In the past few years, I have been lucky enough (blessed) to interview former Apple employees like Steve Milne, who invented the AIFF format (still used 37 years on), Jon Krakower, who created the breakthrough PowerBook keyboard design (all laptops still use the design), and Wil Oxford, who persisted for over two years to engineer 16-bit audio for the Macintosh. The IIfx was the first personal computer with this capability.
Oxford explains his motivation and Apple's support:
I would go into a CompUSA store and see somebody buying, with their own money, a product that I designed or worked on - money they'd earned and saved. That was, and still is now, my motivation. Watching real customers. That's what makes me feel validated because in a lot of cases, I had really good ideas that weren't necessarily easy to implement or weren't immediately monetizable. It wasn't easy, but Apple's ATG (Advanced Technology Group) afforded me the leeway. I was an academic at heart, but I also understood the practicality. Someone inside Apple needed to justify why they were paying me!
Excerpt from Inventing the Future. -> https://books.by/john-buck
