The Apple II got there first. It was the Wright Flyer I of personal computers.
When the Wright brothers made
their historic first flight in 1903, lots of other inventors were trying
to fling their own shoddy little planes into the air. And in 1977, when
Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs unveiled the Apple II, there were a
zillion other nerds working on building a personal computer.
But Woz beat them to it, and Jobs knew how to sell it.
The Apple II was the product
that turned Apple into Apple. It was the iPhone of its era, the product
that redefined every machine like it that came afterward.
Its real magic was Wozniak's
minimalism. He integrated many technologies and components that no one
else had put together in the same device, and he did it with as few
parts as possible. It was, as Wozniak wrote in his autobiography, "the
first low-cost computer which, out of the box, you didn't have to be a
geek to use."
But as genius as Wozniak was,
the Apple II almost didn't make it out of his brain and into a product
that the rest of the world could use.
Daniel Kottke, one of Apple's
first dozen employees, said, "[In 1976] the Apple II did not even work.
Woz's prototype worked. But when they laid it out as a circuit board, it
did not work reliably... It was unacceptable. And Woz did not have the
skills to fix that... But, it was even worse than that. They did not
even have a schematic."
Newly funded by investors, Apple
had just hired Rod Holt as the company's first engineering chief, and
this was one of the big problems that Holt walked into when he took the
job. At the time Woz's Apple II prototype was a bunch of wires and chips
in a cardboard shoebox. The tiny Apple team had to take this amazing
concept machine and turn it into a product that could be manufactured
and sold in stores.
So Holt handed the first task to Apple technician Bill Fernandez.
When it came to computers and
electronics, few people knew the workings of Wozniak's mind better than
Fernandez. The two had grown up as neighbors and had known each other
since the fourth grade. In high school, Fernandez told Wozniak that
there was a kid he needed to meet because he was into electronics and
practical jokes just like Woz. It was a kid named Steve Jobs. Later,
Wozniak acquired a bunch of different electronics parts and took them to
Fernandez's garage, where the pair worked on assembling the stuff into
their own working computer that was years ahead of its time. Then,
before Apple got started, Woz helped Fernandez get a technician job at
Hewlett-Packard, where Wozniak was an entry-level engineer. So the two
had a lot of history together.
In order to make the Apple II a
buildable product, Apple needed a full technical readout of all the
component parts, so that's what Holt assigned to Fernandez.
"When Woz designed something,
most of the design was in his head," said Fernandez. "The only
documentation he needed was a few pages of notes and sketches to remind
him of the overall architecture and any tricky parts. What the company
needed was a complete schematic showing all the components and exactly
how they were wired together."
That meant that Holt and Fernandez had to take the prototype that
Wozniak had made and reverse engineer it to create something more
standard and repeatable.
"Bill and Rod buzzed out the board to create the schematic from the
logic board because they didn't trust the schematics that they had,"
said Kottke. "They did have the board, so they reverse engineered the
board to create a schematic."
Fernandez said, "I drew the
first complete schematic of the Apple II, working from a few xeroxed
pages of Woz's notes written on graph paper. Having worked with Woz
before... this was a straightforward [but] painstaking task. In my
opinion, it was a beautiful schematic: logical, clear, easy to determine
the relationships between components, and easy to follow the data and
logic flows."
It worked. The machine got
built. History was made. Wozniak and Jobs became famous as the two crazy
kids who started the computer revolution in a garage in California.
But our collective memories only
have room for so many names, and history doesn't usually remember
little guys like Bill Fernandez, despite the fact that if it wasn't for
Fernandez, then the Apple II may have never become the machine that
started the personal computer movement. In fact, if it wasn't for
Fernandez, there may have never even been a company named Apple
Computer.
Cream soda pals
Silicon Valley created Bill Fernandez.
His parents met at Stanford
University. They moved to Sunnyvale when he was five, and he spent his
entire childhood growing up in that community, in a house that his
mother decorated in a minimalist Japanese style that reflected her
background in Far East Studies at Stanford.
"What I really respected the most about Bill was his mind. He was so clear-headed."
