L. Bob Rife, anyone?

Better yet, sell it to a fiber optic dude by the name of L. Bob Rife...

Austin was, in the beginning, a support outpost. There were a few phone monkeys who actually moved there from the Bay Area in the early '90s when Apple decided to close down shop in CA (Freemont, IIRC, but I may be wrong there, it's before my time at the fruit company). I've been gone from the place for well over a decade now, but even so I admit I'm a bit surprised to find there's any engineering there at all. Wasn't jack back when I worked there, everything was in Cupertino and Austin was all about phone monkeys and admin.

That's been going on for years. I worked at Apple Austin from '96 to '98; back then there was a LaserWriter on the 2nd floor of the Anderson campus that was ironically named "Dell Resume Writer". Srsly.

It was kind of a crappy thing for the phone monkeys tho. They'd get stuck in a rut, 9mos as a contractor at Apple, 9mos at Dell. Never get a full time gig with benes, just end up being a temp worker forever.

Many many years ago (like, 2002 or something), from memory, they had a sat feed and a radio link to the UK shoreline. Last I heard they'd quietly moved more or less everything to a data center in London and there's pretty much nothing left there anymore.

Furthermore, there was another episode some time back, where they were launching a bowling ball from some sort of contraption, and it did precisely that. They wandered around in the brush on the the other side for awhile until they found it. Which makes nobody thinking of this possibility even more surprising.

That's why we left. Austin was a fantastic place. The only drawback was that it was in the middle of TX. Put Austin out on the CA coast somewhere and we'd still be there rather than hiding out in New Zealand.

Irony: it happens in both directions. Here in New Zealand we have a state sponsored student loan system, where repayments are actually automagically pulled from your salary. We also have a lot of brain drain. Students graduate with a pile of debt, and bugger off to AU, US, UK, EU... Never to return. It would interesting to find out how the numbers even out. Certainly the US has profited from Kiwis (and I suppose possibly Aussies) doing this. And NZ has profited from US folks doing it. Would be a good statistic to try and collect, tho probably pretty difficult.

Actually, nothing much changed between the BlueBox Jobs and the iThing Jobs. Jobs was always first and foremost a sales guy for The Steve Jobs Ego. What he was selling along with that primary product certainly changed over the years (and there were some very good products in there along with some horrendously bad), but his own ego stroking remained pretty constant throughout. He'd quite happily flip-flop once he discovered his current pet project was a failure and suddenly he'd be a big driver for stuff he'd tried to steamroll previously. And he certainly had no issue with taking credit for others accomplishments when it suited promotion of The Steve Jobs Ego.

>Lucas is quoted on the Save Star Wars website as saying in a 1997 interview with American Cinematographer magazine that he thought "the other versions will
>disappear". He said: "Even the 35 million [video] tapes out there wont last more than 30 or 40 years. A hundred years from now, the only version of the movie that
>anyone will remember will be the [Special Edition] version."

Well... Not quite. See, that laserdisc edit got bittorrented. Thus, I've got a copy of the original 3 from those laserdisc rips, and I'm damn sure not the only one. The genie is outta the bottle there George, and you won't be getting it back in. My video cassettes will certainly moulder into dust but those laserdisc rips will be on the torrentz (or whatever p2p becomes popular in coming decades) long after I'm pushing up daisies.