SoA: After AMT you worked on QuickTime: what did you contribute?

DC: I initially worked on QT 3.0. I helped write many of the standard QuickTime effects that were introduced in the 3.0 release, as well as helping engineer some of the core QuickTime event handling code. I also got involved with the QuickTime interactive project (QTi) which was designed to be the next generation of QuickTime architecture. It was interesting stuff, but I was still more interested in applications, especially multimedia authoring apps. After 3.0 was released, I moved over to manage the QuickTime applications team which was responsible for the QuickTime Player and PictureViewer applications as well as HyperCard – more about HyperCard below.

We re-architected QTPlayer during my time on the team, making it a much more robust piece of software. We also introduced the infamous new UI in QuickTime 4.0. This was the first use of the “brushed metal” look in an Apple product – a UI that is still used in Mac OS X today. The UI team and I worked closely with Steve Jobs to design that new UI, which was quite an experience.

After the launch of QuickTime 4.0, I decided I wanted to go back to working as an engineer for a while. I was interested in the Java programming language, which was just gaining popularity at the time. I joined the Java team working on the first release of the Apple JVM for Mac OS X, which was approaching its first beta release. I got to work on the Java event handling system and contributed to the Mac OS X Carbon event handling stack. I also implemented the JVM integration for Microsoft’s first Internet Explorer release for Mac OS X . This was particularly interesting as it involved me working at Microsoft for three months while I implemented the JVM hooks in their code. It was strange being an Apple employee working on Microsoft source code inside the Microsoft engineering labs in Mountain View!

By this time of course, Steve Jobs had returned to Apple and the company was beginning its renaissance with the launch of the iMacs and Mac OS X. I had been at Apple for four years and wanted to move on. I was also living in San Francisco and feeling the effects of three hours of commuting to Cupertino every day. I left Apple and joined the first of a string of startups in San Francisco.

SoA: How was working on Hypercard? What was its role in the Apple of the late Nineties?

DC: Apple was very ambivalent about HyperCard in the late 90s.

To be honest, I don’t think many in the company fully understood it or its potential. HyperCard had been bounced over to Claris then moved back to Apple. When I managed the engineering team, we were working on HyperCard 3.0 which was going to be a ground-up rewrite. We were reimplementing the code in C++ and making it a tool to author interactive QuickTime movies. This would have allowed HyperCard stacks to run anywhere QuickTIme was available – meaning on Microsoft Windows and on websites. HyperCard’s great strength was it was allowed non-programmers to create complex, rich applications. The potential of having these users creating their applications as QuickTIme movies was very exciting. Unfortunately, our management, and in particular Steve Jobs, didn’t see the potential, and in late 1998 the HyperCard project was canceled and the team dispersed.

SoA: How was Apple after the return of Steve Jobs?

DC: Steve’s return to Apple was extraordinary. He transformed the company and I have no doubt at all that he saved it. Apple was struggling and losing a lot of money. Morale within the company was very low and the employees had lost trust in the executive management. Apple had built its reputation as a consumer-focused company and seemed to have lost its way, it no longer seemed to care about consumers, but hadn’t found a new group of users who wanted its products.

Steve’s return electrified the company, in part because of his reputation as the founder of the company, and in part because he immediately took charge and started to transform Apple back into a consumer-focused company. Steve’s great talent is his extraordinary intuition for creating products that consumers love. He understands how to integrate form and function into truly compelling products – the iMac, the iPod, the iPhone and Mac OS X are all examples of this.

He also knows that for a company to succeed it must focus on a vision and execute ruthlessly. He saw an Apple that had hundreds of products with no clear unifying theme. He quickly set about removing projects that didn’t align with his vision of what Apple should be. He created new projects – most notably the iMac – that clearly stated who Apple’s customers were and what the company would do. Within a year he had transformed the company, both financially and as an organization. it was fun and exciting to work for Apple again. When you told family and friends you worked there suddenly the questions went from “Apple who?” to great interest in what was going on and what was coming next.

The flipside of Steve’s genius is he’s a painful boss to work for. His standards are extraordinary and he expects nothing but the absolute best from those working with him. He drove himself and the company extremely hard. We needed it, but it also burnt out a lot of good people.

SoA: How would you sum up the years you spent working for Apple?

DC: It was four years of the most exhilarating and frustrating times. Seeing Steve turn Apple around was incredible. I learned so much about software, people and organizations during my time there. I wouldn’t trade that experience in for anything. On the other hand, I don’t think I’d do it again.

