i love this. A startup I was at during early COVID times got acquired into Hewlett Packard Enterprise, so we all became HPE employees with HPE addresses. There was a similar form there to request "ryancnelson"@hpe, etc...
One of my co-workers got cute and asked for "root@hpe.com" .... And boy, there's a lot of cron jobs running at HP.
bigfatkitten · 1h ago
In the late 90s I worked for a now defunct Australian electronics retailer, who were also a well-known AS/400 shop. Our stock reports etc would come via email from qsecofr@<domain>.com.au.
The QSECOFR (Security Officer) user is effectively root on OS/400.
I would've thought they would run these jobs as some other user, but apparently not.
williamdclt · 2h ago
I’m confused why cron jobs would be sending emails to root@hpe.com?
tuyiown · 1h ago
(not an unix sysadmin, just guessing what happened from my shaky knowledge)
cron jobs reports activity by email to the user (UID) they are running, historically UNIX boxes have the ability to handle mail locally (people would leave messages to each other by connecting to the same server via terminal), so that the root cron activity would land into the root (/root) account mbox file.
When email got interconnected more across servers, generally the service that would dispatch mail to the users account on their home folder on the server started to be able to forward to to others servers, if a domain name was provided. Add to it the ability to fallback to a _default_ domain name for sending email into the organization, and voilà, the root email account for the default domain name receives the entirety of the cron jobs running under root of all the servers running with the default configuration and domain fallback.
layer8 · 29m ago
If you ever come across a ~/dead.letter file, that's one way it can be misconfigured. ;)
sph · 2h ago
IIRC cron writes stdout to the local mail spool (<user>@localhost). If the server is configured correctly, with an SMTP service for the domain, these emails are basically forwarded to <user>@<domain>
In practice, I have never seen a Linux server with an actual SMTP server configured correctly in 20 years, so the worst that usually happens is that cronjobs never actually leave the machine. You used to get a mail notification when you logged in if cron had written something, but that doesn’t happen anymore on recent distros.
lgeorget · 1h ago
It's usually configured correctly at some point in time and then the configuration "rots": it becomes inconsistent, some emails are forwarded, other are lost, nobody cares, etc.
In my case, I configured Postfix to redirect all mails looking like (root|admin|postmaster)@server to myemailaddress+(root|admin|postmaster)_server@domain and Postfix ignores what comes after the + in the user part. So I get all the emails but I still know where they come from. It has worked well for quite some years now but I'm not deluding myself, I know that at some time, that will rot too.
ecnahc515 · 2h ago
Cronjobs often run as root. If the host has is configured to send emails when a cronjob is completed it will default to sending it to user@domain where the user is the user the cronjob runs as, and the domain is what was configured in the cron configuration.
dijit · 1h ago
Minor nitpicky correction: cron only sends an email if there's any stdout of the job.
This is an important distinction because if you have configured mail forwarding, your cron jobs should be configured to output only on error.. then any emails are actionable.
ferguess_k · 2h ago
Or something like "ab-production@company.com", where ab is whatever a mage system.
jorgesborges · 1h ago
That is one of the most beautifully crafted “I did something dumb” emails — and to a CEO no less. I wish all my emails were so clear, direct, and personable.
No comments yet
neilv · 3h ago
That beats my similar anecdote.
At a high-profile place, I too used an automated IT thing to make a first-name email alias for myself, and there was a semi-famous person there with the same first name.
It played out much like this story: I started getting email for the VIP, so I told them, and switched it over to them. I don't recall them being as gracious as Steve Jobs that time. Then, the only other interaction I had with them was them during my time there, was them declining my request to participate in something. :)
bentcorner · 2h ago
I did something very similar, but the effects were different - people who intended to send mail to other people with my first name had my new distribution list (I created a distribution list with myname@company.com with myself as the only member) pop up as the first thing in their autocomplete.
I started to receive mail across the entire company for people who typed "myname<TAB>".
I deleted the distribution list a few minutes later.
foobahhhhh · 1h ago
Mind blown. I remember getting very excited that my teacher in 1991 sent an email. I didn't see the email or use that computer. Just the concept that the email was sent to another country. Weird I barely remember what the email was about. But something along the lines of science and contacting another school.
throwaway7783 · 3h ago
34 years at Apple/Next. Amazing tenure!
cmarschner · 2h ago
$$$$$
No comments yet
georgewsinger · 2h ago
This was such a great story.
