donmelton

Yep, that's it. :)

That's a great damn story. And I'm certain it wasn't a coincidence.

Exactly. And for a moment there, he bought it. :)

Much better answer.

If there is, I've never met one. :)

The original options we had weren't restricted. Also, most of them were at a lower strike price since Apple wasn't highly valued then.

Yes, please someone tell that to Ballmer. :)

Yeah, there was nothing devious there. I hope.

The line about my son was partly to annoy him since he, unlike my wife, reads my blog. And we punk each other like that all the time.

Not that big. About 140 I think. My admin would know for sure.

D'oh! Yep. Noted.

My former minions probably think that. :)

My son, unlike my wife, reads my blog. That's in there just to tweak him. We punk each other like that all the time.

Yes, I have that one and I agree — excellent book.

Closure — that's actually a very good way to put it. I didn't feel burned out. Just tired and complete.

But I was very fortunate to have the means to retire. Many who experience burnout don't have that choice. Which is another reason there's such churn in this business.

As a manager, one thing I always watched for were the signs of burnout. I always said I spent way more time coaching people to pace themselves than to work harder.

Some of them did. But the decision to retire is not always about the money.

Thank you so much. I am humbled by that, sir. I will take your advice to heart.

This is great summary. Thanks.

I can't comment on iTunes.

Remember, Safari is not open source. Only WebKit is.

Neither, really. It's mostly because I retired.

Surprise, I would hope. :) And lack of recognition, I suppose.

That's just me being facetious. Don't read that much into it.

Apple was an excellent place to work and I had a great relationship with Scott, Bertrand, Avie and Steve. Nobody was going to shoot me. AFAIK. :)

I'm not going to comment on the present and future of Safari and WebKit. I'm retired. I have no business doing that. And it would disrespect the fine people at Apple -- my friends -- who are still working on both.

Thank you! I'm typing as fast as I can. :)

I would love to claim the foresight of planning for the iPhone all along. Alas, that was not the case. :) For any of us.

We built our own browser because we didn't want to depend on another company for a critical application.

We built our own browser engine because we wanted to use the technology in more things than a browser.

We built that engine small and fast because Bertrand Serlet would have shot me if I had done otherwise. :)

You have to remember that Mac OS X itself was smaller in those days. Not iOS small, but considerably smaller that it is now.

After the initial success of Mac Safari, there was a time when I was second-guessed by some for choosing KHTML and KJS as the basis for WebKit. When we decided to do the iPhone, I was suddenly a genius again. :)

That's just the way it works in the real world.

The string was originally just contained "WebKit." When it became "AppleWebKit" in mid-December (as I recall) then, yes, it was more likely to be discovered. But I felt that a 17.x.x.x address would be the clincher and the secret would be out.

I'll be clarifying that shared history in a later post. Specifically, what made me select KHTML/KJS over Gecko and other engines.

Thank you. That was my whole reason for writing it. :)

My mistake. We turned it off in the final release?

I don't know whether the Apple IP addresses were reallocated. I do know that Stanford returned most of its Class A allocation.

Firefox wasn't a big factor when Safari debuted. And the project was still called "Phoenix" back then. I believe that other Mozilla and Gecko-based browsers were more widely used at that time.