SoA: Is there any particularly funny or weird story you were part of or you witnessed at Infinite Loop?

DC: Yes, lots, most of which I couldn’t repeat. There was the time a group of us tried to sell Steve on eBay. On another occasion a colleague of mine leaked some remarks Steve had made at an internal meeting to the press, then got called into Steve’s office for a “discussion” which was a pretty traumatic experience for her. But my favorite story is this: Infinite Loop is a series of buildings that surround a very large and pleasant grassed area. There were benches and pathways through this area where you often saw small groups gathering to discuss matters or play frisbee. One day I was walking across to the cafe when I saw the familiar site of Steve on one of the benches. He was deep in conversation with a rather small and disheveled looking man. I knew Steve as he was working on the QuickTime UI project at the time, so I said “hi” as I walked past. Steve said “hi” back and the man he was with looked and and said “hi” too. It was, of course, Bill Gates. I still don’t know what plans the two of them were hatching, but I’m sure it changed the world.

SoA: What are you working on, now?

DC: After leaving Apple I worked at several startups. My first, Verb, lasted a year and then ran out of money, right at the bottom of the 2000/2001 dot-com implosion. I moved on to work at a company called guru.com which was eventually acquired by Unicru. After three exciting years there, I wanted to try my hand at another early-stage startup. I co-founded a company called Blurb.com with Eileen Gittins, who had been my CEO at Verb. I got Blurb off the ground, helping it develop and launch the first version of its BookSmart software. Blurb lets anyone create and publish their own bookstore-quality books – go to blurb.com and try them out.

This took me to 2006, by which time I had been living in San Francisco for ten years. My wife and I decided it was time for a change of scenery and lifestyle, so we decided to move to New York. I was lucky enough to get an interview with Google’s New York office, and for the last eighteen months I have been working as a Product Manager for Google. I started out working on the search quality team dealing with our crawling systems. I’ve recently started on a new project, which I’m afraid I can’t tell you much about right now – come back in a year and I’ll tell you all about it.

Update: this interview was done during 2008. In the meantime I checked on Dan and he let me know that his project was Google Squared and that “the technology that powers its is now being used to answer certain types of query in Google’s core web search”. After leading the Squared project and working on it until July 2009 Dan is now working in Google’s London office on advanced advertising systems.

The screenshots of QuickTime 4.0 and HyperCard are “courtesy of Apple”, while the picture of Steve Jobs and Gil Amelio is from http://www.rdl.com.lb

To tell the story of this software I contacted Dan Crow, who worked at Apple on a lot of key multimedia projects such as QuickTime and Hypercard, starting with Apple Multimedia Tool, of which he was put in charge.

Dan, who is now at Google, not only graciously answered to all of my questions about his work but also provided a fascinating background of what was life at Apple during the mid-Nineties and then after Steve Jobs came back and began to transform Infinite Loop. Thanks a lot, Dan!

Stories of Apple: Would you tell the Stories of Apple readers a bit about yourself, about your background and where do you come from, professionally speaking?

Dan Crow: I’m a software developer and product manager. I first got interested in computers in early 1982, when my mother purchased a Sinclair ZX81. I taught myself to program BASIC and Z80 assembly language before graduating to a series of more advanced personal computers. Eventually I became so interested in programming that I interned at IBM for a year and then went to the University of Leeds to study Computer Science. I graduated from Leeds in 1989 and decided to stay on to pursue a PhD in Artificial Intelligence, specifically working on intelligent user interfaces.

SoA: Your first role at Apple was Lead Engineer on AMT, the Apple Media Tool. Can you shed some light on its history?

DC: AMT was originally written by a Belgian software developer called Patrick Soquet. Patrick is an exceptionally talented software engineer and a really nice guy. He was inspired by the Eiffel programming language and implemented his own version of it which he called Key. He not only created a Key compiler, but also a full development environment and a simple to use graphical UI for generating Key source code. This UI was focused on authoring multimedia presentations. Patrick offered the whole Key environment to Apple, who saw the potential of it and started selling it as the Apple Media Tool (AMT) and its accompanying Apple Media Tool Programming Environment (AMTPE).

Patrick was initially the sole developer of the software with Apple simply marketing and selling it under its brand. In the summer of 1996, Apple negotiated with Patrick to take over the full rights to AMT and AMTPE and created a small internal development team to produce future versions of the software. This is the team that I lead from late 1996 to early 1997.