Steve was a mischievous person himself, so surely a part of him respected this.
No comments yet
pkaye · 1h ago
What if a new employee was named Steve Teve?
incanus77 · 56m ago
I first learned about the ability to apply for custom aliases at my university after noticing a guy I knew didn't have the usual pattern — first 5 of last name, first name initial, and nothing or else numbers 2+ depending upon your order in line. So I was 'millej3'.
Then I thought about the guy's name: D___ Hoover.
He had applied for, and got, 'hoover'.
ubermonkey · 48m ago
Heh. I have a somewhat related story.
In the market we sell into, mergers, acquisitions and spin-outs are the norm. People shift employers all the time without changing offices. It's a whole Thing.
USUALLY this is somewhat drama-free, and USUALLY there's not an issue with email addresses, but this is not a story about the usual case.
Most places now seem to use the firstname.lastname@corp.com style of address. This is a good idea, and creates collisions less often than flastname@ style addresses would. However, one of my customers -- someone who had been happily a first.last@companyA.com user -- got acquired by an org that insisted on the old style flast@companyB.com addresses.
I will not provide the name of my customer, but the problem that ensued was of the same type, and yet a bit more severe, than it would have been if his name were "Steve Hithead."
To this day, though, his address honors the local convention. STANDARDS MUST BE FOLLOWED NO MATTER WHAT, apparently.
3pt14159 · 41m ago
Hahahaha. I wish HN allowed the use of the joy emoji in response for these types of posts.
msephton · 1h ago
Whilst working in corporate I tried to get matt@apple.com which was showing as free, but in fact somebody in retail had claimed it. Good for them!
MarkMarine · 1h ago
I had mark@apple.com during my time there, accidentally got added to one of the exec’s threads from Tim and felt pretty silly (and didn’t read anything in that thread, couldn’t delete it fast enough, had to email Tim to explain)
gield · 1h ago
I managed to claim my 4-letter-first-name@apple.com. Not having an English name definitely helps.
FlamingMoe · 3h ago
Great story, put a smile on my face.
HaZeust · 3h ago
If this kind of thing is up your alley, check out techemails.com
ViktorRay · 27m ago
Wow this is such a neat website! Thanks for sharing!
bilekas · 1h ago
It's a really cool story, but I can't help but feel a lot has be idealized around regular people who did extraordinary things.
I mean, Steve Jobs had to work with people, but he wasn't some prophet. He was a talented guy, who had his failures and successes, more of the latter.
It is a cool story, but if my boss of 15 years ago becomes world famous, I'm not going to personally treasure the email he sent with 4 words, possible 2 automated, write a blog post about it.
I'm just going to giggle to myself a little. Again, I might be in the minority here.
sailfast · 45m ago
I’d hypothesize you would if you thought he was a great boss, and the opportunity to work there was unique.
Just reading that email felt magical to me - to get something so visionary on your first day at a company in the early 90s would’ve convinced me they were leading me in the right direction.
lutusp · 30m ago
My interactions with Steve Jobs came earlier, when he wasn't quasi-mythical, but was already a PITA. A typical interaction with Steve Jobs in 1976:
"Hi! Are you Steve Wozniak?"
"No, I'm Steve Jobs."
"Okay ... umm ... where is Steve Wozniak?"
I suspect people's preference for those who were actually building things, over selling them, may have twisted SJ's character ... I mean, more twisted than it already was.
Ironically, two people I worked with in the early Apple days -- Steve Jobs, enough already said, and Jef Raskin, who designed the first incarnation of the Macintosh -- both died of pancreatic cancer.
I actually miss Jef. We lived together for a while, as I was finishing Apple Writer and my frequent commutes from Oregon were becoming impractical.
Here's a Jef Raskin story I think almost no one knows. Jet resolved to design an electric car. He packed a bunch of 12 volt car batteries into a relatively small, lightweight car, and, after removing the ICE, rigged an electric motor in its place.
