Posted on 11/19/2022 11:50:22 AM PST by nickcarraway
Allan Alcorn was desperate when he hired a young college dropout named Steve Jobs.
Atari, the fledgling computer games company he worked for, was scrambling to staff up after the sudden success of its first game, Pong. Now, here was a young hippie in sandals, waiting in reception and asking for a job as a technician.
“It was 1973 and there was this kid, maybe 18, who was just so passionate about technology – said his name was Steve Jobs,” Alcorn told The Post “So I hired him.” “He was kind of a pain to work with and he had this real problem with body odor, so we made him work nights,” Alcorn recalled of the man who would go on to found Apple
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
I was in close proximity to Jobs once circa 1997. Didn’t notice this at that time. Generalizing from any specific anecdote doesn’t really work.
Playing the machine was boring for sure. The only way Pong was fun was playing with a friend and doing beer shots each point.
Of course when you’re a kid, incorporating beer into any game makes it more fun. LOL
LOVE IT that you remember! Ha ha! You might appreciate this, then...
Back in the mid 90s when I worked for him, John Scherer called me from his jet one afternoon and asked if I knew how to eject a CD from his new fangled laptop. We had just made the transition from VHS to disc format, so it was all still relatively new to us. After several minutes of my different iterations of advice from "Press this button...Find Root drive C:... Right click this, right click that... reboot... etc, etc, etc..." we finally figured out the issue...
I ended the phone conversation with "Well, I'm just glad nobody knows that the world's foremost computer learning expert and his top tech editor took only 25 minutes to finally figure out that THERE WAS NO DAMN DISC IN YOUR LAPTOP!"
Truly LOL!
Great story. Positive = Job’s mother was single and people encouraged her to have an abortion. She was pro life, courageous and gave birth to Steve. Negative = Job’s was stubborn (”I am always correct about everything”) and tried to cure his pancreatic cancer all by himself with diet. Sad. And yes, pong was fun, because pong was an image on a tv screen that can be manipulated.
Ha! That made me think of how the Brits use the word “Pong”:
Definition of pong
pong
noun
an unpleasant smell. Australian, British, and New Zealand slang.
What’s that horrible pong?
Why is there such a pong in the toilet?
His doctors actually caught his pancreatic cancer very early and he likely would have been easily cured with standard methods of treatment. But he decided to treat himself with a strict vegan diet with disastrous results.
Since he passed on, Apple really hasn't done anything new and exciting but they continue to make generate enormous revenue and profits on the products that were introduced during Jobs' lifetime.
I recommend the Walter Isaacson biography on him.
They have been developing a car - or so we keep hearing. If Jobs was still there maybe it would be in production.
I sooooo love that you remember this and are asking! John started out of a little office in about 1993. He grew quickly and acquired a modest shipping facility. The first year production team was one computer software expert as a writer, a camera pc screen grab guy and editor, and text graphics geek, and marketing company. A few years later, it was 3 writers, a pro graphics guy, a tech director for the product and commercials, a QC editor (me), a production manager, about 30 CSRs taking phone orders, and a huge warehouse to store and ship the product. When I joined, I gently nudged the (non tv experienced) Production Manager to let me take John in a less "cheesy" direction. His reply to me was "Oh, are you gonna tell John that??". I shrugged my shoulders and dropped it. I stayed in my lane and watched him stroke his ego on national tv. I left for greener pastures in 1998 and Scherer took it personally (which he should not have!). Three years later, the hypocrite sold the company to some idiotic foreign entity, which cost everyone else their jobs, immediately. That entity lasted about one year before bankruptcy. John still lives in a mansion stop a Denver metro mountain.
Lordy, ain’t we showing our age.
He was a nice guy, but very much projected his First Class status of our little Titanic - and still does, as I am close friends with his liquidation manager (only out of pure coincidence). Anyway... I don't remember the exact numbers, but the revenues up to 1999 were mid 8 figures, annually. Don't remember what he sold out for, but wish I did. I do remember it was a foreign entity that collapsed very quickly. I think their play was to leverage the marketing and shipping process, not the product.
Great story, especially about the guy’s wife. LOL
LOL!
Best decade, ever.
/you can’t put a price on love
;D
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