A Pirate Culture

I began working for Apple on a sunny day. When I looked at the directions to my workplace, I was surprised. There was a sign that read, “Cupertino National Bank.” How could my office be in a bank? Why wasn’t it in the Apple headquarters?

I arrived at the bank and asked the security guard, “Is there an Apple office here?”

He pointed at the back door.

I went to the back door and found a stairway behind it. I walked upstairs. When I arrived on the second floor, I saw several young people working in front of computers.

Apple had this secret office because the company wanted to keep product development absolutely confidential. Then the products would astound everyone when they came out.

“Perhaps this is a reflection of Apple’s pirate spirit,” I told myself, knowing there was a pirate spirit in Apple. Steve Jobs once raised a pirate flag on top of his building. He also placed a Besendorfer piano and a $10,000-worth pair of speakers in the lobby. Beside the piano was a BMW motorcycle, which guests would see right away when they entered the building. Jobs would play the piano for the employees working late at night. I imagined how passionate music must have filled the lobby at those moments and somehow wished I could have been there.

Apple managers often told employees, “Work on your inventions, don’t care about what people say, and believe that one day we can change the world.”

The Apple employees I worked with were all very young. I was 28 then. They were around my age or even younger. They loved Apple’s pirate culture. Some of them brought their pets to work. Once a colleague’s rabbit jumped on my hand while I was typing. The atmosphere was very casual.

Among my colleagues were Philip Miller, who once co-authored the famous software program Lotus 1-2-3, Phil Goldman, who created Web TV, which was sold to Microsoft in 1997 for $425 million, and Andy Rubin, who years later took charge of Google’s Android.

These remarkably talented colleagues helped me transition from pure research to product development. We worked harmoniously together in the hope of making computers ultimately become people’s intelligent assistants. We wanted computers to understand human language and follow verbal instructions. We were dreaming of three-dimensional user interface, which could be applied to games, social media, and video conferencing.

From July 1990 to February 1991, I had a fabulous time at Apple. No one managed this team. We had maximum freedom to maximize our potential. We were so into our work that sometimes we forgot it was time to go home. Our tireless effort made the speech recognition in Mac 40 times faster.

We also made a few breakthroughs in Mac III, including video conferencing, speech recognition, speech synthesis, video camera, three-dimensional user interface, telephony, and high-definition sound effect. The product would use the Motorola 88110 processor and a Mach operating system developed by the Computer Science Department of Carnegie Mellon University.

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【法奶日報www.lulijen.com 2013.5.29. 刊出，第9908號】

刊登日：2015/8/1

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