First test drive, Jef tried to descend a hill, only to discover the car's brakes, which until then had gotten an assist from the ICE, were nowhere near adequate to stop the suddenly-massive battery bank. Very scary, briefly out of control, but no harm done.
agentjj · 18m ago
So the mythical Apple car project actually goes way back :)
Aurornis · 3h ago
> Hi - I'm new here. I did something dumb and
> set up a mail alias so that steve@next.com
> would go to me.
> This was a bad idea, I'm sorry.
> I've changed it to steve@next.com goes to you,
> not to me. I think that makes more sense.
> My apologies.
> Signed, new guy.
What a great example of how to own a mistake, apologize, communicate, and get it fixed. I can think of so many past situations with coworkers that would have been so much better handled with quick communication like this.
airstrike · 1h ago
It really is the perfect message. It's effective, efficient, impactful and human at the same time. No wonder they've had such a long tenure at Apple.
msh · 3h ago
It must have been a big difference between working for a cutting edge tech company like next and a regular company back then.
testfrequency · 1h ago
This post is particularly funny to me as well as I also had a very common name@apple.com email and I would often get sensitive emails, including travel info, sent to me - despite the fact that I had worked there longer than most peers.
I eventually grew so annoyed with it that I ended up surrendering the email to said person as it was a losing battle.
AceJohnny2 · 1h ago
A colleague had an email when they started that was very similar to an SVP. When they highlighted the confusion, it got fixed promptly.
testfrequency · 1h ago
If anything, all it taught me was that nobody at the company would bother to check directory before emailing.
Now that the company uses Slack however, I imagine there’s a lot less confusion.
mattl · 3h ago
Steve Hayman, long time NeXT/Apple employee who just retired last week from Apple having started in 1993 with NeXT.
His WebObjects demo from 2001 is one of the most entertaining tech demos I've ever seen
What a great video :). Interesting how some old ideas are new again. Thank you for sharing this and congrats to Steve Hayman for his tenure at Apple!
sailfast · 40m ago
Oh my god what a gem: “it’s got a steep learning curve which is good because that means you learn a lot in a short period of time” hahaha
phillco · 2h ago
The idea of any official Apple presentation today beginning with a humorous rendition of _God Save the Queen_ is so absurd I can't help but smile at what we've lost.
MagerValp · 1h ago
Steve is easily the most entertaining conference speaker I’ve had the pleasure to attend in person. He was a regular at MacSysAdmin for many years, and always in the Friday afternoon slot when you need a jolt of energy. Good times.
no_wizard · 2h ago
In many ways, WebObjects feels ahead of its time.
Sometimes I wonder what happened to these ideas.
mattl · 2h ago
AFAIK, WebObjects is still in use inside Apple, but also Project Wonder and WOLips have kept the tooling active (it all stopped working after Apple depreciated the Obj-C/Java bridge) and modern libraries for WebObjects.
immibis · 2h ago
It was probably no better than most of the other frameworks we have. Most things aren't. In a set of lots of things, it's more fun to speculate about the ones that we haven't seen, but there's a good chance they're about the same as the ones we have.
MrScruff · 1h ago
"It's got a steep learning curve but that's ok, because it means you learn a lot in a short period of time."
ralfd · 2h ago
Watched only a short time, but the phone call were he pretends to be a lifeline for "who wants to be a millionaire" cracked me up.
mattl · 2h ago
At one point he asks someone in the front row if EOF is patented, and then blurts out "software patents are evil" amongst other things.
Really refreshing to see.
levlaz · 2h ago
Most wholesome HN post this year
1-more · 2h ago
This is how I find out next.com returns a 301 to apple.com. Fascinating!
mattl · 1h ago
For a while a few years ago they had it misconfigured and you could browse apple.com at next.com -- so pages like next.com/ipad worked.
