
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.
I don't get it. I grew up with green and amber CRTs and I don't miss those days at all. What makes it mean so much, to you kids who never knew those days to miss?
Looks cooler, and you tell yourself that you're saving your eyes as you sit in your blackout-curtained hacker den... but the pitch black hacker den is also part of the desired aesthetic.
Real Hackers didn't use rgb dweeb keyboards though
Oh, I see. In my day we smoked cigarettes, compared with which RGB keyboards seem like a pretty clean win. Literally a clean win; the main reason for keeping the lights off and the windows covered, as I recall it, was to hide all the filth that constantly accumulates in such an environment. Not to say I don't look back on it fondly, but when I actually look back on the photos I still have of how I lived then, it sort of makes my teeth itch, if you know what I mean.
> I admit it is exciting to make something you truly believe is good and helpful.
I want to double down on this - I’m lucky enough to have worked places where I truly believed the world would be a better place if we “won,” and not on the margins, and it really, really makes a difference in quality of life. I’ve worked at other places, too, and the cognitive drag of knowing that your skills and efforts - your ability to change the world - is at best being wasted is something you don’t truly feel until it’s gone.
I've wasted countless years on pursuits I thought were good but later determined to have been bad, and therefore deeply regretted. I don't wish this on anyone.
I've also wasted countless years on pursuits I still think were good but overall never truly helped make the world better. This was less bad and seems inevitable.
Yeah I got a couple places on my resume I don’t like to talk about anymore. Turns out an awful lot of things are bad for the world in the wrong hands.
Still, if I’m going to spend a third of my life on something - and, more importantly, if I’m going to be responsible for my efforts contributing to something - I’d prefer it be something I find value in. I’ll take the risk of being wrong - although I’m certainly looking at the world through less rose-tinted glasses than I used to.
I agree, and I'm convinced selling my own software is the only way I can do that. At least for me. I just need to put it all together now, all the skillsets I've honed for decades, and the insight I might have gleaned from what people need.
I mean, as long as the average number of Apple devices per person is > 2 (which seems pretty likely, I have three on me right now), that’s still technically in the millions range.
> 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
You can be a superstar and still not succeed alone if you don't have other superstars around you. They are so successful because they know each other. And survivorship bias guarantees that all those who didn't make it are unknown, or not mentioned.
This is the role of successful companies like this, just like top universities. They help create the connection between people with huge potential (or money), superstars, and amplify it.
Remember those pictures will all the famous 20th century geniuses in one place. They each got to reach the peak by building a new step on top of someone else's previous step, and so on. Eventually they all climbed the same ladder together. They were like a talent packed sports team dominating the sports for many seasons. It's not a coincidence they're in the same picture.
The General Magic movie/document (2018) is amazing and underrated. Always getting teardrops while watching it (watched it ~3 times). A true old-school startup story. And the soundtrack is also beautiful.
I totally agree. I watched it 3 times as well. One in London with a panel of the general magic employees. It was an amazing experience
Oh wow, that must have been magical. Have you seen "Halt and Catch Fire"? These two masterpieces are my top 2 watchings. Both so amazing but generally unknown/underrated.
Access to capital/other's talent and/or access to your market (users) is the primary competitive advantage among those talented enough to design and build a product.
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 around the age these guys were during this story. I feel the exact opposite way. I spent middle/high school feeling similarly, only pining for the 2000s ("wow, with smartphones and the internet the industry was wide open with opportunity, anything was possible. Now it seems like everything's been done and giants rule the world"). However, the GenAI boom completely changed my mind. I feel like we're the most lucky of all the generations of engineers so far considering how many crazy things are now possible with just a few determined individuals.
https://kagi.com/smallweb
> I wish I could surf just that internet and so on.
You just solved it for me.
I've been wondering what to use 90s.dev for.
That's it.
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.
Yeah, Hypercard or MacPaint (really a demo for Quickdraw). Had he done only one of those two he would still rank as a genius.
Apparently we need to be doing more LSD
It's really hard to extract computing from the capitalistic, consumerist cradle within which it was born.