Steve Wozniak
The Fernandez family's Eichler
house was situated in a middle class neighborhood filled with engineers
employed by the growing technology boom in Northern California. They
worked at places like Hewlett-Packard, NASA Ames Research Center,
Lockheed, and a number of technology contractors for the US defense
industry. Many of them had personal workshops in their garages and were
so passionate about the emerging tech boom that they loved to chat about
it with eager neighborhood kids -- and occasionally share parts and
tools along with wisdom about circuits and wiring.
Fernandez said, "I love working
in wood and sometimes wish that I'd grown up on a street of cabinet
makers. But, I grew up on a street of electronic engineers."
Bill's father was a trial
lawyer, superior court judge, and the mayor of Sunnyvale for a time. He
described his mother as "a 1950s era super mom."
By the time he was in middle
school, Bill was hooked on electronics. When he was 13, he built a box
with multicolored lights that could easily be turned on and off with a
series of switches. When he was 14, he designed an electric lock that
would engage or disengage based on a sequence of buttons. When he was
15, he made a TV jammer that could interrupt reception on a TV -- Woz
took it to college and harassed his classmates with it, and it was
immortalized by a funny scene in the movie " Pirates of Silicon Valley."
But in 1970 when Bill was 16 and
Woz -- who is four years older -- was back from college, the two of
them embarked on their most ambitious project yet. They decided to build
their own computer from a collection of about 20 electronics parts that
Woz had begged from Tenet, the technology company he was working for as
a programmer. For years, Woz had been sketching out ideas for computers
on paper, but he never had the hardware to try out his ideas about
building a working computer with the fewest number of parts possible.
Once Woz acquired the parts, he
took them to Fernandez's garage, and the two of them set out to bring
Woz's paper sketches to life. By today's standards, it looks like a
rudimentary experiment, only a step above a glorified calculator. It had
no microprocessor, screen, or keyboard. The machine merely processed
punch cards and returned the input with a series of flashing lights.
But, as a personal computer, it was several years ahead of its time, and
it held the potential of doing a lot more.
They called it "The Cream Soda
Computer" because while they were working on it in Fernandez's garage
they would take breaks and ride their bikes to the Safeway and get their
favorite drink, Cragmont Cream Soda, and then drink it while they were
building the machine.
The home of Steve Jobs in Cupertino, California is famous as the garage where Apple Computer began.
Image: Jason Hiner/TechRepublic
A couple years earlier,
Fernandez was walking through the neighborhood one day with Jobs when he
spotted Woz washing his car and finally found the opportunity to
introduce the two. They hit it off immediately.
"We were just kids, and they were just two electronics buddies," said Fernandez.
Jobs and Fernandez had been friends since middle school, when Jobs moved into the same school district in Cupertino.
"We were both nerdy, socially
inept, intellectual," said Fernandez, "and we gravitated towards each
other. We both also were not at all interested in the superficial bases
upon which the other kids were basing their relationships, and we had no
particular interest in living shallow lives to be accepted. So we
didn't have many friends."
In middle school and high
school, the two spent a lot of time together, particularly at the
Fernandez house, where Jobs was attracted to the meticulous Japanese
style that Fernandez's mother used to decorate the place. In retrospect,
Fernandez sees it as an important early influence on Jobs' sense of
design and love of minimalism. Jobs was around so often and endeared
himself to Fernandez's mother so much that she thought of him like
another son, Fernandez said.
While both Fernandez and Jobs
loved technology -- it was their most important common bond -- the two
of them were also a pair of deep thinkers at a young age, and they liked
to explore ideas together. One of the things they did more than
anything else was to walk.
"He and I also spent endless
hours walking around the neighborhood, particularly in some of the
nearby, undeveloped wild lands, talking about life, the universe, and
everything," said Fernandez.
For Jobs, it was a pattern that
lasted his entire life and career. With Apple employees, Silicon Valley
colleagues, journalists, and friends, the favorite meeting place of
Steve Jobs was the open air of Cupertino or Palo Alto on a good, long
walk.
The first hire
It wasn't long after he
introduced Jobs and Wozniak that Fernandez noticed the two of them
hanging out on their own. They collaborated on two things: electronics
projects and practical jokes. Eventually, the two of them starting
working on professional projects together when Jobs landed a gig with
Noah Bushnell at Atari and enlisted help from Wozniak in creating the game "Breakout."