These two short emails are the best tech flex I’ve ever seen ;-)
Nice one and enjoy your retirement!
cynicalsecurity · 1h ago
That was a very sweet post, thank you.
luotuoshangdui · 3h ago
That's a fun little story
kccqzy · 3h ago
It's interesting that they can just reassign an email alias to someone else without any approvals. Could this be a permissions oversight? Or could the person who designed the system thought that heck it's always permitted to reassign an email alias owned by the current user?
madeofpalk · 3h ago
It was 1991. They were an up start tech company. It was a different time.
joezydeco · 3h ago
You could also register a domain for free by sending an email form to a bot. It was truly the wild frontier.
mixmastamyk · 2h ago
The biggest factor is the small company… same could happen today.
mattl · 3h ago
And I'm sure it was the responsibility of a single person editing /etc/aliases in Emacs, not a big drawn out process too.
caseyy · 3h ago
Everyone’s super concerned about security and control, but the best places I worked in were more concerned with freedom. Yes, be savvy about security, protect key assets, but “permissions oversight” about claiming an alias seems excessive.
You’ll have 1,000x more headaches and burned operational cash getting everyone to approve everyone else’s every step than handling one security incident in a decade. And even with very tight security, something will still happen. It’s best to have backups, a good restore plan, and a relaxed culture*. Or that’s what I think, anyway.
I’m in SME land though, not big tech. But then again, 99.99% companies are.
* common sense exceptions apply.
ryandrake · 2h ago
One of the biggest time sinks and "velocity" killers in BigTech, and sometimes also in MediumTech, is the need to get approval (sometimes multiple people's approvals) for absolutely everything. Often, approvers are among the most senior, busy people in the company, and "approving a dozen things" is not even top 100 on their list of things to do today. There are people who spend >75% of their time just "chasing" approvers and reminding them to please, please, please approve my Thing X so we can launch Product Y on time!
caseyy · 1h ago
For sure. It kills projects and companies large and small.
jajko · 1h ago
In multinational megacorps this is more or less modus operandi. I am not even mad anymore, I realized this aint malice but simply inevitable as size goes up and time passes on.
The best companies that realize this can minimize it, but its inevitable.
dogleash · 2h ago
I feel you. I keep hearing people in software say "wild west" when they mean "absence of paternalistic bureaucratic controls."
The virtual space is locked down so so so much harder than the physical because it's "free" to automate, but the vibe is it's outrageously uncontrollable. I get it when we're talking the whole Internet, but the same group of insiders as the physical space?
kccqzy · 2h ago
> but the best places I worked in were more concerned with freedom
Sure. But if that's the case why do you even have individual email? Make everything a group email and group IM. Not allowed to send messages to a specific person; can only send messages to everyone. What would happen?
Can you see the flaw in this logic? Email isn't only for discussing work projects. It needs to be private for discussions involving HR, legal, and other personnel matters.
caseyy · 1h ago
Steve Jobs’s email was not taken away. A guy was allowed to register an alias self-service style. Everyone could reach Jobs on his email.
mattl · 1h ago
And every NeXT machine came with an email waiting in your inbox out of the box from sjobs@next.com complete with Lip Service voice message from Steve Jobs.
Of course you likely had no immediate way to reply to an internet email address like that at the time out of the box.
shawnz · 2h ago
Even with the privacy concerns aside, you need individual mailboxes for reasons of maintaining organization.
I think your point would be better made if in your hypothetical, we still had individual mailboxes, but everyone could see into everyone else's mailbox.
kadoban · 3h ago
The bigger issue is probably being allowed to set up an arbitrary one at _all_ without approvals. Once you have one, redirecting it is maybe not the biggest issue? Could still be problematic though.
This story is quite old, security culture in tech was really quite basic and forgotten in a lot of places. I would hope that a similar thing would not be allowed today at anything like a big company.
pixl97 · 3h ago
>security culture in tech was really quite non-existent
This is 1991, the actual number of people on the internet was tiny back then. Things like SMTP servers were commonly open relays (for some reason I'm remembering sendmail being an open relay out of the box).
A lot of the internet culture wasn't based on security, but of the premise you shouldn't be a dick.
It quickly changed in the next few years as the number of people online exploded.
pianoben · 3h ago
Yep! A formative experience of my childhood was working out how to type SMTP commands over telnet and sending mail from billg@microsoft.com to my dad. Such "opportunities" vanished decades ago.
Fun times :)
mixmastamyk · 2h ago
Worked at an aerospace concern in the early 90s… for the first year or so there was no firewall. Yes, my Mac and PC directly on the internet with routable addresses.
