Michael Geary in 1976, when he met Steve
Jobs.
Michael
Geary
Michael Geary has been a programmer living in
Silicon Valley since before the world called it Silicon
Valley. And he’s got some incredible stories to tell.
For instance, he’s pretty convinced he was the first person ever
fired by Steve Jobs.
He was living in Palo Alto in 1976 and shopping in a health food
store.
“I was a scraggly looking hippie and I ran into this guy
at produce. He was a scraggly looking smelly hippie. I
just introduced myself and it turned out we both into computers,”
Geary told Business Insider.
Jobs told him he just started a company called Apple Computer,
and the name comes from “byte” as in “take a byte out of the
apple, ha, ha,” Geary recalled. (A byte is computer storage
term.)
“He and Woz were literally working on the Apple 1, literally just
the two of them,” and he mentioned he needed someone to do
some programming for him. “He needed a disassembler for the 6502
chip,” Geary said.
A disassembler is a computer program that translates the
chip’s language into assembly language. A 6502 were for a new
kind of computer, very small ones, not huge mainframes. Geary was
working at company doing programming on mainframes.
Michael Geary today. He’s
still a contract programmer.
Michael
Geary
Back in those days, it was really expensive to buy computer chips
to write programs for them. But it was possible to fake having a
real chip by using a software program called an emulator, which
pretended to be the chip. Geary had access to a mainframe
and an emulator at work, so he told Jobs, “I can do that.”
Geary went home and started to write the disassembler code.
“Steve called me back a few days later and said ‘this dissembler,
this is a for a microprocessor. Your work is all with mainframes.
They are nothing alike. All you know is mainframes, forget this
whole thing,’ ” Geary recalls.
“When we hung up, I was pretty disappointed. Then I thought, ‘Who
is this guy telling me I can’t program? I’ll show him. I’ll write
a partial proof of concept and I’ll visit him and show him the
code,'” Geary said.
So he dug up the address to Apple Computer and showed up,
with no appointment. It turned out to be the address of
an answering service. Jobs and Woz were still working in the
garage. In those days, a garage startup wasn’t considered a very
reputable office.
Apple
Inc.
“I said to myself, these guys are flakes! They are never going to
make it. And I turned around and walked back out the door,” Geary
said.
He stayed fired.
And he was obviously wrong.
Years later, Geary got asked to do a short contract job at
Apple (working on an email client called Diplomat) but the
singing of the contract was stalled. And at another health food
store, this one in Los Gatos, California, he once again ran into
Steve Jobs.
Geary approached Jobs again, and they had a laugh about the
first time they met. Geary didn’t tell him that he wrote the
program. Instead, he nudged him to sign the contract. On the
following Monday it was signed, though Geary didn’t interact with
Jobs after that.
In fact, Geary didn’t see him again for many years. By that time,
Jobs was ill.
They were at a restaurant in Menlo Park, California, and Geary
was at the next table.
“He looked like he vaguely recognized me. I didn’t want to
interrupt. I should have said hello. I should have told him I did
write that program. I didn’t have quite the guts to talk to him
at that point,” he said.
Jobs passed away a short time later.
“In the back of my mind, I’ll always regret not talking to
him that night,” Geary said.
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