Then, famously, Jobs and Wozniak
started a little computer company called Apple when Jobs decided that
the computer Woz had designed, later to be known as the Apple I, could
be packaged and sold to other enthusiasts. Jobs was into the company
more than Wozniak. Woz had an excellent gig working as an engineer at
HP, and at the time he could happily see himself working there forever.
But, as the computer revolution was preparing to take flight, HP didn't
include Woz in its team that was working on a personal computer. So, he
scratched his itch to build a computer with the fewest possible parts by
sketching ideas and experimenting with prototypes in his spare time.
"There was a palpable sense that magic was in the air."
Bill Fernandez
As the Apple I evolved into the
groundbreaking Apple II, it was time for Jobs and Wozniak to start a
company. Woz was unsure whether Apple would rise above the scads of
decloaking computer companies that wanted to pioneer a personal machine,
so he wasn't ready to leave his job at HP yet.
Jobs, on the other hand, was all
in. But, he needed help. So Woz and Jobs approached Fernandez, who was
working with Wozniak at HP at the time. As Fernandez remembered it, they
told him they needed an electronic technician and he was the best one
they knew, and would he come work for them at their little company.
Fernandez thought about it and
said to himself, "These are a couple of my friends, and not corporate
types with a lot of stability, and I'll be working in a garage. But, I'm
living from home, and I'm not married."
So he took a chance.
Bill Fernandez holds an Apple I, with an Apple II on the desk.
Photo courtesy of Bill Fernandez
Apple was not even officially a
company yet, and Fernandez had to delay working for Jobs and Woz until
he gave his notice at HP. But, when he came on board in early 1977 it
was just as Mike Markkula became an investor and Apple Computer, Inc.
was officially formed. Fernandez became the first official full-time
employee.
Wozniak said, "Bill was really
in that early circle of founders at Apple. He was part of the family. He
[later] got badge number four, but we really brought him in before Mike
Markkula [who got badge number three]."
Kottke said, "There are three
people who can claim to be Apple's first employee: me, Bill, and Steve's
little sister, Patty. Patty was actually getting paid a dollar a board
to plug chips into the Apple I board. That was in the early summer of
'76. And then in June of '76 I showed up, and it was an easy choice for
Steve to give that job to me. I never knew that he had been paying her a
dollar a board. He was paying me three dollars an hour, and I could do
way more than three boards an hour. So I was Steve Jobs' first cost
reduction. He could have offered me the same dollar a board he paid his
sister. So at that point I could say I was the first employee. But then
at the end of the summer I left to go back to Columbia to finish my
degree. And then in January of '77 Apple incorporated, and then there
was money and Bill Fernandez was hired."
While Apple was now a company, it was still barely formalized.
Fernandez put it in perspective.
"Jobs and I used to take turns going over to each other's garages,
typically, and hanging out there and working on things," he said. "I'd
bicycle down there, and he'd bicycle over to my house. But now I found
myself in my little yellow Datsun pickup driving over there and going to
work in the garage, which was kind of funny. And as things happened, we
built things, we built boards, we brought in processor technologies to
look at."
Now the two of them were
carrying the daily weight of a nascent company on their shoulders. Since
Fernandez was the technician, it was his job to help assemble and
solder and build things and offer feedback and input. As the only
employee, he also ran errands all over the place to do whatever the
company needed.
"It was just me. And for a long
time it was just Jobs and me because Woz was still working at HP," said
Fernandez. "Jobs and I were in the garage. Woz was in between HP and his
apartment... It was incredible. I'd be sitting in the garage and Woz
would come in and say, 'You gotta see this program.' ... Things were
always happening and always growing and always moving forward. There was
always forward motion."
The Apple I had been a
respectable start, but the Apple II turned into a runaway success. Apple
outgrew the garage and moved into its first office on Stevens Creek
Boulevard in Cupertino. Woz quit his day job at HP and came to work at
Apple full time.
"There was magic in the air.
There was a palpable sense that magic was in the air," said Fernandez.
There was also this implication that we were going to change the world,
or we were going to change society in a significant way... [There was]
the sense that anything was possible, that we were fulfilling the
growing demand and desire for people to own their own computers, that we
were empowering ordinary people to do things unimaginable, that we were
putting the latent, potential power of technology into the hands of the
people."
