steveh

Before Apple took the site over (and made their various changes) it was built for, and was the headquarters for Four-Phase Systems (makers of the first all-LSI minicomputer systems) back in the late '70s. One of the things that happened during the company's move from its previous headquarters involved moving their fab; when the move was done, the fab was spun up, and it worked (not something you could count on back then).

The basic layout of the campus was much like its current format, if quite a bit simpler. Four-Phase is long gone, having been swallowed up, or parceled out to various other companies, including Motorola and Canon, but it was a pretty interesting place to work for a guy new to the Valley, and ended up being a stepping stone from there to Apple a little later for me.

rogifan_new said:

I’m in the middle of a thunderstorm right now with winds gusting to at least 30-40mph. Just for a test I said “Hey Siri is it windy out”. Siri responded back, “No I don’t think it’s all that windy, only 9mph”. Siri still can be such garbage. Unbelievable.

Do you seriously think that Siri actively collects, say, weather conditions everywhere itself?

If whatever information aggregator is used for things like weather conditions isn't up to the minute, Siri gets the same thing you'd get by directly contacting the same source. Blame NOAA (or whomever) for the error.

borps said:

I really think this announcement from Autodesk it entirely dishonest. They've decided to discontinue macOS support and now they want to make it look as if it was Apple's fault, which is nonsense.

Sort of like Adobe's dropping FrameMaker for the Mac. Don't update the software for a couple years, then claim that poor sales (of the dusty thing) was because nobody was interested in it. Ignoring years of "when are you going to update/fix the package"?

The ADB port was invented at Apple, and it was also used (for a while) by NeXT, HP, and Sun Microsystems, although Sun, at least, didn't call it that.

rigormortis said:

We would probably be still using FireWire if it wasn't for Apple wanting royalty payments on every computer sold

The FireWire Consortium, which was quite a bit more than just Apple, including contributions from Texas Instruments, Sony, Digital Equipment Corporation, IBM, and INMOS/SGS Thomson, was by no means the only standards body to get royalties from manufacturers using the standard. (I edited one of the IEEE.1394 standard versions, and that was done along with some co-workers from, and with the blessing of, Sun Microsystems.)

For a couple examples, HDMI use involves royalties, and Thunderbolt required royalties to be paid until a bit after Thunderbolt 3 arrived.