SoA: How did you join the AMT team?

DC: After graduating from Leeds for a second time, I worked as Head of Software Development for a small multimedia company in the UK called Art of Memory. This was back in the days before the web took off, so we worked on CD-ROMs and kiosk systems. The company specialized in multimedia production for museums and we created pieces for the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and the Corning Museum of Glass in upstate New York amongst others. It was at Art of Memory that I first worked with HyperCard and the Apple Media Tool (AMT).

At Art of Memory we developed a series of extensions to AMT, and I became active on the developer mailing list. As we became more involved with software development for AMT I became increasingly interested in the tool itself. I eventually got in touch with the AMT team at Apple and wound up with a contract to write the technical documentation for an upcoming version of the tool.

As part of the contract I spent a week at Infinite Loop. It was my first visit to California (though not America) and I was impressed by Apple, by the AMT team and by San Francisco. I recall flying out of San Francisco airport, with the sun setting over the Bay, and thinking that was the place I wanted to live and work.

So, for the next few months I lobbied to become a full-time member of the AMT team. In the end I think they got tired of my constant pestering and decided that the only way to shut me up was to offer me a job. So in the Fall of 1996 I became the tech lead on AMT and moved with my wife to California.

SoA: How was the experience?

DC: We launched version 2.1 a few months after I arrived. We then began work on the next version. Unfortunately Apple was in turmoil at the time. This was the period when Gil Amelio was CEO and the company was running into deep financial problems. Apple had become very fragmented at this time and there were teams working on projects that competed with each other. We produced dozens of different Mac models which confused our customers and most of them simply weren’t that exciting. There was huge internal debate about if we should be a software or a hardware company and if we should pursue consumers, educational customers or corporation. Worst of all the Mac OS was outdated, slow and had lost its UI edge. There were a lot of unhappy people at Apple.

Our management decided to try to rationalize what Apple did. Unfortunately for me, one of the victims of this was AMT. Apple produced AMT, FileMaker (through the Claris subsiduary) and HyperCard and that was at least one similar product too many. Sadly, AMT was the product we decided to end. The problem was that although AMT had some very enthusiastic developers who were creating some very cutting edge products with it, they only numbered around 10,000. HyperCard was in use by hundreds of thousands of Mac users, so AMT was canceled and the team was reassigned to QuickTime.

SoA: And what happened of AMT after that? Was it definitely shelved?

DC: Following Apple’s decision to cancel AMT as an Apple product, there were various attempts to find a new home for the tool. A number of developers who were using it expressed an interest in seeing it become an independent product, as well as some members of the Apple AMT team. Eventually, Patrick joined forces with a number of other AMT fans and brought back the rights to AMT and AMTPE. They launched a new company, tribeworks.com, to develop and sell AMT, which they renamed iShell. In 2006 iShell was acquired from Tribeworks by a new company called tribalmedia. iShell continues to have a loyal following of developers and you can see what AMT has evolved into by visiting them at www.tribalmedia.com

(continues in part two)

The picture of Dan Crow is courtesy of Dan himself and is from the Flickr account of Danny Sullyvan. The AMT environment screenshot is from an old University of Calgary Newsletter.

You can find it in MP3 form in the Document Archive section of the Stories of Apple website together with other files and material of historic importance pertaining to Apple’s history, design, imagery, sales and legal matters.

Enjoy!

At the MOCA2008 “hacker camp” in Italy I had the pleasure to meet and speak with John T. Draper. Draper is better known as Captain Crunch a man whose work and life are deeply intertwined with the history of hacking, phreaking and the personal computer industry.

Here’s the transcription of the short chat we had, which verged mostly on his interactions with Apple, Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs and also his use of Macs.

