Fortune has flagged up a video from 2011 of an eyewitness retelling how Jobs behaved and interacted when seeing Xerox’s PARC revolutionary graphical user interface inventions for the first time. Although the video is old, it seems to have gone largely unnoticed until this week and features some interesting anecdotes about the events.
Wired has an interesting profile out this morning on Jim Yurchenco, a now-retired engineer whose career virtually started with the task of helping create the first mouse for Apple and Steve Jobs:
Yurchenco was just a year or two out of school when he got a call from an old Stanford pal, David Kelley. Kelley had just started a new design firm and asked if Yurchenco might want to join as an engineer. That meant a proper salary—Yurchenco had been working at a medical tech start-up, being paid mostly in stock—so he agreed. The company was called Hovey-Kelley; Ideo was still a few years off at that point. But thanks to co-founder Dean Hovey’s relationship with Jobs, Apple became one of the young company’s first clients.
In an SEC filing today, Apple announced that Luca Maestri has officially transitioned into the Chief Financial Officer and Senior Vice President role. His first official day on the job was yesterday, May 29th. Maestri is not yet on Apple’s executive biographies page, but an official profile will likely go live in the coming days. Apple says that Maestri’s previous job as Principle Accounting Officer will be folded into his CFO role.
Maestri, previously Corporate Controller and a Vice President at Apple, replaces long-time CFO Peter Oppenehimer. The transition was announced by Apple earlier this year. Oppenheimer will shift his remaining responsibilities to Maestri over the course of the next few months and completely retire from Apple at the end of September of this year. As part of his promotion, Maestri will now receive an annual salary of $1 million and new stock-based payment packages:
Apple has announced that its CFO Peter Oppenheimer is leaving Apple for retirement in September this year. Luca Maestri, vice president of finance, will take over as CFO. The transition will begin in June to smooth the changeover from Oppenheimer to Maestri.
Oppenheimer has been at Apple since before Jobs returned in 1997, as a senior director. He became Senior Vice President and CFO in 2004. Yesterday, it was announced that Oppenheimer would join Goldman Sachs as a board member. Oppenheimer was the lead of the Apple Campus 2 project; whether Maestri will take over this responsibility is currently unclear.
Here’s the reason, courtesy of a concept drawing from Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, where the graphical user interface was invented, and where Steve Jobs was introduced to the concept that was to lead to the Macintosh. 8BitFuture writes:
When the graphical user interface was later developed by Xerox, however, the team found that the vertical pointer was almost impossible to see due to the low resolution displays in use at the time.
Rather than make the pointer larger, the decision was made to turn it 45 degrees, making it easy to see. Despite the high resolution displays we have today, the concept has managed to stick for 33 years.