I soon set up a website and webcam as they were shipped. CU-See-Me blew my mind. At some point I stood up a Quake server and invited friends to play. ;-)
khazhoux · 3h ago
Are you requesting a process and architecture retrospective on a company from 30 years ago? :-)
scop · 3h ago
Great story.
Have to ask…what’s up with that avatar for Tim Cook?
gield · 1h ago
It's his image in Apple's internal employee directory, also used for emails. It's an old image, probably taken in the early 2000s.
scarface_74 · 1h ago
I have absolutely no respect for Tim Cook anymore. I understood that Cook was the operations guy and not a product guy like Jobs.
I even have to begrudgingly admit that he has to navigate the political waters in both China and the US doing things I don’t like.
But he consistently makes Apple’s products worse in the name of money - advertising on the phone, malicious compliance in the EU, what came out in the recent court case where he ignored Phil Schiller (head of App Store and long time a Apple employee) who suggested they do the right thing as far as the courts ruling, and how the experience is worse not being able to buy third party content (kindle) and subscriptions within apps. Well you can now. The Kindle app has been updated.
Of course I don’t care if they skim 30% from games, loot boxes and coins where 90% of their revenue comes from.
I wouldn’t consider it an honor to get an email from Cook. The enshittification of iOS is completely on him.
smm11 · 3h ago
I emailed Steve Jobs right after he came back to Apple and suggested they make a carry-able computer that could project the interface and keyboard input to any glass surface.
sgerenser · 2h ago
At that point, Steve was just starting to kill all the “moonshots” and “cool tech but who is really going to buy it” products like the Newton and OpenDoc. Even if he read the email, there’s no way he’d be interested in something like that at the time.
p_ing · 3h ago
I'm not sure how a glass surface would work given how lasers interact with glass.
But this style of keyboard has been done in various forms as far back as '92. They're awful.
In 2010 I emailed Steve Jobs about an idea for improving iWork 09. I forgot what it was. No reply ever.
mattl · 3h ago
Did you get a reply?
edm0nd · 3h ago
and? did he reply?
khazhoux · 3h ago
Honestly, kind of sad that Tim Cook’s reply was so generic. I don’t think I’m off base in saying this, and from personal experience, he is really not connected to the people at the company.
void-pointer · 3h ago
The experience as CEO of a company with 10e2-10e3 headcount is a lot different than the experience with 10e4-10e6 headcount.
rdlw · 1h ago
Any number of negative employees would be troubling, but I admit 9.9 million of them would be especially bad.
jawns · 3h ago
But the latter can often afford a secretary, if not a team of secretaries, to handle these sorts of things, with permission to add his signature.
cosmicgadget · 2h ago
Personally I'd either say nothing or farm the research out to an assistant for long tenure employees.
chinchilla2020 · 3h ago
That's actually his personality based on my knowledge of interactions with him. He is sort of a workaholic robot.
lapcat · 3h ago
There's no evidence that Steve Jobs knew Steve Hayman from Adam. "This was the only email I ever personally received from Steve Jobs."
numinix · 1h ago
He probably only knew him as Shayman
mattl · 2h ago
Hayman did a lot of WWDC presentations of WebObjects which was the only thing really keeping NeXT alive prior to the merger. He mentions elsewhere that towards the end Jobs was mostly at Pixar and NeXT was reduced to selling $50,000 WebObjects licenses but also had its first profitable quarter.
no_wizard · 2h ago
A big part of me has suspected, especially after reading biographies about him, that Pixar was simply better aligned with his creative side. NeXT was a business, one he knew well, but Pixar made things with computing and I think that really appealed to Jobs.
All speculation of course.
bena · 2h ago
It would have been funnier if he replied with "Great idea, thank you."
GuinansEyebrows · 3h ago
I love how sarcastic this reply comes across. Did it feel at all like that in the moment or was it received as earnest?
khazhoux · 3h ago
I didn’t pick up any sarcasm at all. It was a good idea which clearly hadn’t occurred to SJ himself, but would have been obvious once seeing the suggestion
karmakaze · 2h ago
Oh this is about email. Thought it might be from the Xerox PARC tour, or the Sherlock app, etc.
