Wired has published an article featuring Apple executives Tim Cook, Phil Schiller, Eddy Cue and more who reflect on their memories working with Steve Jobs at Infinite Loop, Apple’s former corporate headquarters in Cupertino, California.
The article, available to read in full here, details Tim Cook’s first day working at Infinite Loop, and how Mike Slade, who served as special assistant to Steve Jobs from 1999 to 2004, was told of Jobs’ battle with pancreatic cancer. Wired’s “Oral History Of Apple’s Infinite Loop” offers a glimpse into the company’s naming scheme for conference rooms, and how navigating through the building was like navigating through a maze.
Tim Cook recalls how on his first day working at Infinite Loop he had to cross a picket line of protesters angry about Jobs’ decision to kill the Newton.
My first day at work I had to cross a picket line to get in the building—they are out with signs and yelling and I’m asking myself, “What have I done?” I learned that it was because Steve decided to kill the Newton. I told him there’s protesters outside, and he says, “Oh yeah, don’t worry about that.”
Phil Schiller discusses how before the days of Apple news sites, executives waited around for the latest weekly magazine delivery to see what internal secrets had been leaked to the press.
Things were so different then—there were no cell phones, not even Wi-Fi. We didn’t get all our news on the internet yet, so the drop of magazines was a big deal to everybody. Somebody would go around with the mail cart of everybody’s magazines, and we’d get our Macworlds and MacWEEKs and look at the rumor column on the back page and say, “Uh, oh, what leaked?”
Greg Joswiak remembers how literally every person at Infinite Loop had their own office.
“They built this campus fast, and it was obviously a bright shiny object. Everybody wanted to move in. It was a gigantic shift in the way we worked, because we went from being in cubes to, all of a sudden, literally every person had an office. – The original inhabitants of all the floors got to name their own conference rooms. It’s a very weird set of names. We have rooms like Here and There. I still have the hardest time keeping it straight. Which one’s Here, which one’s There?”