Interview with Chris Espinosa

About Chris Espinosa

Chris Espinosa met Steve Jobs at Paul Terrell's Byte Shop while the former was installing an Apple I, and later became friends with Steve Wozniak, despite having been warned against the two by his teachers at Homestead High School (which Jobs and Wozniak had also attended). He became a regular at Homebrew Computing Club meetings, and was employee number 8 at Apple (Mike Scott wanted to be 7). He developed programs to show at demos of the machine, and ran public demos of the Apple II until 1978, when he graduated from high school at started his freshman year at the University of California, Berkeley.

At Berkeley, Espinosa met Andy Hertzfeld, and rewrote the Apple II user guide at the behest of Jef Raskin, Apple's publications manager. He returned to Apple full-time, and was director of documentation for the Macintosh project. He hired Caroline Rose, Carol Kaehler, and various others to write the technical documentation and user manuals for the Macintosh; he also hired Sandy Miranda to write the "Test Drive a Macintosh" script.

After working on the Macintosh project, Espinosa spent a number of years working in Apple's Marketing division, then worked on the Kalieda project. He is now manager of the Components and Scripting department.

About the Interview

The interview was conducted on 13 June 2000. The transcript was created and edited by Alex Pang. [Please note: This transcript is an interim version, and has not been reviewed and approved by Chris Espinosa. A final version will be posted in the future.]

The original recording (a cassette tape) has been deposited with Stanford University Library's Department of Special Collections.

Contents

The transcript has been broken up into several pages, each of which deals with a particular subject. A full transcript is also available that contains the same content, but presents it on a single page.


Document created on 6 July 2000;