Every other human creative practice and media (poetry, theater, writing, music, painting, etc) have existed in a wide variety of cultures, societies, and economic contexts.
But computing has never existed outside of the immensely expensive and complex factories & supply chains required to produce computing components; and corporations producing software and selling it to other corporations, or to the large consumer class with disposable income that industrialization created.
In that sense the momentum of computing has always been in favor of the corporations manufacturing the computers dictating what can be done with them. We've been lucky to have had a few blips like the free software movement here and there (and the outsized effect they've had on the industry speaks to how much value there is to be found there), but the hard reality that's hard to fight is that if you control the chip factories, you control what can be done with the chips - Apple being the strongest example of this.
We're in dire need of movements pushing back against that. To name one, I'm a big fan of the uxn approach, which is to write software for a lightweight virtual machine that can run on the cheap, abundant, less/non locked down chips of yesteryear that will probably still be available and understandable a century from now.
you can only blame capitalism so much for the unpopularity of hypercardlike things vs instagram/facebook/twitter etc
on some level it is just human nature to want to consume than create. just is. its not great but lets not act like people havent tried to make creative new platforms for self expression and software creation and they all kinda failed
> is just human nature to want to consume than create
That may be true.
But it doesn't really explain why the tools for simple popular creation are not there. There are a lot of people in the world who would use them, even if its only 1%.
Part of the problem trying to isolate computing is that it's fundamentally material. Even cloud resources are a flimsy abstraction over a more complex business model. That materialism is part of the issue, too. You can't ever escape the churn, bit rot gets your drives and Hetzner doesn't sell a lifetime plan. If you're not computing for the short-term, you're arguably wasting your time.
I'm not against the idea of a disasterproof runtime, but you're not "pushing back" against the consumerist machine by outlasting it. When high-quality software becomes inaccessible to support some sort of longtermist runtime, low-quality software everywhere sees a rise in popularity.
What's worse, in context here, is Apple's distinguished primary role in bringing this about.
Idk 2003-2009 was very much the days of the sort of malware and spyware that showed developers in a company didn’t deserve rights anymore
I totally agree
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.
a wild ride definitely!
> 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.)
All traditional practices of use of psychedelic substances emphasize the importance of preparation, having the right state of mind, right stimuli / environment, and sitters in un-altered state of mind nearby.
LSD is not known to permanently alter brain; for that you need psilocybin.
You had me up until your last clause…
If you understand that LSD doesn’t permanently alter the brain, why do you think PY “permanently” alters the brain? It does alter the brain (like LSD; see the plethora of research on PY altering neurogenesis and functional connectivity [0]), I’m unsure of what you mean by “permanent”.
[0] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07624-5
It permanently changed my buddy's brain when we were in college doing it. He thought he was talkng to God and blew his brains out. Not worth it for me now.
I’m sorry to hear that.
I know that there absolutely are people who shouldn’t take it based on their mindset and underplaying predispositions.
There is certainly a point to be made about psychoactive (and other) drugs inducing episodes of psychosis. This is something on the uptick with marijuana legalization in the US [0].
And I think am plainly wrong about my understanding of these effects not being “permanent”. I suppose I was thinking about this too much from a “neurotypical” angle, and not from the angle of how substances can alter the neurological trajectory of people with predisposed sensitivity.
[0] https://www.nbcnews.com/health/mental-health/marijuana-induc...
AFAICT there exists no conclusive biomedical evidence of permanent physiological effects of LSD. This may mean we're just not looking hard enough, but there's no certainty.
For psilocybin, there is plenty, e.g.: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8376772/
First, you’re cutting an in vitro study. Second, “permanent” is a serious claim that bears a large burden of proof.
I think defining “permanent” would first be useful. The brain is extremely plastic.
Beyond that, OP comment was referring to psychosis effects. See his comment below.
Survivorship bias? Plenty of brilliant people smoked tobacco. I didn't think more smoking will produce more brilliance.