But, as Apple skyrocketed into
an icon of the emerging computer revolution and Jobs and Wozniak became
geek heroes, some of the early Apple employees got lost in the shuffle.
Fernandez was among the lost.
Once Rod Holt was hired to run
engineering, he became Fernandez's boss. Fernandez was a very capable
technician who helped shape the early trajectory of Apple and the
products that made it a success. But as the startup transformed into a
corporation, Fernandez remained a technician and increasingly ended up
doing unfulfilling kinds of work. "It was mind-numbingly boring," he
said.
He and Holt got along well, but
when Fernandez approached Holt about opportunities to move forward,
there weren't many options. At that point in 1978, Apple was up to 100
employees and was catapulting toward an IPO. It was an IPO that years
later would create more capital than any since Ford Motor Company and
would set a new all-time high by creating over 300 millionaires.
But, in 1978 as Bill Fernandez
was looking for opportunities to do more at Apple, the word was starting
to get around about employees getting a stock option. There was no
human resources department to handle the issue and explain it to
employees, but it was becoming clear to some employees that not everyone
was going to get a stock option.
"Bill was really in that early circle of founders at Apple. He was part of the family."
Steve Wozniak
"It was only a big deal to those
of us who didn't get one, which there weren't many. There were very few
of us," said Kottke. "The policy of the company was only engineers.
Apple was not unusual in that regard. That was common. Secretaries did
not get stock options. Hourly employees, in general, were not eligible
-- only salaried engineers. [Bill] was the hourly technician in
engineering, and I was an hourly technician in production."
So, with little hope of doing
more than assembling prototypes as a technician and no prospect of
getting a stock option, Fernandez decided to leave Apple just 18 months
after joined the garage as the first guy that Jobs and Woz wanted to
hire. His friends were now busy and overwhelmed trying to run a company
in their 20s, and quiet, humble Bill Fernandez got lost in the
background.
"There was no growth path for
me," said Fernandez. "I was a pretty naive, geeky kind of guy... As the
company grew and as we hired more and more high-level people, I became
bored and dissatisfied with working at a technician level and never
having the opportunity to grow into an engineer."
Bill got a job offer from some
people he'd worked with after high school. They had started their own
company making computer components, and they gave Fernandez the
opportunity to come work for them as a product engineer.
"So I left Apple to get some career growth," said Fernandez.
He said he also left because "it meant I could actually invent things and create things."
Unfortunately, it turned out
that the company and its technology needed a lot of cleaning up, which
meant that Fernandez ended up doing a lot of the same kind of technician
work that he was fleeing at Apple. So, it didn't work out. After a
year, Fernandez walked away, unsure of where to go next in his career.
Meanwhile, Apple II sales continued to explode, and Apple Computer, Inc.
prepared to go public with one of the blockbuster IPOs of the 20th
century, turning many of his Apple friends into millionaires.
Fernandez said, "We make choices
in life and choices have consequences... And you go forth in life
making a series of consequences."
The computer that love built
After leaving the component
maker, Fernandez took his life in a completely different direction. He
got out of technology. He searched for bigger meaning. He left the
country.
"I have always had too many interests," he said.
Fernandez performed on TV in Japan as a singer-songwriter.
Photo courtesy of Bill Fernandez
One of those interests was the
martial arts. Fernandez was a brown belt in Aikido, a Japanese form of
the martial arts that is primarily defensive and centered around the
concepts of peace and unity. The curiosity about Japan and the Far East
that he inherited from his mother, combined with his own studies in
Aikido, compelled Fernandez to leave Silicon Valley for Japan in 1979.
"I got a cultural visa and then
went over there and lived there for two years," said Fernandez. "I got
to go and live in a country where I had a lot of interests and kind of
immerse myself in the culture."
He settled in Sapporo on the
northern island of Hokkaido, which is about the same latitude as
southern Alaska. "It's snow country for Japan," said Fernandez.
Fernandez went to Japan to do a
combination of three things. He worked as an English teacher and tutor
for adults. He studied Aikido more deeply to earn his first degree black
belt.
He served as a cultural
ambassador for the Bahá'í Faith, a religion focused on building a global
community through international fellowship.
