ATG boss Larry Tesler stood before an employee-only gathering inside De Anza 3:
“Part of Apple's identity is innovative leadership in technology for people. Breakthroughs have come from all over Apple, but there's one group that has ‘breakthrough’ as its charter, and that's ATG. Your Advanced Technology Group is Apple's principal research organization. We like to work on high-risk projects, paradigm shifts, and unexpected applications and try untested technologies.382
Some ATG innovations have already appeared in Apple products, like the Mac II sound and video features. Even an Apple II product has come out of ATG. That's the Video Overlay Card. A little high-tech wonder camouflaged as an educational tool. More ATG innovations are in the product pipeline, and you'll be seeing products in 1990, 91, and 92 that come from them. We're continuing research on technologies like high-speed computing and highly integrated custom chips. Ways to use artificial intelligence techniques to improve the user interface and ways of supporting people who are working together at great distances at their own desktops connected by high-speed lines. But ATG is not all technologists. We have education researchers, we have a physicist, an anthropologist, a psychologist, an architect, a physician. We even have a businessman who helps us to understand (laughter) the commercial implications of what to do. And he owns a tie (laughter).”
Apple scientist Jean-Charles Mourey recalls his work environment:
“Walking around the Advanced Technology Group was a bit like walking around James Bond's gadget lab. So many smart, innovative people with grand ideas, doing important work, that we believed could change the world and have a positive impact on millions of people. My friends thought I was in a cult."
I remember Will Oxford, Ph.D. (kind of a rarity at Apple at the time), who was working on artificially altering the phase differential in sound coming out of two stereo speakers to make it seem as though the sound was coming from much further left or right than either speaker. It was mind-blowing. But ATG engineers felt the longing to ship a product and the frustration with so many canceled projects. There was a bit of jealousy between ATG and the Development teams who got to ship products and did the "real" work. So, any time some collaboration could be worked out was a godsend.
John Worthington looks back:
This was a period when a lot of engineering work was happening in ATG just because Apple didn't have that many people. People had left after Jobs departed, and others through work-life attrition and company layoffs. There was such a huge change after Jobs left. There was a lot of space for people to fill in, and I think that there weren't as many layers of management.
And there weren't the ‘internal’ walls that sort of came up later between people developing hardware and people developing systems and software, and people doing pure research. It was much more fluid.
Excerpt from https://books.by/john-buck/inventing-the-future
