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Apple: Help Wanted

Apple advertised in two recent issues of MacWEEK, using a two page spread ad to list the new jobs it has available. None of them looked like they were designed for us, so we thought we might pass along some of the more interesting ones, though a lot of them sound like palm readings, as in – "You will meet a tall dark engineer of the appropriate sex."

The first job listed under Product Design & Imaging is Reliability Engineer. Hmm, wonder what they’re getting at? A bit further on down the page, two jobs for hardware types are listed with the blurb "You will work on advanced floppy disks." There’s an interesting thought. Now that the SuperDrives have finally calmed down a bit, it’s time to look into new drives. The new NeXT machines will have 2.8 megabyte floppies, and Kennect’s Drive 2.4 can read and write at 2.4 megabytes, but it seems more likely that Apple is looking into the floppy technology that can put 10 or 20 meg on a single disk. Listed right after the floppy drive jobs is one which says something about "you will take primary responsibility for optical drive evaluation, selection, and debug." Aside from the dubious grammar of that last word, it sounds like Apple is playing catch-up with Steve Jobs. Someone should tell them that the NeXT’s optical disk is now an option, not a standard. One way or another, it will probably be a while before any new floppies or flopticals hit the market.

The next section is Video/Graphics & Voice/Speech. The fifteen jobs listed here indicate that Apple will be putting its money where John Sculley’s mouth has been recently in regard to multimedia. Two interesting jobs are the Text to Speech Software Engineer and the Voice Recognition Software Engineer. Macintalk has been officially dead for some time, but many people were less than pleased with its demise. These two engineers ought to come up with some useful stuff, particularly considering the rumors that the new IIsi will have built-in audio digitizing hardware and System 6.0.6 will have a cdev and a HyperCard XCMD for digitizing sound. A number of the other jobs in this section use the words compression and decompression. Pleasant of them to compress all this video stuff, even if they are working on some larger storage devices as well. The most cryptic entry is one which reads "You will contribute to our 3D product." Haven’t heard about that one before.

The last section, IS & T, is devoted to relatively boring corporate-type jobs such as designing 4D databases and business applications on a whole slew of nasty IBM machines like the S/370-3090, S/38, and AS400. ‘Tis the price you pay for becoming a "serious business machine" company.

Apple Computer
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Cupertino, CA 95014

Information from:
Adam C. Engst — TidBITS Editor

Related articles:
MacWEEK — 14-Aug-90, Vol. 4 #28, pg. 82

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