Stories of Apple: What’s the story behind you doing the Apple II phone board?
John Draper: Let’s start talking a bit about how I met Steve Wozniak. [...] He contacted me when I was a DJ at KKUP radio. He asked whether or not I could come down and see his bluebox. He wanted me to show him how to use it. I was very suspicious of him. It was at a time during which there was a lot of busts going on and I thought this might have been a setup.
So I made my arrangements to go see him without having anything on me and illegal things not being there. When I saw him he showed me the bluebox: I was not impressed.
The problem with this bluebox was that it had a square wave instead of a sine wave: the tones are not pure, They sound crappy and anybody using one of those Woz’s blueboxes would often drop a trouble card in the switch because the switch wouldn’t recognize tones and wouldn’t accept them.
[...] As my relationship with him grew [...] he introduced me to Steve Jobs. Jobs was working on a little 6 bit computer. And he said “Whoa, why only 6 bits?” Six bits can only give you a number of the count to only 32 and he said “just to demonstrate that I can do a computer, that’s all” I said “That’s cool”. Then two or three years later when Woz was developing the Apple I and then of course later on the Apple II he was using a cross-assembler that I wrote because during that time all these microprocessors where coming on the market people needed to build the right assembler language to write their software.

SoA: Which microprocesors?
JD: We did it for the [Intel] 8080, the Z80, 6502, 1802 and the 6800.

SoA: Were you working alone at the time or did you have any…
JD: I developed the cross-assemblers on a time-sharing system that only ran Basic. It would take the assembler code, parse into opcode [...] and it would then output it in binhex so you could take it and dump it into your tape.

SoA: Not a print-out?
JD: No, you could get tape readers back then for about fifteen bucks: they were surplus. That was how probably Bill Gates put in Microsoft Word at Microsoft. Once that got in he then developed more, a more robust development system, called the Crust development system. [...]
After that Wozniak [...] was working on the Apple II and he offered me a job and my job was to design and develop a “charlie board”.

SoA: as an employee or an outside contractor?
JD: Yeah, as an outside contractor job. So I built the board: it had nine chips. Woz says “Nine! Chips!” He said: “No, shit, too much!” and he said “I’ve got a better design for you and he gives me a design with five chips so I’ve tried to build that [laughter] but I said “wait a minute, you are only using a 6 bit deck instead of a 8 bit deck” and he said “Yeah, 8 bit decks cost too much: I can build a 6 bit and I can write the software so you don’t have to buy that chip”
So I worked on how to get the extra two bits from. Guess? The address line. The extra two bits I grabbed from the address line. [...] I was just peeking and poking the address. That was my phone board.

SoA: Was it ever sold? Did they actually make it available?
JD: No. AT&T made sure of that. They were too freaked out. Because everything was done in software the board could have evil thoughts and you don’t wanna have a board with evil thoughts. [...] There was sofware and with the right tone table you could turn it into a bluebox. AT&T did not want that. [...] They put pressure on Jobs. Not Woz, on Jobs to say “Wow! AT&T says ‘you put this out and we’ll sue you’ “.
There were also other problems. The board, to work, had to directly connect to the phone line. At the time this came out, which was in 1975 [...] actually more like 1976 in order for you to connect to a phone line you had to have a PacBell-approved connection interface device [...] and the cheapest one was 450 bucks. Therefore in order to use it as a telephone board a person had also to pay that 450 bucks to buy one of those device while it wasn feasible to do all of that work just connecting to the telephone. Well, the kept a lot of pressure on Jobs [...] “We’re gonna sue you!”. They can’t let people connect shit to their telephone lines, right?

SoA: And then…
JD: Then came the modem. [...] The DC Hayes modem. They came out with a 1200 baud modem. It connected to their phone line because in a while they relaxed their restrictions so you could connect to the phone line

SoA: And they were approved.
JD: And they were approved.
The basic problem I had was saturation to the transformer. Phone line said that DC current ran through the transformer. If pure DC current ran throught the transformer it would saturate [...]. When you saturate a transfomer you get distortion. It’s like when you have video and you turn video all the way [...]. You lose the quality, it’s very distorted, not good.

SoA: How fast would have been the board?
JD: Around 300 baud but we used to say “programmable” phase shift. [...] A programmable phase-locked loop [which] allows you to pick up a frequency and lock on that frequency. [...] If that frequency starts coming down the line you can then detect it [...] by the phase-locked loop: it would turn around to that frequency. The modem had a switch between two frequencies, I had a phase-locked loop. Did it all in software.

SoA: Was it very common to use few chips and do it all in software?
JD: Well, that was sort of Woz’s philosophy. Me I didn’t care how many chips I used as long as I got them working. Wozniak was thinking more in terms of economics.

SoA: Probably behind that there was actually Jobs.
JD: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Jobs was very very much influenced by Woz, by Woz’s need to have things done cheaply. It was something that Woz sort of, you know… ’cause Jobs manipulated Woz. [...] Jobs is a very manipulative person. [...] Nowadays if you walk in an elevator and Jobs goes in there, by the time the elevator gets to your floor and you get out you’re gonna get fired. He’s very very ruthless.

