Caroline Rose grew up in New York, and received a B.A. in mathematics from Queens College. She moved to the Bay Area in 1967 (shortly after "the Summer of Love," she recalled, when "everyone in New York wanted to move to California"), and went to work for Tymshare as a technical writer and later programmer. "I was able to do anything I wanted to" there, but after several years the company was starting to falter. She worked in Douglas Engelbart's research group after it relocated from SRI to Tymshare.
In 1982 she joined Apple to write the technical documentation for the Macintosh. Inside Macintosh, which she co-wrote and edited, was used by countless Macintosh software developers. She left Apple in 1986, and became head of publications at NeXT. In 1991, she returned to Apple to edit develop, The Apple Technical Journal. Since 1997 she has been a contract writer and editor, and has worked with Adobe, Netscape, Marimba, and Apple, among others.
Caroline Rose was interviewed in Palo Alto on 14 March 2000. The interview was transcribed and edited by Alex Pang; this transcript also contains additional information, drawn from e-mail between Pang and Rose, covering various points. The transcript was reviewed by Rose, and the final version created on 15 June 2000.
The original audio file is not available.