Pang: A great deal has been written about the Mac group having its own identity, and being encouraged to think of themselves as the company's real (or only remaining) visionaries. Was this how people working on the Mac saw themselves?
Rose: Absolutely.
Pang: How did they view the rest of the company?
Rose: As inferior, boring, behind the times. But we were happy it was there to help fund our efforts ;-).
Pang: Many of the descriptions of the Mac group -- as "pirates", for example -- have a macho twist to them. Did women have trouble find a place in -- or being accepted into -- the group?
Rose: No. The engineers were always treated as the big heroes, and they were all men, but they were very accepting of me and the other women who worked there. Everyone had a respect for people who did great work, whatever the nature of the work or the worker's gender. Steve always said he hired only the best, so if you made it into the group at all, you were highly accepted.
Pang: Or was it no more troublesome than usual in high tech in the early 1980s?
Rose: I never found it troublesome.
Pang: Jef Raskin and some writers have made much of a cultural difference between the highbrow, educated computer scientists, and the self-educated garage-band likes of Jobs and Wozniak. Was this a distinction that really mattered?
Rose: Looking at what the two different types of cultures produced, I guess it did matter. Tymshare certainly wasn't going to ship an exciting new personal computer. Being a self-educated "garage band" was both a help and a hindrance.