SoA: They say he asks “what are you doing for me?”
JD: Exactly. He says “what are you doing for me?” Exactly. And if you don’t give him the right answer you’re outta work [...]. Not good. Not a good person to work for.

SoA: Did you have any chance to meet Jobs lately.
JD: I ran into Jobs when I was at Apple Computer down at the testing labs testing some of my software.

SoA: How long ago?
JD: I suppose it was in 2004, 2005. And I was working on a Voip a Voice Over IP [...] application for a private company.

SoA: After the board thing fell through you developed the word processor software, right?
JD: That was later [...] actually two years later. I started in 1979: I built EasyWriter in 1979. Barney Stone was coming out with an application program written in Basic. I showed him Easy Writer [...] He wrote in Integer Basic. A word processor.

SoA: Did you also write it in Basic?
JD: No, I wrote it in Forth. And all the scrolling I did that in assembly language [...] it was very fast. We adapted it with a VMI, Virtual Machine Interface. Today, that language would be called a driver, video driver, a virtual machine interface. We developed it for the VIDEX board.

SoA: What was that?
JD: Videx was an 80 column board for the Apple II. Then we did the IBM PC. All we had to do was adapt to the IBM PC video [...]

SoA: You then switched over to the IBM PCs which probably were a more profitable market…
JD: Well, you know, when the PCs came out there weren’t that many of them, there were many more Apples.

SoA: So, what have you been doing lately?
JD: I work for a company called En2go: we are an entertainment company, we do media. We are a media delivery company. We deliver video to your desktop. Media [...] movies, entertainment, games, music… whatever, 3D animations. [...] I am their CTO (Chief Technical Officer) and I’m in charge of five different teams with each team working on a specific part of the company.

SoA: Is it just software or also hardware?
JD: It’s software and also hardware. Actually mostly software right now [but] we have a set-top box, we call it the Flixo. It’s a video delivery system to your Macintosh, delivers media to your desktop.

SoA: Only for the Macintosh?
JD: I believe we’re working on a PC version but it’s not as mature [...].

[Note: the Flixo program streams high definition-quality video to home computers, allowing the monitor to function like an HD television.]

SoA: So, I’ve seen you using a Mac. [...] Why?
JD: Because we like the interface and using (Mac) OS X. We’re developing using Cocoa, the programming environment Xcode. Cocoa is an Objective C…

SoA: ..and is it easier to write with?
JD: Yeah, it’s wired up, man. Fuckin’ wired up man. [...] It was borrowed from NeXT. Jobs owned all the code from NeXT, he brought it in to Apple. It’s part of Xcode, part of Cocoa.

SoA: Did you have any prior experience with the NeXT Step system?
JD: Yeah, of course. I used it when it came out, I know Cocoa form back then. You know what NS stands for? [...] The name of the functions start with NS. [...] For the Windows version we use… how is it called… Visual C++.

SoA: Do you have any personal projects? Working on some hardware, on some board?
JD: Personal projects… oh yeah, I’m doing Crunch TV: it’s a TV program on one of our Flixo channels. It’s on CrunchTV.net right now, they have a first episode right now, you can watch it anytime you want.

SoA: Is it going to be a monthly show? Or weekly?
JD: It hasn’t been set on yet. [...] Eventually we’re gonna move our studio from Las Vegas to Hollywood. [...] We have got lots and lots of raw video footage: we haven’t got to date a video editing suite that we like. And I don’t wanna do it. I hate video editing, I think somebody else will do that.

Thanks to Metro Olografix for inviting Mr. Draper, to Massimo “manray” Politi for the heads up and pictures during the chat and Salty Dog for helping figuring out some (I hope most) of the technical terms mentioned.

We contacted him to ask some questions and he very generously answered providing a lot of interesting and background info and tidbits on Apple and its technologies and inner workings.

Stories of Apple: Would you tell our readers a bit about yourself and what’s your connection with Apple?
Drew Thaler: Hi! My name is Drew Thaler, and I’m a low-level software engineer. I’ve spent most of my career working on Mac OS software, including an internship at Apple during college, and five years working at Apple.

