Retromacintoshapplefloppy-disks
Apple Hid a Sony Engineer in a Closet While Saving the Mac’s Floppy Drive
Andy Hertzfeld recalls the secret fallback that survived a failed drive plan and an awkward visit from Steve Jobs.
A supplier engineer working on the Macintosh ended up waiting in a janitorial closet because Steve Jobs walked into the room. Vendor management had reached the hide-and-seek phase.
Hertzfeld recalls that the Mac team’s original Twiggy drive was unreliable, leaving the computer without a viable storage plan. Jobs favored an Alps alternative; colleagues kept Sony work moving out of his sight.
When Jobs appeared unexpectedly, Sony engineer Hide Kamoto was ushered into the closet for about five minutes. In Hertzfeld’s telling, Kamoto’s response was: “But American business practices, they are very strange.”
Alps later returned an eighteen-month production estimate. Hertzfeld says Jobs thanked the engineers who had kept Sony available. That outcome makes the closet funny; it also leaves a fairly uncomfortable question about why the fallback needed hiding.
The engineering question for the next project is whether a team can preserve the same useful escape route without making a guest engineer hide inside it.