Senior Scientist Mike Liebhold recalls his role at Apple:
I guess I was an unofficial ‘agent provocateur at Apple'. I had to do two things. One way was to provoke the engineers to build things. The other was to educate the managers and the rest of the company on the need for this stuff. On the demand side, I was thinking about advanced media systems. The wider scale view of what video would mean to our computing experiences. What kinds of apps and services would you need for data-rich computing? What does it mean if you have access to a lot of data on your computer?
Liebhold liaised often with Apple's San Francisco based Media Lab. He tracked what Margo Nanny, Barbara Bowen, Steve Gano, Mike Naimark, and Kristina Woolsey were researching in the multi-media space.
Tom Gilley was now working as a contract programmer in the Bay Area.
I was the go-to Mac hacker guy who made a "a big red button" Macintosh interface using XCMDs (external commands for HyperCard) for Mike (Naimark), which was then used as a laser disk controller. The Media Lab really was amazing, and they demonstrated how "interactive" video would be important years ahead of everyone else. I built that 'button' and a few other gadgets which I showed Margo, who then shared them with Liebhold and Harry Vertelney in Apple ATG.
Soon after, Gilley was invited to meet Vertelney at Apple headquarters:
I drove down to Cupertino with an old Samsonite brown briefcase, and I had all my Meeting Technologies projects in it: the balloting system, the laser pointer, Jobber, and a video on a camcorder of how the three Macs connected with a keyboard and mouse and all that jazz. And I ask for Harry. I found out later that Harry was an architect and did all sorts of stuff with Disney before going to Apple. He was an amazing individual. I showed him my work - especially the gadgets, and he was - ‘taken’. Harry had just started to build what would become Smartifacts. He used that term to refer to new forms of software-based agents which could be embedded in anything. I was able to convince him that I would be a good member of his team. And he set up my next interview with the head of ATG, Larry Tesler. And that didn’t go so well.
Larry says, “You don’t have a degree, and we don’t know where to put you” So Larry was a no, but Harry says, 'No, no, no, he's great. He's going to do exactly what we need him to do.
Vertelney prevailed, and Gilley started in ATG.
I was asked what I wanted as a job title. I chose "MechaSoftTronic Engineer" because I was a mechanical software hardware engineer. Someone who did mechanical systems, software systems, wrote code, programmed chips. A jack of all trades.
In a short period of time, Gilley was pitching the idea of an iPad to CEO John Sculley. 21 years before the iPad debuted.
An excerpt from my "Inventing The Future" book, which is here - >