AIorNot · 3h ago
Ok but for Pete’s sake, he was a CEO not a God - the geek hero worship is a bit excessive
oortoo · 2h ago
On the one hand, an amusing anecdote about an interaction with someone that ended up becoming massively famous does come across as somewhat noteworthy, but on the other hand, the fact that Job's response basically translates to: "Um, ok." does make this kind of... sad?
Side effects of living in a world where wealth and power have become virtues. I think we subconsciously judge our own value based on how many degrees we came to stepping onto the world's "stage".
sublinear · 2h ago
I completely agree. Both emails from Steve Jobs and Tim Cook are totally impersonal and routine. It's entirely possible they weren't even "personally sent" by either.
There's nothing wrong with the stories, just the overall sentiment behind them.
mlyle · 3h ago
Hey, running into someone who is exceptional and having a fun story to tell about it is reasonable and doesn't deserve this negative energy.
That time I ran into Larry Bird, or just missed having dinner with Douglas Adams, or the time I talked to Jonny Kim-- they're little markers of time in my existence. I know they're not gods, and I've done pretty cool things myself, but I'm still in awe of the cool stuff they've done.
jonathanlydall · 1h ago
I have a famous person anecdote I enjoy telling.
More than 20 years ago now, my brother (who was maybe 9) had his friend over for lunch and the night before my brother had spent the night at his house.
So my mother asks what they got up to, and the friend says they were playing water pistol fights with his sister’s boyfriend, “Wa-kin”, who was visiting.
We then ask what the boyfriend does, and he responds that he’s an actor. (Just be aware now that we live in Johannesburg, South Africa.)
So we say, cool, has he acted in anything we might know?
And friend says something like “Oh, lots of movies, Gladiator, Signs, others…”.
At which point I remember thinking, “no way!” and “so that’s how Joaquin is pronounced” (as I’d only ever seen it written).
Turns out the friend’s sister was a model living in New York which explained the situation I would never have guessed.
jjulius · 3h ago
Kevin Nash and I peed next to one another in an airport bathroom one time.
cosmicgadget · 3h ago
Well don't leave us hanging.
bayindirh · 3h ago
Steve was a temperamental guy. It's not geek hero worship, just being afraid of your boss, plus the timidness and vulnerability of being a new hire.
rightbyte · 3h ago
Have Jobs ever been a compter geek hero? Wozniak is the one people raise to the skys.
skeletal88 · 2h ago
Steve is the hero of salesmen, consultants and CEO-s, should not be a hero for geeks and actual developers.
voidspark · 2h ago
Geeks and developers can have multiple dimensions to their personality.
I respect Steve Jobs for his ruthless and uncompromising focus on quality and his attention to detail. He wasn't just a sales guy.
scarface_74 · 1h ago
Steve Jobs knew how to ship products people want. I have no respect for developers in a corporate settings who don’t ship.
saalweachter · 1h ago
I mean, the salesman-CEO/founder is way better at selling themselves as a hero of tech & innovation than the engineer-CTO/founder.
numinix · 51m ago
Sending every new user an email with a "very personal welcome" and audio message for example.
khazhoux · 3h ago
We tell stories of things that are noteworthy. We find this to be entertaining.
mattl · 3h ago
Where are you seeing geek hero worship here?
madeofpalk · 3h ago
Dude wrote a small anecdote on their blog and this is your response?
mattl · 2h ago
Yeah, a small anecdote on their blog after 34 years on the job. Does not seem like worship at all.
One of my co-workers got cute and asked for "root@hpe.com" .... And boy, there's a lot of cron jobs running at HP.
The QSECOFR (Security Officer) user is effectively root on OS/400.
I would've thought they would run these jobs as some other user, but apparently not.
cron jobs reports activity by email to the user (UID) they are running, historically UNIX boxes have the ability to handle mail locally (people would leave messages to each other by connecting to the same server via terminal), so that the root cron activity would land into the root (/root) account mbox file.
When email got interconnected more across servers, generally the service that would dispatch mail to the users account on their home folder on the server started to be able to forward to to others servers, if a domain name was provided. Add to it the ability to fallback to a _default_ domain name for sending email into the organization, and voilà, the root email account for the default domain name receives the entirety of the cron jobs running under root of all the servers running with the default configuration and domain fallback.
