The First Time I Was Almost Fired From Apple
3 Jul 2025
Me at Apple in December, 1995.
I was hired on at Apple in October of 1995. This was what I refer to as Apple’s circling the drain period. Maybe you remember all the doomsaying — speculation that Apple was going to be shuttering soon. It’s a little odd perhaps then that they were hiring at all but apparently Apple reasoned that they nonetheless needed another “graphics engineer” to work on the technology known as QuickdrawGX. I was then a thirty-one year old programmer who lived in Kansas and wrote games for the Macintosh — surely, Apple thought, I would be a good fit for the position.
I had never experienced anything like the interview process (detailed here) but as it ultimately turned out, I was offered (and I accepted) the job as QuickdrawGX graphics engineer at Apple Computer, Inc.
Moving the girlfriend, all my stuff (and two cats) from Kansas to California was pretty wild but we got on with it. As it would turn out I had a good deal to learn about my new career — er, well, about professionalism in general. And immediately I came to find that I may well have been in over my head as a programmer. These other engineers at Apple were friendly, but also very smart. (If I have not already, I should write up a little bit about the early panic that I endured — feeling like I had wandered into the deep end of the pool.)
Eventually though (about six months later) I started to get into the groove so to speak and felt a little more comfortable with getting the work done. But as I’ll soon make obvious I was still an undisciplined bumpkin not at all in step with Professional Corporation™.
QuickdrawGX, the project, imploded not long after I was hired though and so instead I was asked to join a new team (the ColorSync team) and soon was handed a new project. Apple had a standard window with which the user could select a color — this was called the Color Picker. Apple also was at this time beginning to transition from using Motorola 68K chips in their computers to using the new and faster PowerPC (PPC) chips. My task was to get the existing Color Picker project, written for 68K chips, to compile for the new PPC architecture.
Color Pickers
The original HSL and RGB color pickers (some assembly required). As I explain later, I really don’t like “lightness” because, among other things, the vivid color is in the center of the slider. Not very intuitive.
... continue reading