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

“The people who are doing the work are the moving force behind the Macintosh. My job is to create a space for them, to clear out the rest of the organization and keep it at bay. I can’t spend enough time here, unfortunately, because I have other responsibilities. But every spare moment I have, I dash back because this is the most fun place in the world.

This is the neatest group of people I’ve ever worked with. They’re all exceptionally bright, but more importantly they share a quality about the way they look at life, which is that the journey is the reward. They really want to see this product out in the world. It’s more important than their personal lives right now.

The Apple II had a magical feel about it. You couldn’t quantify it, but you could tell. The Macintosh is the second thing in my life that’s ever felt that way. Opportunities like this don’t come along very often. You know somehow that it’s the start of something great. So everyone wants it to be perfect and works really hard on it. Everyone feels a personal responsibility for the product.

The Macintosh is the future of Apple Computer. And it’s being done by a bunch of people who are incredibly talented but who in most organizations would be working three levels below the impact of the decisions they’re making in the organization. It’s one of those things that you know won’t last forever. The group might stay together maybe for one more iteration of the product, and then they’ll go their separate ways. For a very special moment, all of us have come together to make this new product. We feel this may be the best thing we’ll ever do with our lives.”

Steve Jobs in 1984 in the first issue of Macworld

In the original press release it is stated that

Mac OS X is built on the high-performance Mach microkernel and BSD 4.4, and includes the Apache HTTP web server and WebObjects application server

which were all features coming from the adoption of NeXT’s operating system.
This evolution, which was called “Rhapsody”, was modified in the interface to resemble the Mac OS and also had the addition of new and old Apple technologies such as NetBoot and support for ColorSync and QuickTime.

Mac OS X Server required 64MB of RAM, a 1GB hard drive and a CD-ROM drive and supported all Power Macintosh G3 systems but was specifically optimized (and marketed) for Apple’s new blue and white G3s, also announced at Macworld 1999.

The product actually shipped in march at a lower price, only USD 499, instead of the “estimated” 999 mentioned by Steve Jobs in January during his Keynote.

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.