[ChrisMarshallNY]

I don’t know if Chris Espinosa still works for Apple, but I think he might have been around a couple of years before Gassé. He started as a teenager.

I’ve been writing Apple software since 1986. Lots of changes, since then.

I remember it as being a fairly “scruffy” little company; especially if you went to MacHack. I worked for GE, at the time, and the corporate culture differences were quite stark. GE was a “shirt and tie” operation, and I was part of a team that had maybe 400 people.

I was constantly being sneered at (literally) for sticking with a “dead” company. It was pretty annoying, and a lot of people did give up on them.

[jidiculous]

> I don’t know if Chris Espinosa still works for Apple but I think he might have been around a couple of years before Gassé. He started as a teenager.

He's still at Apple, and was actually employee #8, making him its longest-serving employee according to his Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Espinosa

[chubot]

Wow, that's amazing... Starting at 14 years old! And a few years from retirement age now.

[ghaff]

I started to work at a minicomputer company in the mid-80s. Product managers and the like still wore suits. Many older engineers still wore ties but engineering in general was shifting towards what we call business casual today.

[valuearb]

I joined a Mac software startup in 1986. The two founders told me about going to the first Mac developers conference, they claimed it was them, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and a dozen or so other people from other companies.

[ChrisMarshallNY]

MacHack was like that, into the early nineties.

You had close, personal contact with top Apple engineers, for three days. They were quite unpolished. Very different from Apple's presentation, these days.

Quite small; maybe only a couple hundred folks.

Lot of fun.

[shadowofneptune]

Did this change as Apple got bigger and then fell on hard times?

Also are you adding those proper quotation marks by hand?

[ChrisMarshallNY]

I made the post from my iPad. I suspect it did the quotes. Let's "try" it from my computer...

Nowadays, people sneer at me for "working for The Man."

Being an Apple programmer has meant many years of being sneered at. No way to win...

[sgt]

I think you can toggle the smart quotes. I don't like them either. And if they happen to end up in code, it's insanely irritating.

[52-6F-62]

I work with high-profile editorial and art staff. They need those quotes! They're often great at knowing how to insert them themselves, but others need that short cut. As it is, the quotes are hidden at `Opt + [` and `Opt + Shift + [` on my machine (Canadian English layout). [Oh, the war stories I have trying to sanitize text for moving from platform to platform...]

We're not the only ones using keyboards anymore, and we're in the minority of those who do!

[buckminster]

Oh God yes! You get an obscure syntax error and it really isn't obvious what the problem is. It would be useful if syntax highlighting marked smart quotes (outside of strings) with a bright red background or something.