"I taught English to support
myself," Fernandez said. "At that time, there was a huge interest in
having native English speakers tutor people in English. So I had a small
group at a bank and a small group at an engineering firm... So that was
part of my day. It was preparing lessons and teaching classes. And then
part of it was just immersing myself in the culture... Being an
American there, people were interested in that. So people would come out
of the woodwork and become my friends and sort of set up cultural
experiences for me."
In Japan, Fernandez also got to engage his interests as a musician and humanitarian.
"In Sapporo, the Bahá'ís
sponsored a charity concert for UNESCO where I was a performer ... to
sing and talk about California. So I called it the 'Refreshing
California' concert. I sang songs and showed slides of California cities
and farmland and talked about what it was like, because America looms
large in the Japanese psyche, and California is one of the places that's
kind of famous and has kind of a character that attracts the Japanese
imagination."
But after two years in Sapporo,
in the spring of 1981, it was time for Fernandez to return to
California. When he landed in Silicon Valley in search of work,
Fernandez gravitated back toward some familiar friends.
"When I came back, I got into technology because that is what I knew," he said.
He did some freelance and
consulting work for several months, and he also reached out to Steve
Jobs. Fernandez said to him, "I need a job. Have you got anything
interesting?"
"I love working in wood and sometimes wish that I'd grown up on a
street of cabinet makers. But, I grew up on a street of electronic
engineers."
Bill Fernandez
Jobs certainly did.
At the beginning of the year
Jobs had taken over the Macintosh project. He was fighting to remain
relevant within the leadership team at Apple -- which now had a bunch of
experienced executives in its ranks -- and so Jobs had set up a
separate SWAT team of engineers and designers to build a different kind
of computer than the Apple II. For this team, he was adding
technologists that he knew and trusted. He only wanted the best.
In October 1981, Jobs hired
Fernandez to come back to Apple as a "Member of Technical Staff," the
15th member of the Macintosh team.
Because Fernandez had previously
been an Apple employee and his name was already in the company's
database, he was re-issued the same employee number he had before he
left in 1978: No. 4.
Apple was a much different
company the second time around, with thousands of employees,
high-powered executives, a corporate infrastructure, and a growing
campus of buildings in Cupertino.
But Jobs separated the Macintosh
team from Apple headquarters by putting the group into a two-story
building several blocks away from campus. It was next to a Texaco
station, and so the team members dubbed it "Texaco Towers."
While the Apple II was still
selling like crazy, Jobs predicted that it was destined to run out of
steam within a couple years and that Apple needed something much more
audacious to remain a leader in the computer business. IBM and a flood
of other companies were coming into the market with new products that
were creating brutal competition.
The Macintosh project was
something the Apple executives allowed Jobs to dabble with -- partially
in hopes that it would develop into the company's next great product,
but partially just to keep him busy and out of the way.
Jobs fired up his band of rock
star techies to create a new kind of computer that would change the
world, unleash the latent creativity inside of people, and bring the
power of the computer revolution to everyday people. While he was
notoriously difficult to work with at times during this period, he could
also be deeply inspiring.
"The Macintosh development was
basically an environment filled with love -- love for our loved ones and
our family members, because these were the people we kept in mind as
our target audience," said Fernandez. "It was hugely creative, and we
knew that we were breaking new ground and that we had to invent a new
world, a new way of looking at things, a new way of interacting with
things. It was a very creative, inventive environment where a whole lot
of hard work was being done to do that and a whole lot of hard thinking
about how do we accomplish our goals, and it was all motivated by
wanting to do something insanely great that would serve our loved ones.
There was all of that -- love, creativity, hard work, inventiveness,
vision, drive. So it was a wonderful environment."
Fernandez moved into a role
similar to what he had played in the early days in the Apple garage. He
was a utility man, a jack-of-all-trades, the person who filled in the
gaps.
"I played a lot of different roles," said Fernandez.
One of those early roles was as
the manager of the engineering lab. Another was engineering project
manager for projects like the Macintosh External Disk Drive and the
Macintosh External Video Port. At another time, he was the project
manager for the AppleTalk PC card.
When the Mac team finally moved
out of Texaco Towers and into the "Bandley 4" building on the Apple
campus, Fernandez worked with the architects to plan the move and make
the space a great working environment for the team. That included
"laying out the hardware lab, and building a no-doors-needed 'light
lock' leading into and out of the CAD room, putting trees along the
division between the main hallway and the break area," said Fernandez.