SoA: What parts of the Mac OS did you work on?
DT: I started out in CPU Software working on drivers for new hardware: video acceleration, PCMCIA, hardware DVD playback, and more. Later, I was part of the small group of engineers that created Apple’s (Mac) OS 9 and (Mac) OS X CD and DVD burning solution, called DiscRecording.framework. And recently I spent just over a year contracting for the CoreOS filesystems group.

SoA:You also contributed to iTunes. When was that? And how was the perception at Apple of the app’s importance? Was the iPod + (Music) Store strategy already known?
DT:My friends and I developed the CD/DVD burning technology at a company outside of Apple, and we were acquired. It’s a little crazy to think about this, but iTunes had no support whatsoever for CD burning at the start of November 2000. The paperwork for the acquisition finished up in the middle of that month. Six frantic weeks of development later, we had integrated it into both iTunes and the Finder in Mac OS 9 in time for it to be shown at MacWorld San Francisco in January 2001. It shipped to customers later that month. I continued to work with the iTunes engineers until late 2003.

iTunes has always been what we call a “flagship” application for Apple. It is one of the most visible parts of the Mac OS and Steve Jobs personally oversees many of the decisions about its interface. Steve was instrumental in taking SoundJam and removing features from it to simplify, simplify, simplify. I have the utmost respect for the iTunes engineers for putting up with that, since Steve is a perfectionist with a bit of a short temper, and he’s never been easy to work with!
I’m not actually sure whether the iPod and iTunes Store were planned when iTunes was first acquired. By the time we joined up, however, iTunes was successful and the iPod project was already in motion. It was incredibly secret, even by Apple’s standards, but we still heard internal rumors about it because we were working so closely with the iTunes team. The actual name was a surprise though. I remember thinking to myself, “What kind of a stupid name is ‘iPod’?”

SoA:This “company outside Apple”. Which company was that? Can you provide any additional info?
DT:We were at Prosoft Engineering in a subsidiary called Radialogic which was about to be spun off into a separate company. Apple never actually formally acquired Radialogic, since it wasn’t a separate entity, but instead made a deal with Prosoft to acquire Radialogic’s assets and hire its engineers.
There were five of us: John Bertagnolli, Ed Wynne, Mike Shields, Nathan Duran, and myself. We’d created Radialogic’s “CD Master” and “Storage Master” products. The CD Master engine became the “Authoring Support” extension in OS9, and our FireWire and USB drivers for external CDs and DVDs became the “FireWire Authoring Support” and “USB Authoring Support” extensions.

SoA: I remember one of the initial issues of Mac OS X was disc burning. Can you provide any background on that?
DT: Yes, I do. We’d designed our CD-burning software on (Mac) OS 9. We did it with (Mac) OS X in mind, but because we did it outside of Apple, it was all theoretical — none of us actually had any free time where we could play with (Mac) OS X until, literally, the end of January 2001.
At that point we started working on a Mac OS X port. But we quickly found that it didn’t support many of the features that we needed: no direct access to the CD burner, no way to handle blank CD media, not even recursive mutexes in the pthread library! Of course we quickly started talking to the right people in CoreOS to get these problems solved, but still, there was just so much missing that we were planning on a June or July 2001 release of CD burning in Mac OS X.

Now as we were working on resolving all those problems, Mac OS X 10.0 was released. Sometime around the end of March — maybe even on launch day? — Steve Jobs announced that “CD burning will be available in Mac OS X by the end of next month.” In our group, we all freaked out. WHAT!? Nobody had told us that!
Suddenly everything changed. We went from “Let’s do this the right way” to “Do it as fast as possible, at all costs!” We hacked around the pthread problem, wrote our own quick-and-dirty kernel extension, and got it all ready to ship in literally four weeks. Mac OS X CD burning support was released on May 1st as part of 10.0.2, a day “late” but actually three full months ahead of our original plan.

SoA: You mentioned hardware DVD playback. Was your work aimed at desktops or PowerBooks? Do you know anything about Apple’s choice to not support the PowerBook G3 decoder card under Mac OS X?
DT: The DVD decoding hardware was very similar in the desktop and Powerbook. Another guy, Mike Puckett, wrote the drivers for both and I helped him maintain them. The chips were C-Cube ZiVas that did almost all of the decoding work: they just needed to be fed chunks of DVD data.
Mike gave the project the code-name Oubliette. That was a bit of dark humor because it consumed a lot of time and effort. One day I asked him, “Hey, why did you name the project Oubliette? The dictionary says it means a trap — a big hole in the ground that you fall into and you can never get out of. Oh wait. Um, never mind.”

