Biography | Tim Cook — The March 1998 Move from Compaq to Infinite Loop

In March 1998 Apple was not the rational next job.

Cook was vice president of corporate materials at Compaq, then a much larger personal-computer company. He had been there only a few months.

Steve Jobs, back from NeXT after the 1996 acquisition, asked him to run worldwide operations at Apple.

People who knew Cook told him to stay. Compaq still looked like the safer balance sheet.

He took the meeting anyway, then took the job.

The campus that received him was already here: 1 Infinite Loop, finished in 1993 on the old Motorola site at Interstate 280 and De Anza Boulevard.

Six low buildings on a private U-shaped street, named for a programming joke that also happens to be a traffic pattern.

This was not the garage and not Apple Park. It was the research-and-operations campus Jobs's company occupied when Cook walked in as senior vice president of worldwide operations.

His brief was the unfashionable half of the company: manufacturing partners, inventory, the weeks of parts sitting in warehouses that had almost killed Apple in the mid-1990s.

He closed factories and warehouses, shifted assembly toward contract manufacturers, and tightened the time between a forecast and a finished machine.

By 2002 he was executive vice president of worldwide sales and operations. On 14 October 2005 Jobs named him chief operating officer.

The visitor who stands at the Infinite Loop sign is looking at the campus where that work was assigned, not at a single office number Apple has never published for 1998.

The company later moved its center of gravity a mile east to Apple Park. Infinite Loop is still there, still numbered, still the address on a generation of press releases.

March 1998 is the bend in the life. Everything that follows — interim CEO, permanent CEO, the supply chain the iPhone required — starts from the day he stopped being a Compaq vice president and started being Apple's operations hire.

Photo: Alison Cassidy, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons (inside Infinite Loop, looking toward IL6)