And "putting planter boxes with trailing vines, etc. along the tops of
cubicle walls to spread greenery through the office area in a
space-efficient way."
One of the skillsets that
Fernandez was developing along the way was designing interfaces for
humans -- both virtual interfaces and physical interfaces. The Mac team
turned out to be an amazing place to cut his teeth on these ideas
because the team dove deeply into the concept of user interface and how
to build a new one that average people could intuitively understand.
They famously settled on the metaphor of a physical desk, and they
imposed a tremendous amount of discipline on themselves to design a
system that wouldn't confuse users.
"On the Mac team, we were trying to bring the illusion of tangibility to the screen," said Fernandez.
The Mac engineers went to a
tremendous amount of effort to standardize the look and behavior of the
different controls in the operating system. They thought deeply about
checkboxes versus radio buttons, for example.
"All of those things we
consciously thought about how do we make a pattern of visual elements
that communicate their function and how do we make patterns that give
you a consistent way to interact with your program, no matter what the
program was," said Fernandez.
"We really tried to get all the
third-party developers to write programs so that they all kind of worked
in the same way, so that users would have to learn essentially one
language -- one visual language, one user interface language, one
interaction language, one behavior language -- that they could then
apply to all of the apps that they bought. That had a powerful force in
the industry. And everyone kind of copied those patterns."
Fernandez poses in a gray suit in November 1978.
Photo courtesy of Bill Fernandez
When the first Macintosh
computer arrived in January 1984, it included a secret buried deep
inside of it on the molding of the case. The signatures of the members
of the early Mac team -- including Bill Fernandez -- were emblazoned on
the lining.
"The Mac team had a complicated
set of motivations, but the most unique ingredient was a strong dose of
artistic values," explained Mac engineer Andy Hertzfeld in an article
about the early Mac team. "First and foremost, Steve Jobs thought of
himself as an artist, and he encouraged the design team to think of
ourselves that way, too... Since the Macintosh team were artists, it was
only appropriate that we sign our work. Steve came up with the awesome
idea of having each team member's signature engraved on the hard tool
that molded the plastic case, so our signatures would appear inside the
case of every Mac that rolled off the production line."
The signature panel was created
on February 10, 1982, almost two years before the product launched, and
had 47 signatures, including Fernandez, Hertzfeld, Kottke, Jobs, and
early Mac pioneers like Jef Raskin and Bill Atkinson.
Another one of the signatures on
the panel was three simple letters: "Woz." Wozniak had been part of the
early Mac team, mostly helping conceptualize what the Macintosh should
be and helping with the early processor design.
Around the time of the Apple IPO
in late 1980, Woz decided to give away stock options to the earliest
Apple employees who had never gotten options -- including Randy
Wigginton, Chris Espinosa, Kottke, and Fernandez. He gave them each a
stock grant out of his own chunk of shares. It was a generous move,
especially towards Wozniak's old neighbor and friend with whom he'd
built his first computer and helped become Apple's first employee.
"Bill is one of my favorite
people in the world," said Wozniak. "What I really respected the most
about Bill was his mind. He was so clear-headed."
Leaving Apple again
After the launch of the Mac,
Fernandez remained at Apple for nine more years. In 1986, he moved from
tinkering with hardware into building software interfaces, where he
discovered his niche and eventually developed a reputation as a UI
wizard.
"I found that I had an affinity
for user interface work and gradually migrated from electronic
engineering work to user interface design," said Fernandez.
"We make choices in life and choices have consequences... And you go forth in life making a series of consequences."
Bill Fernandez
In the Apple and Silicon Valley
tradition of thumbing its nose at corporate America and taking on
tongue-in-cheek job titles, Fernandez adopted "Master of Illusions" on
his Apple business card.
He went on to play a key role in
the development of QuickTime and HyperCard, which had a big influence
on the development of HTML and the world wide web. Fernandez was also
instrumental in the evolution of the Macintosh Finder system software.
One of his last big projects at Apple was designing some of the MacOS 7
folders, including the three-button concept for opening, closing, and
maximizing that still remains to this day.
