Biography | Tim Cook — The Infinite Loop Campus That Hired Compaq's Materials Vice President

People treat the 1998 hire as an obvious move toward a company that already owned the decade.

It was not.

Cook was thirty-seven and six months into the job of vice president for corporate materials at Compaq, then the world's largest personal-computer seller.

Apple recruiters had already been turned away more than once.

In March 1998 Steve Jobs hired him as senior vice president for worldwide operations, reporting to the chief executive.

Apple's own biography page, archived that spring on the company site, said the brief was procurement, the supply chain, manufacturing, and distribution.

He had spent twelve years at IBM, most recently as director of North American fulfillment for the Personal Computer Company, then run the reseller division at Intelligent Electronics.

The meeting that changed the decision was with Jobs, not with a search firm.

Later interviews described a short conversation about strategy after which Cook left Compaq against the advice of people who knew him.

This pin is 1 Infinite Loop.

The six-building campus opened in 1993 and became the public headquarters after Jobs returned in 1997.

Apple Park, the ring that later replaced it as the main address, did not exist.

The work that followed was operations, not industrial design.

The title that followed thirteen years later is a different memory on the same loop.

Photo: Apple Campus, One Infinite Loop sign, Joe Ravi, 4 September 2011, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Portrait: Tim Cook after the Macworld Expo keynote, January 2009, Valery Marchive, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.