In practice, I have never seen a Linux server with an actual SMTP server configured correctly in 20 years, so the worst that usually happens is that cronjobs never actually leave the machine. You used to get a mail notification when you logged in if cron had written something, but that doesn’t happen anymore on recent distros.
In my case, I configured Postfix to redirect all mails looking like (root|admin|postmaster)@server to myemailaddress+(root|admin|postmaster)_server@domain and Postfix ignores what comes after the + in the user part. So I get all the emails but I still know where they come from. It has worked well for quite some years now but I'm not deluding myself, I know that at some time, that will rot too.
This is an important distinction because if you have configured mail forwarding, your cron jobs should be configured to output only on error.. then any emails are actionable.
No comments yet
At a high-profile place, I too used an automated IT thing to make a first-name email alias for myself, and there was a semi-famous person there with the same first name.
It played out much like this story: I started getting email for the VIP, so I told them, and switched it over to them. I don't recall them being as gracious as Steve Jobs that time. Then, the only other interaction I had with them was them during my time there, was them declining my request to participate in something. :)
I started to receive mail across the entire company for people who typed "myname<TAB>".
I deleted the distribution list a few minutes later.
No comments yet
Steve was a mischievous person himself, so surely a part of him respected this.
No comments yet
Then I thought about the guy's name: D___ Hoover.
He had applied for, and got, 'hoover'.
In the market we sell into, mergers, acquisitions and spin-outs are the norm. People shift employers all the time without changing offices. It's a whole Thing.
USUALLY this is somewhat drama-free, and USUALLY there's not an issue with email addresses, but this is not a story about the usual case.
Most places now seem to use the firstname.lastname@corp.com style of address. This is a good idea, and creates collisions less often than flastname@ style addresses would. However, one of my customers -- someone who had been happily a first.last@companyA.com user -- got acquired by an org that insisted on the old style flast@companyB.com addresses.
I will not provide the name of my customer, but the problem that ensued was of the same type, and yet a bit more severe, than it would have been if his name were "Steve Hithead."
To this day, though, his address honors the local convention. STANDARDS MUST BE FOLLOWED NO MATTER WHAT, apparently.
I mean, Steve Jobs had to work with people, but he wasn't some prophet. He was a talented guy, who had his failures and successes, more of the latter.
It is a cool story, but if my boss of 15 years ago becomes world famous, I'm not going to personally treasure the email he sent with 4 words, possible 2 automated, write a blog post about it.
I'm just going to giggle to myself a little. Again, I might be in the minority here.
Just reading that email felt magical to me - to get something so visionary on your first day at a company in the early 90s would’ve convinced me they were leading me in the right direction.
"Hi! Are you Steve Wozniak?"
"No, I'm Steve Jobs."
"Okay ... umm ... where is Steve Wozniak?"
I suspect people's preference for those who were actually building things, over selling them, may have twisted SJ's character ... I mean, more twisted than it already was.
Ironically, two people I worked with in the early Apple days -- Steve Jobs, enough already said, and Jef Raskin, who designed the first incarnation of the Macintosh -- both died of pancreatic cancer.
I actually miss Jef. We lived together for a while, as I was finishing Apple Writer and my frequent commutes from Oregon were becoming impractical.
Here's a Jef Raskin story I think almost no one knows. Jet resolved to design an electric car. He packed a bunch of 12 volt car batteries into a relatively small, lightweight car, and, after removing the ICE, rigged an electric motor in its place.
First test drive, Jef tried to descend a hill, only to discover the car's brakes, which until then had gotten an assist from the ICE, were nowhere near adequate to stop the suddenly-massive battery bank. Very scary, briefly out of control, but no harm done.
> set up a mail alias so that steve@next.com
> would go to me.
> This was a bad idea, I'm sorry.
> I've changed it to steve@next.com goes to you,
> not to me. I think that makes more sense.
> My apologies.
> Signed, new guy.
What a great example of how to own a mistake, apologize, communicate, and get it fixed. I can think of so many past situations with coworkers that would have been so much better handled with quick communication like this.
I eventually grew so annoyed with it that I ended up surrendering the email to said person as it was a losing battle.
