Love these stories. Thanks so much!!! I read the whole folklore.org and the book that had the same content. Love love these stories. Would love to hear your persona story as well. How’d you join Apple. Your different roles. Etc.
Sorry for the absence, busy rehabbing a house and being a grandpa.
OK, since you asked... I graduated from UC Davis with a degree in economics and held several jobs as a purchasing agent during the 1970s. It was easy to find work in Silicon Valley in those days, and if you got bored or pissed off where you were, another job could be found in a week or two -often at 20% more pay. Networking was key and many of us moved around a lot.
During high school I had taken some drafting classes as electives. I also was fascinated with meteorology and built pretty much all of the weather instrument kits offered by Heathkit. As it turned out, reading blueprints and familiarity with electronic assembly was a very unusual background for a buyer to have and my network grew rapidly since the design and manufacturing engineers moved around as often as we did.
Jobs included 2 years at ISS/Sperry Univac (14 mb hard disc drives the size of a washing machine) then 4 years at Amdahl Corporation (470v6 and v7 mainframe computers) and a -very- short stint at Dataproducts where we were developing a dot matrix printer under contract for IBM.
A friend from my ISS days landed at Apple in 1981 and gave me a call...
I was hired as the supervisor of the mechanical purchasing group for the Apple ][ and spent 18 months there. In late '82 I was loaned out for a day of travel with 2 engineers and help sort out a problem with the mold maker on what turned out to be the Mac rear housing.
At that point they only had a single buyer -who was great at components but had little experience (or time) to deal with tooling or the mechanical parts.
When I returned to my desk in the Mariani building I was called in to Del Yocam's (Director of Mfg) office and told I worked for the Mac group starting immediately.
My initial responsibility there was "everything not soldered to the main logic board", this included the pcb itself as well as the analog board which was purchased as an assembly.
