Steve

[cpratt]

I'm not surprised by Jobs' death, and of course my inner cynic wants to blame homeopathy or whatever the hell it was he was into; an anecdote that has stayed with me revolves around macrobiotic Indian food (or something) he tried to share with Gil Amelio back in the day, but of course I digress (and I don't really trust my own memory at this stage

Comments

[unzeugmatic]

I never made this connection before: I wrote the original documentation for Nutshell/Nashoba Systems. The original group there were some ex-Wang employees (with whom I used to vanpool) who hired me part-time in the evenings. It was supposed to be a couple of weeks and turned into a couple of months and then they hired a full-time person to take over from me (I had already left Wang as well but I was working fulltime for Teradyne). I lost touch completely with those folks, although I had heard they had come into a bit of money here with the sale of the product. I don't know why I didn't know it had morphed into Claris.

[cpratt]

That's too damn funny. I was the self-appointed gatekeeper of the only known copy of Nutshell in the office; because it was a DOS application, I guess they figured I should have it. Heck, I probably made a Virtual PC image with a running version of it just so everyone could see how far they'd come.

I don't remember the story of how Nutshell became FileMaker, but I would hazard a guess that it was an acquisition. If I remember correctly, only MacWrite Pro was truly developed in-house (at least at first); even ClarisWorks was acquired from somewhere else (in that case, I think some devs in Vancouver, WA, but I really don't remember).

Of course, Claris was eventually renamed FileMaker, Inc. Forgot to mention that.

[goodolmike]

Cool story. Thanks for sharing.
It's funny. I guess NeXt was right before my time, because it doesn't ring a bell. But all of a sudden, every one is talking about how much they loved it.

[cpratt]

I don't know if anyone outside the Bay Area would have been too familiar with NeXT: their hardware cost the earth, didn't run any consumer software, and was utterly obscure save for the few customers Jobs convinced to buy it (e.g. CERN, where Tim Berners-Lee used NeXT technology to invent the World Wide Web - there was also some bank or financial outfit that invested a lot in NeXT hardware, but I forget who that was).

[gunslnger]

There were NeXT machines on sale at the campus bookstore at UCSD in the early 90's, but yeah, they were so much more expensive than the Macs. And it didn't seem useful for a mere college student when we had to do all our coursework on the school mainframes anyways. I assume they were there for the grad students or something. :)