Now that the company uses Slack however, I imagine there’s a lot less confusion.
His WebObjects demo from 2001 is one of the most entertaining tech demos I've ever seen
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NfWnDJtUyrw
Sometimes I wonder what happened to these ideas.
Really refreshing to see.
https://web.archive.org/web/20130301092249/http://www.next.c...
You’ll have 1,000x more headaches and burned operational cash getting everyone to approve everyone else’s every step than handling one security incident in a decade. And even with very tight security, something will still happen. It’s best to have backups, a good restore plan, and a relaxed culture*. Or that’s what I think, anyway.
I’m in SME land though, not big tech. But then again, 99.99% companies are.
* common sense exceptions apply.
The best companies that realize this can minimize it, but its inevitable.
The virtual space is locked down so so so much harder than the physical because it's "free" to automate, but the vibe is it's outrageously uncontrollable. I get it when we're talking the whole Internet, but the same group of insiders as the physical space?
Sure. But if that's the case why do you even have individual email? Make everything a group email and group IM. Not allowed to send messages to a specific person; can only send messages to everyone. What would happen?
Can you see the flaw in this logic? Email isn't only for discussing work projects. It needs to be private for discussions involving HR, legal, and other personnel matters.
Of course you likely had no immediate way to reply to an internet email address like that at the time out of the box.
I think your point would be better made if in your hypothetical, we still had individual mailboxes, but everyone could see into everyone else's mailbox.
This story is quite old, security culture in tech was really quite basic and forgotten in a lot of places. I would hope that a similar thing would not be allowed today at anything like a big company.
This is 1991, the actual number of people on the internet was tiny back then. Things like SMTP servers were commonly open relays (for some reason I'm remembering sendmail being an open relay out of the box).
A lot of the internet culture wasn't based on security, but of the premise you shouldn't be a dick.
It quickly changed in the next few years as the number of people online exploded.
Fun times :)
I soon set up a website and webcam as they were shipped. CU-See-Me blew my mind. At some point I stood up a Quake server and invited friends to play. ;-)
Have to ask…what’s up with that avatar for Tim Cook?
I even have to begrudgingly admit that he has to navigate the political waters in both China and the US doing things I don’t like.
But he consistently makes Apple’s products worse in the name of money - advertising on the phone, malicious compliance in the EU, what came out in the recent court case where he ignored Phil Schiller (head of App Store and long time a Apple employee) who suggested they do the right thing as far as the courts ruling, and how the experience is worse not being able to buy third party content (kindle) and subscriptions within apps. Well you can now. The Kindle app has been updated.
Of course I don’t care if they skim 30% from games, loot boxes and coins where 90% of their revenue comes from.
I wouldn’t consider it an honor to get an email from Cook. The enshittification of iOS is completely on him.
But this style of keyboard has been done in various forms as far back as '92. They're awful.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projection_keyboard
All speculation of course.
Side effects of living in a world where wealth and power have become virtues. I think we subconsciously judge our own value based on how many degrees we came to stepping onto the world's "stage".
There's nothing wrong with the stories, just the overall sentiment behind them.
That time I ran into Larry Bird, or just missed having dinner with Douglas Adams, or the time I talked to Jonny Kim-- they're little markers of time in my existence. I know they're not gods, and I've done pretty cool things myself, but I'm still in awe of the cool stuff they've done.
More than 20 years ago now, my brother (who was maybe 9) had his friend over for lunch and the night before my brother had spent the night at his house.
So my mother asks what they got up to, and the friend says they were playing water pistol fights with his sister’s boyfriend, “Wa-kin”, who was visiting.
We then ask what the boyfriend does, and he responds that he’s an actor. (Just be aware now that we live in Johannesburg, South Africa.)
So we say, cool, has he acted in anything we might know?
And friend says something like “Oh, lots of movies, Gladiator, Signs, others…”.
At which point I remember thinking, “no way!” and “so that’s how Joaquin is pronounced” (as I’d only ever seen it written).
Turns out the friend’s sister was a model living in New York which explained the situation I would never have guessed.
I respect Steve Jobs for his ruthless and uncompromising focus on quality and his attention to detail. He wasn't just a sales guy.