Probably the reason Mac OS X didn’t support the decoder cards was that the Macs which had them were on the verge of obsolescence already. There was an awful lot to do in Mac OS X when it first came out and it simply wasn’t a good use of engineering resources.

SoA: In your resume you state you “developed technology demo of subpixel font smoothing on LCD screens”. Was this for Mac OS 9 or X?
DT: This was for Mac OS 9. It was 1998 and Apple had recently announced a five-year cross-licensing agreement with Microsoft, so all of their patents were fair game. CRTs were still the norm for desktop machines, but I was working in the Powerbook group where all we had were LCDs. So naturally Microsoft’s ClearType caught my eye.
I developed a small demo application which showed off the difference between whole-pixel anti-aliasing — which (Mac) OS 9 already supported — and ClearType’s sub-pixel anti-aliasing. Sub-pixel anti-aliasing looked a lot better, especially on the LCD displays we were using at the time which were lower resolution than today’s. We showed it to a few people and almost everyone who saw it seemed interested. I left Apple soon afterward to work on CD burning, so I don’t know what happened to it after that. But a few years later sub-pixel anti-aliasing showed up in Mac OS X. It was probably just that it was an obvious thing to do, but it’s nice to think that maybe my old demo had influenced someone. :-)

SoA: From your point of view how was the transition between Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X and how do you feel their coexistence was managed?
DT: It was a very difficult transition for Apple to make, and it took a very, very long time. So much was different, and a lot of things had to be completely redesigned and rewritten! After four full years of work I think they simply made the decision to push 10.0 out the door whether it was ready or not. :-)
I don’t think Mac OS X was totally ready the day it was released, but it did show a lot of potential. Once it was released it simply took some time to mature, and today I think most of us can’t imagine a world without it.

For the first year or two of Mac OS X’s existence, almost everybody at the company was working a little bit on both systems. New computers were able to boot into both Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X, so drivers had to be written for both. iTunes and our CD burning software were being released for both. And so on. Everything was literally twice the work! By the time 9 was retired, we were all more than happy to be X-only.

SoA: What do you think about Apple’s HFS+ filesystem?
DT: I think it’s a pretty great filesystem which has scaled incredibly well. HFS was first released in 1985, when the state-of-the-art was a 20 megabyte hard drive. HFS+ added a few minor changes (Unicode support, increasing the maximum file size, etc) but is essentially the same design. Journaling was a very important addition in 2003 which has extended its lifetime. These days high-end Mac OS X servers use HFS+ on 20 terabyte RAID installations. That’s a million times larger than it was originally designed for!

SdA: In the last year there’s been a strong steady buzz about Mac OS X and ZFS. What’s your take on it? And do you think Apple will (or should) actually switch from HFS+ to ZFS?
DT: I think ZFS is great. (And I wrote several blog posts recently about it: ZFS Hater Redux.
The difference between HFS+ and ZFS is very similar to the difference between Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X — it’s like the future! ZFS does so many things that HFS+ can’t: end-to-end data integrity, storage pools, snapshots, smarter caching and prefetching, sparse files, compression, I/O sorting and priority, and more.
And ZFS is quickly shaping up to become a common Unix filesystem standard: it’s open-source and many other Unix systems (Solaris, FreeBSD, NetBSD, Linux) either have added support for it or are working on adding support for it. The benefit of a shared standard is huge, because it lets everybody work together on improving the future of storage.

I think Apple will inevitably switch to ZFS over time. It won’t be a sudden change — instead it will be much more gradual, the way that HFS+ was introduced. Leopard has been widely reported to include read-only ZFS support. It won’t be long until read-write support shows up, and eventually new Macs will be able to boot from ZFS. In two to three years — 2009 or 2010 — we will probably see the first Macs which ship with ZFS as the default filesystem.

SoA: One of the most missed features of Mac OS X, filesystem-wise, is not having full and official support for Linux’s ext3 and Microsoft’s NTFS. What’s your take on this and -if you know something about it- what was or is Apple’s stance on the matter?
DT:This is pure speculation, but I think the reason Apple hasn’t officially and fully supported ext3 and NTFS is partly a matter of resources: it would be very expensive in terms of engineering time, and the return on the investment would be minimal. Most of Apple’s customers would never use either one.