In 1993, "Apple had started
laying off long-time veterans, presumably to save money by getting a lot
of highly-paid people off the payroll," said Fernandez. "I was in the
second round of these layoffs during that period."
Fernandez called the experience
"liberating." He immediately got several job offers for his services as a
UI expert. He worked for a database company that was acquired; he
worked for a document management company that went on to an IPO; and
then in 1998, he started his own company, Bill Fernandez Design, a UI
consultancy. He did that for 15 years, working on many different
projects for many different companies that he can't mention by name. He
did that until 2013, when it was finally time for him to launch his own
tech startup.
The future of UI
With a front row seat to the
birth of the personal computer and the rise of the internet -- and a key
role in several of the technologies that helped shape those revolutions
-- Bill Fernandez has accumulated enough wisdom to fill a library. It
gives him a ready perspective on the hottest issues in technology today,
and the stuff that's going to shape the future of computers, design,
and UI. Especially UI.
"There was all of that -- love, creativity, hard work, inventiveness, vision, drive. So it was a wonderful environment."
Bill Fernandez
"We are in a time of
transition," said Fernandez. "And like [how] the water becomes brackish
where river water meets the ocean, the state of UI design is messy.
There's some great stuff out there, much more than there used to be, but
there's still a lot of trash, and there's a lot of well-meaning but
misguided efforts. One example of this is in the migration from
three-dimensional, photo-realistic UI elements (window frames,
pushbuttons, sliders, etc.) to 'flat' UI design. Years ago a friend
asked what I thought web pages of the future would be like and I said
'like magazines.' I thought we'd see flatter designs, expert typography,
beautiful, magazine-advertisement-like page layouts, etc. That
prediction is coming true...
"But in moving towards flat
design we are losing much of the wisdom that was embedded in the old 3D
style of UI. For example: A user must be able to glance at a screen and
know what is an interactive element (e.g., a button or link) and what is
not (e.g., a label or motto); A user must be able to tell at a glance
what an interactive element does (does it initiate a process, link to
another page, download a document, etc.?); The UI should be explorable,
discoverable, and self-explanatory. But many apps and websites, in the
interest of a clean, spartan visual appearance, leave important UI
controls hidden until the mouse hovers over just the right area or the
app is in just the right state. This leaves the user in the dark, often
frustrated and disempowered."
Fernandez sees the current state
of flat design as "a very mixed thing" and worries "we have lost a lot
of the wisdom of the past, as we're moving into a cleaner future."
The startup
As passionate as Fernandez is
about the ways people will use computers in the future, today his time
is being spent designing a very specific kind of UI.
Almost 40 years after helping Jobs and Wozniak start Apple, Fernandez is launching his own tech startup, Omnibotics.
The company is still in stealth mode at the time this article is being
published, but Fernandez gave a few hints about its trajectory.
"Now that my kids are grown and I
can ignore them without harm, I have closed my consultancy to follow my
dream of starting a company that will transform how we interact with
our homes. This is the future I'm most looking forward to. And we're
looking for rock star engineers, marketers, and investors who want to
join the team," he said.
He said Omnibotics will "build
smart home electronics and I'm hoping that we can finally make it
possible to make your house more responsive to you, to give your house a
user interface other than mechanical switches and knobs."
Wozniak said, "Because of his
keen mind and his understanding of people, Bill is able to look at
technology from the perspective of the viewer and design something that
is usable."
Badge No. 4
For now, history will remember
Fernandez as "Badge No. 4" at Apple. Kottke, however, never remembers
Fernandez flaunting, or even mentioning, his badge number -- even though
low badge numbers were very prestigious at Apple.
No photos exist of Fernandez
with the famous badge, and he gave it to human resources when he left
the campus for the last time as an employee in 1993.
"I was a good boy and when I
left, I gave them my badge back," said Fernandez. "Some people have
ended up with their badges still in their possession. I don't know how
they did that. And I wish now I'd kept mine. [But] when you leave a
company you're supposed to turn in your badge."
Perhaps no Apple employee has
had a greater odyssey with the company than Bill Fernandez, with
timeless contributions and disquieting exits. He never made millions
from stock options. He never became famous as an early Apple pioneer.
But he has a legacy of work that influenced some of the most important
forces of change in our time, and he walked away with a wisdom that he
continues to use to play his part in technology's contribution to
humanity.
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