The Fucking Medal

Apple · iMovie 1.0 · 1998

Halfway through building the very first version of iMovie, I made a call that nearly got me fired. iMovie had to capture DV video off FireWire without dropping a single frame — and at the time, Apple’s own QuickTime simply couldn’t do it. So my tiny team wrote our own low-level capture engine instead. It was so bomb-proof the whole Mac could freeze and it would still be writing every frame to disk.

One day I got called into Steve’s office. Phil Schiller and Tim Schaaf, who ran the QuickTime team, were already there. I didn’t know why I’d been summoned. “So I understand you’re not using QuickTime,” Steve said, “and that’s a big fucking problem.” What I found out later was that I’d been set up — someone was hoping to get me fired.

I didn’t flinch. “That’s true, we are doing that. The reason is that QuickTime doesn’t work yet and we can’t use it and we need to make our schedule. And by the way, it’s better than QuickTime.”

Steve turned to the QuickTime lead and asked if it was true that you could import either the video or the audio, but not both. To his credit, he told the truth: yeah, basically — it doesn’t work yet.

And then he yelled for the next five minutes.

A few weeks later I got called into the office of Apple’s VP of Human Resources, which is never a good thing. The first words out of his mouth were, “Don’t worry.” They’d had a medal made. It was engraved with the words “fucking medal,” and they held a little ceremony.

As far as I know, I’m the only person in the world holding a medal from Steve Jobs that says “fucking medal” on it. It still hangs on my office wall — and people always ask about it.