Interview with a Legend (For us MacOS9Lives!)
http://www.storiesofapple.net/discs-filesystems-and-macs-interview-with-drew-thaler.htmlSoA: What parts of the Mac OS did you work on?
DT: I started out in CPU Software working on drivers for new hardware: video acceleration, PCMCIA, hardware DVD playback, and more. Later, I was part of the small group of engineers that created Apple’s (Mac) OS 9 and (Mac) OS X CD and DVD burning solution, called DiscRecording.framework. And recently I spent just over a year contracting for the CoreOS filesystems group.
SoA:You also contributed to iTunes. When was that? And how was the perception at Apple of the app’s importance? Was the iPod + (Music) Store strategy already known?
DT:My friends and I developed the CD/DVD burning technology at a company outside of Apple, and we were acquired. It’s a little crazy to think about this, but iTunes had no support whatsoever for CD burning at the start of November 2000. The paperwork for the acquisition finished up in the middle of that month. Six frantic weeks of development later, we had integrated it into both iTunes and the Finder in Mac OS 9 in time for it to be shown at MacWorld San Francisco in January 2001. It shipped to customers later that month. I continued to work with the iTunes engineers until late 2003.
iTunes 1.1iTunes has always been what we call a “flagship” application for Apple. It is one of the most visible parts of the Mac OS and Steve Jobs personally oversees many of the decisions about its interface. Steve was instrumental in taking SoundJam and removing features from it to simplify, simplify, simplify. I have the utmost respect for the iTunes engineers for putting up with that, since Steve is a perfectionist with a bit of a short temper, and he’s never been easy to work with!
I’m not actually sure whether the iPod and iTunes Store were planned when iTunes was first acquired. By the time we joined up, however, iTunes was successful and the iPod project was already in motion. It was incredibly secret, even by Apple’s standards, but we still heard internal rumors about it because we were working so closely with the iTunes team. The actual name was a surprise though. I remember thinking to myself, “What kind of a stupid name is ‘iPod’?”
SoA:This “company outside Apple”. Which company was that? Can you provide any additional info?
DT:We were at Prosoft Engineering in a subsidiary called Radialogic which was about to be spun off into a separate company. Apple never actually formally acquired Radialogic, since it wasn’t a separate entity, but instead made a deal with Prosoft to acquire Radialogic’s assets and hire its engineers.
the Authoring Support extension iconThere were five of us: John Bertagnolli, Ed Wynne, Mike Shields, Nathan Duran, and myself. We’d created Radialogic’s “CD Master” and “Storage Master” products. The CD Master engine became the “Authoring Support” extension in OS9, and our FireWire and USB drivers for external CDs and DVDs became the “FireWire Authoring Support” and “USB Authoring Support” extensions.
It worth reading ALL
Topic: Discs, filesystems and Macs – Interview with Drew Thaler (Read 2793 times)