NTFS is a special problem because it’s not really a published and open standard. Microsoft is free to change it at will and with no advance warning. If Apple enabled write support in NTFS, the next change Microsoft makes to it might be incompatible with Mac OS X. Can you imagine how much trouble and bad press Apple would get if OSX accidentally damaged NTFS disks that were attached?

SoA: I see you did driver work for “some of the first USB and FireWire storage drivers”. What do you think right now is the advantage of FW over USB. Is there one? Do you feel Apple is abandoning FW?
DT: There’s very little difference from the user’s perspective. They have similar speeds, both are hot-pluggable, and whatever you can do over one you can usually do over the other. USB actually has the advantage for most purposes because it’s universal in the PC market these days, has a single connector (FireWire 400 has a different connector than FireWire 800), and is a tiny bit cheaper for the manufacturer.

The primary difference between the two is that USB is host-driven, while FireWire is peer-to-peer. In a USB network all communication is routed through the host computer, much like the Stories of Apple web server is the central point which connects the authors and readers of the site. But in a FireWire network any device can talk directly to any other device — a computer doesn’t even need to be present. So, for example, a video camera can talk directly to a hard drive without a computer in the way. FireWire’s peer-to-peer design is more powerful, but also much more complicated. For whatever reason the trend seems to be that high-end audio-visual components have adopted FireWire, while most low-end computer peripherals have adopted USB.

SoA: How would you sum up the years you spent working for Apple?
DT: Fun and sometimes frustrating. Fun because there are a lot of brilliant people that work there and you get a chance to create some great technology. But it can be frustrating because there are a lot of internal politics that aren’t normally visible to the outside world.
Do you know the saying that a corporation often takes on some of the personality of its CEO? Like Steve Jobs, Apple is brilliant. But its management structure is very power-focused and hierarchical, and often paranoid and secretive even with its own employees. You don’t always feel like everybody is playing on the same team. That makes it a challenging environment to thrive in. I think it’s a little bit like going “behind the scenes” at Disney (or Edenlandia, or wherever): a little bit of the magic is gone when you know how it all works. :-)

SoA: What are you doing now? Is it related to what you did at and for Apple?
DT: I’m working at Sony Computer Entertainment America (SCEA) on a filesystem for PlayStation 3 games. The work I do is mostly focused on making games load faster from the Blu-Ray disc: compression, I/O sorting, and hard-disk caching are just a few examples. In a way it’s the reverse of what I did at Apple: with DiscRecording I worked to get bits onto optical discs, and now I work to get them off.

Adrian Ulrich has recently restarted the project and is again providing (together with Marco Bonetti) a Slackware distribution for Apple (and non-Apple) RISC-powered hardware. We contacted him for a short interview to ask him what happened, what is his role and what is the distribution’s status.

Stories of Apple: A couple of years ago Slackintosh seemed to have been shelved. What happened? How and when did you picked up the project? And is there any contact or relationship with the previous maintainer?
Adrian Ulrich: I’ve been using Slackintosh 8.1 (after ditching Yellow Dog Linux and Debian) and soon upgraded it to the unfinished 9.1 and started to build my own Packages for 9.1. Later i’ve realized that Russel had stopped working on the project so i contacted him via e-mail and offered my help. While waiting for a response i’ve started to rebuild everything from scratch using Slackware 10.1. After a few weeks, i still didn’t hear anything from Russel so i uploaded my stuff to a server i own and announced my 10.1 version in a newsgroup and a few slackware-related forums. (Well: I did get a response from Russel after 10.1 has been released ;-) )

SoA: What kind of user is Slackintosh for and how many are using it? And what are its perspectives and chances after Apple has switched from PPC to Intel CPUs?
AU: Slackintosh is made for experienced Linux-users and Slackware users who own PowerPC hardware.
It is still useful even after the switch to x86 CPUs: Apples PowerPC support for OSX is not infinite, but with a free Operating System (such as Slackintosh) support will be thereas long as people use the hardware.

SoA: What’s the best (i.e. most easy/supported) Apple hardware to try and use Slackintosh?
AU: Even without Apple there is still a lot of interesting PowerPC based
hardware. I’ve been using Slackware 10.2 on the Nintendo Gamecube a few months ago. A Wii port would be interesting…

SoA: How would you sum up these years as maintainer of the Slackintosh project?
AU: I’ve learned a lot about the ‘inner workings’ of a Linux/Unix system.
Building stuff like glibc, compilers and X.org is not much fun but educating :-)