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The first time I was almost fired from Apple

was hired on at Apple in October of 1995. This was what I refer to as Apple’s circling the drain period.

There was a good deal of assembly code written for the HSL picker that allowed it to render a color wheel very quickly to the screen — even as the user dragged the Lightness slider in real time. To keep a long story short, I did get it sorted out — I rewrote the assembly code in straight C (a language I was familiar with) and the PowerPC was happy to display the HSL color wheel. But as I tried to lay out earlier, I was not very sophisticated to the intricacies faced by Corporate America and so stupidly (although innocently) I jeopardized the entire operating system Apple was about to release.

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