Neither does smoking alter your conscioudness in any remarkable way further than irritability or cravings due to whitdrawal symtpom
at least acid doesnt make sense to consume daily because it stops having the same effects the more you consume it
Pretty ancient practice probably. See the history of drug use in cultures and spirituality/art. Soma, etc.
> 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...
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.
I had that feeling too.
How do we get it back?
How do we share it with others?
There has to be a way.
I am looking forward to trying to make use of a Raspberry Pi 5 as much as is feasible once I get a small tablet shell for mine.
If it works out well, I'm going to see about getting a Wacom One display tablet with touch.
> How do we get it back?
Time machine.
> How do we share it with others?
Just like the church, capture them in their most formative years.
No. There has to be a way.
I have been thinking about this more, about how I spent hours and days exploring everything of my family’s new Mac SE, and then HyperCard, and creating with it.
There is an aspect of creativity that comes from being inspired, taking off from others’ ideas.
But there is also an aspect of creativity that’s more ascetic, and requires being bored—when there’s nothing else to do, turn the computer into a toy, to play with it, so you are not bored. And I am increasingly of the opinion getting to that state, at least for me, requires turning off the internet.
100% agree, you must be bored to be inspired.
I think I know how to recapture that "whole new world" feeling and share it.
It's on the tip of my tongue, and has been for a while.
But I can't fully see it yet. I need to go offline for a while. You're right.
Yeah, I think it was MacPaint actually.
"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.
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.
“Sin” of being readable
The real sin is having both.
I don't get it. I grew up with green and amber CRTs and I don't miss those days at all. What makes it mean so much, to you kids who never knew those days to miss?
Looks cooler, and you tell yourself that you're saving your eyes as you sit in your blackout-curtained hacker den... but the pitch black hacker den is also part of the desired aesthetic.
Real Hackers didn't use rgb dweeb keyboards though
Oh, I see. In my day we smoked cigarettes, compared with which RGB keyboards seem like a pretty clean win. Literally a clean win; the main reason for keeping the lights off and the windows covered, as I recall it, was to hide all the filth that constantly accumulates in such an environment. Not to say I don't look back on it fondly, but when I actually look back on the photos I still have of how I lived then, it sort of makes my teeth itch, if you know what I mean.
It feels a bit like he wrote his own obituary with this.
Maybe he did. We are all going to die. And if you have an interesting story (of interest to many) it's good to share it.
I find myself, as I get older, telling stories that have a similar perspective flow. It happens.
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.
> I admit it is exciting to make something you truly believe is good and helpful.
It's sad when management takes that work and locks it down, and puts it in a walled garden.
> I admit it is exciting to make something you truly believe is good and helpful.
I want to double down on this - I’m lucky enough to have worked places where I truly believed the world would be a better place if we “won,” and not on the margins, and it really, really makes a difference in quality of life. I’ve worked at other places, too, and the cognitive drag of knowing that your skills and efforts - your ability to change the world - is at best being wasted is something you don’t truly feel until it’s gone.
I've wasted countless years on pursuits I thought were good but later determined to have been bad, and therefore deeply regretted. I don't wish this on anyone.
I've also wasted countless years on pursuits I still think were good but overall never truly helped make the world better. This was less bad and seems inevitable.
Yeah I got a couple places on my resume I don’t like to talk about anymore. Turns out an awful lot of things are bad for the world in the wrong hands.
Still, if I’m going to spend a third of my life on something - and, more importantly, if I’m going to be responsible for my efforts contributing to something - I’d prefer it be something I find value in. I’ll take the risk of being wrong - although I’m certainly looking at the world through less rose-tinted glasses than I used to.
I agree, and I'm convinced selling my own software is the only way I can do that. At least for me. I just need to put it all together now, all the skillsets I've honed for decades, and the insight I might have gleaned from what people need.
> whatever we invented would be used by millions of people
Two billion active Apple devices in 2025.
I was reflecting on his thoughts and my life's work.
I mean, as long as the average number of Apple devices per person is > 2 (which seems pretty likely, I have three on me right now), that’s still technically in the millions range.