Apple often ran full-page trade magazine advertisements. One such example was:
‘Opportunity comes in all shapes and sizes’ It announced ‘immediate openings’, including Product Design Engineers, Datacom Engineers, and Unix Software Engineers with ‘experience in Unix kernel development, device drivers, utilities, and communications. Send your resume to Department BH-CW15’.
Unix software engineer John Kullman continues:
I was sitting at home one day reading the San Jose Mercury News, and I saw a double, full-page spread from Apple advertising jobs, and I remember 11 positions involved Unix. I told my wife, at the time, as my finger went down the page, ‘I could do this and I can do all of this and I could this'. I wasn't boasting, she knew that I'd done these jobs at Plexus, DG, and Opus. However. At that point, to me, Apple was a toy company that made toy computers. But I was curious. ‘Why did they want Unix engineers?’
So I reached out to an acquaintance, Rob Smith, who worked at Apple, and asked him, ‘If I give you a resumé, can you give this to the hiring manager at Apple for the Unix project, for the jobs they advertised?’ He agreed, and I reiterated, 'I'm applying for all of the positions, not individually, but all of them, all at once.'
Unknown to Kullmann, and the outside world, Apple engineers in Project Oreo, led by Ron Johnston, were building the company's implementation of the Unix operating system to run on Macintosh computers.
Johnston recalls what happened next:
I was screening all these resumes that were coming in from an ad that we were running. Rob Smith brings me a resumé from a guy called John Kullmann, and he says, 'This is a friend of mine. He's applying for all of these jobs.'
And I said, ‘Well, which one does he want? He said, 'No, you don't understand. He's saying, he can do all of these jobs.'
I thought, well, I got to talk to this guy, but first I wanted to check him out. I noticed on the resumé that he had co-founded Opus with Grant Muncie, and I had worked with Grant at HP on my APL project. I was the project leader, and he was one of my team members, so I knew him well. I found his phone number, and called him. I said, ‘This guy John Kullmann, is he the real deal?’
Kullmann moved to Apple and on to the Oreo team. Their work resulted in the A/UX software product shipping in early 1988. He later ported the Mac OS X kernel to allow it run on Intel processors. By himself.
Excerpt from https://books.by/john-buck/inventing-the-future
