The funding did occur during the dot-com boom, however the quality of the team was quite high. Mike Boich, Andy Herzfeld, Susan Kare and Bud Tribble were all members of the early Macintosh team. Mike had several successful previous startups return large amounts to the funders and Andy was also well regarded for Radius and General Magic as well.
Working at Eazel was great! I was there when the team was quite small; less than fifteen people. Eventually our tiny workspace was bursting at the seams and all the cubes were dismantled and rows and rows of picnic tables from Costco were brought. OK, that part sucked big-time. It reminds me of high density floor plans at Amazon.
Most of us were on IRC all the time and it was always funny to see a majority of the office silently stand up to go on a lunch trip that had just been arranged on an IRC channel.
Andy was a huge proponent of the Free Software Foundation and Richard Stallman gave us our employee orientation. Yes, he did put on a robe and wear a hard disk platter on his head during the final convocation.
Because of the reputation of the founders and the quality of the staff, there was always someone interesting stopping by; Jeff Raskin, Steve Jobs, Alan Kay, Bill Atkinson, Mitch Kapor, Heidi Roizen, etc. I remember most of these people because I would always have to ask myself "How did a kid who grew up on a farm and didn't have a college degree end up at a place where I could talk to people like this?" I had a similar feeling when I was at Be and Apple as well.
The early GNOME developers who were worked closely with were also an amazing group of people. Nat Friedman and Miguel de Icaza, Raph Levien, Havoc Pennington and many more.
I mentioned the Eazel team having a huge impact on Apple as well. I was able to learn from these people, go to Apple with them and watch them do great work. Darin Adler and John Sullivan, who already were legends to me because of System 7 went on to found the Safari team along with Don Melton, Maciej Stachowiak and Ken Kocienda. John Harper, who was respected for the the sawmill/sawfish window manager, went on to create CoreAnimation and I believe large parts of SwiftUI. Bud Tribble became a senior executive behind many of Apple's technology. The Apple Watch is just one of his projects. Pavel Cisler brought his input from Tracker at Be and Nautilus at Eazel to Finder, where he is still managing the team. There are many more that didn't make the trip to Apple, but ended up at Android and other places doing great things.
As for the day to day work, it was a lot like any other programming job. We used gcc, edited code, compiled, checked things into CVS, managed bugs in Bonsai, automated builds in Tinderbox, etc. When I think about it, you could probably take 2001 me and drop me into 2022 and I wouldn't be all that shocked. Same processes, different tools. I would be super disappointed things hadn't progressed the way that I had envisioned though.
