Future Apple programmer Konstantin Othmer was entering academia at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech).
I went to Caltech and studied EE, which was more of an applied physics kind of thing. One day, my roommate said that Apple was on campus interviewing for jobs and I should go over, “…maybe they can help you with the issues you are having programming the Apple II.” I had been working on projects on the side, and in those days, getting tech support was difficult. I went over to where Apple was interviewing. I knocked on the door, and the guy asked what time my appointment was. I told him I didn’t have an appointment but just wanted to see if they could help me with some issues on the Apple II.
As the arrogant kid, I figured this was ‘just some recruiter,’ and I would talk way over their head, so I went through various bugs I had found with the Apple II ROM, and one in particular with the mouse driver. I complained about Apple’s system software, and then he said, “OK, let me get back to you on that.” A few days later, he called and suggested I come up to Cupertino for an interview. I told him I was not interested; I just wanted my tech support questions answered, but he insisted and said it would be fun for me to visit the Cupertino campus. So I agreed.
Turns out that the “recruiter” was Harvey Lehtman, who was the head of the Apple II group.
Before being a Senior Manager at Apple, Lehtman was a member of Douglas Engelbart’s illustrious SRI research group that, over a ten year period, developed the mouse, windowed editing tools, hypertext, and tools for networked collaboration. Lehtman was one of Apple's first senior engineers and was a member of the team that developed the Apple Lisa user interface.
Harvey walked me around the team and introduced me to everyone, including the engineer responsible for the mouse driver. I was like, “Oh shit, hopefully, I don’t sound like an idiot now, this is the guy's code I was complaining about!” - I repeated the story (this time with not as much energy) about the buggy driver and he said, “Yes, we had that issue in one of the beta releases”. Boy, was I relieved. Anyway, they ended up making an offer to pay me $2340 per month for the next summer, which seemed like a fortune to me, so I took it.
Excerpt from https://books.by/john-buck/inventing-the-future
