Revolution in The Valley [Paperback]

by Hertzfeld, Andy

  George Crow George joined the Mac team from HP in the summer of 1981 and designed the Macintosh analog board, which contained the Mac’s power supply and video generator. He was also instrumental at convincing the Mac team to adopt the Sony 3.5“ disc drive. He left Apple in September 1985 to co-found NeXT with Steve Jobs. He is currently working at Apple again.

  Donn Denman Donn started at Apple in July 1979 to work on BASIC for the Apple III and joined the Macintosh team in September 1981 to write the first BASIC interpreter for the Macintosh. He also wrote some of the initial desk accessories, including the Notepad and the Clock. Later, Donn was one of the authors of Apple’s end-user scripting environment, AppleScript. He currently works at the Open Source Application Foundation.

  Chris Espinosa Chris grew up at Apple, starting work there as employee number #8 in 1976 when he was 14 years old, getting paid $3.00 an hour to write BASIC demo programs after school in Steve Job’s garage. He has worked there ever since, except for a brief period when he left Apple to attend UC Berkeley. Steve Jobs talked Chris into dropping out of school to become the Macintosh publications manager in September 1981, and he has worked in a wide range of positions at Apple over the years. He was recently the AppleScript engineering manager and currently works on developer support.

  Andy Hertzfeld Andy started at Apple in August 1979, working on Apple II peripherals. He joined the Mac team in February 1981 and became one of the main authors of the Macintosh system software, working on the core operating system and the User Interface toolbox, as well as many of the original desk accessories. He later went on to co-found three innovative companies: Radius (1986), General Magic (1990), and Eazel (1999). He is also the author of the book you’re currently reading and the creator of the Mac Folklore web site (http://www.folklore.org/).

  Joanna Hoffman Joanna Hoffman started on the Macintosh project in October 1980, while it was still a research project, and constituted the entire Macintosh marketing team for the first year and a half of the project. She wrote the first draft of the Macintosh User Interface Guidelines and later led the International Marketing team, where she was instrumental in making the Mac suitable for Europe and Asia from its earliest incarnations. She was vice president of Marketing for General Magic in the 1990s, and retired from the industry to devote her time to her family in 1995.

  Bruce Horn Bruce practically grew up at Xerox PARC, working there during summer break from the age 14. Bruce became one of the main architects of the Macintosh system software after starting at Apple in January 1982: he wrote the resource manager, dialog manager, and the Finder. After leaving Apple in the summer of 1984, he attended graduate school at Carnegie Mellon, earning his Ph.D. in Computer Science. In 1999, he co-founded Marketocracy, Inc.

  Brian Howard Brian Howard was Jef Raskin’s close friend and collaborator, starting at Apple in January 1978 and working on the Macintosh project from its inception. Originally, Brian’s official job was writing documentation, but he soon became indispensable as Burrell Smith’s assistant, helping Burrell interface with the rest of the organization. He’s worked at Apple continuously since 1978, co-designing many of the best Macintoshes over the years, such as the Macintosh IIci.

  Steve Jobs Steve Jobs co-founded Apple Computer with Steve Wozniak in 1976, when he was twenty-one years old. After being rebuffed by the Lisa team in the fall of 1980, he took over the Mac project from Jef Raskin in January 1981, and led the Macintosh team until John Sculley ousted him in May 1985. He left Apple in September 1985 to co-found NeXT, Inc, and returned to Apple in 1997 after Apple bought NeXT in December 1996. He is currently the CEO of Apple, as well as Pixar, a leading computer animation studio.

  Susan Kare Susan started working on the Mac Team in January 1983. She designed most of the icons and fonts for the Macintosh, as well as lots of the original marketing material, and helped to craft the overall look and personality of the system. After leaving Apple in the fall of 1985, she was one of the first ten employees at NeXT. Since 1988, she has been a successful independent graphic designer.

  Larry Kenyon Larry Kenyon began working at Apple in the summer of 1980 to work on Apple II peripheral cards, and joined the Mac team in January 1982 to work on low-level software. He wrote many of the device drivers for the Macintosh ROM. He also worked on the memory manager and file system. He is probably the most underrated important contributor to the Macintosh system software.

  Jef Raskin Jef was hired at Apple in January 1978 to start Apple’s publications department. He conceived of the Macintosh project in early 1979, and formed a small team to pursue his ideas in September 1979. He put together an amazing team consisting of Burrell Smith, Bud Tribble, Joanna Hoffman and Brian Howard, and led the project until January 1981. He left the Mac team in the summer of 1981, and left Apple entirely in February 1982. Jef founded Information Appliance in 1982, which designed the Canon Cat, a small computer that embodied more of his ideas than the Macintosh. He is also the author of The Humane Interface, a book about user interface design, and is currently a professor at the University of Chicago.

  Caroline Rose Caroline started working on the Mac Team in June 1982. She wrote and edited the first three volumes of Inside Macintosh, the crucial Macintosh developer documentation. After leaving Apple in 1986, she managed the publications group at NeXT for a while and later returned to Apple to become the editor of Develop, Apple’s technical journal for Mac developers. Since 1997, Caroline has been a successful independent technical writer and editor, working for Adobe and others.

  Burrell Smith Burrell started at Apple in February 1979 as a lowly service technician. His brilliant digital board provided the seed that the rest of the team coalesced around, its Woz-inspired creativity setting the tone for the rest of the project. Besides five different Macintoshes, Burrell also designed the digital board for the LaserWriter printer. He left Apple in February 1985. In 1986, he co-founded Radius, Inc. and created their first two products, the Radius Full Page Display and the Radius Accelerator. He retired from the computer industry in 1988.

  Bud Tribble Bud met Bill Atkinson and Jef Raskin at University of San Diego in the early 1970s. Jef convinced him to take a one-year leave of absence from medical school at the University of Washington to become the first Macintosh programmer in September 1980. He was instrumental in convincing Burrell to switch from the 6809 to the 68000 microprocessor, which turned Jef’s research project into the future of Apple. A year and a half later, in December 1981, he had to leave the project to return to finish his M.D./Ph.D. degree, but he eventually returned to Apple in the summer of 1984. He left Apple to co-found NeXT with Steve Jobs in September 1985, and after a seven-year stint at Sun and year and a half at Eazel, he returned to Apple as a vice president of software technology in January 2002.

  Steve Wozniak Steve Wozniak co-founded Apple Computer with Steve Jobs in 1976. His brilliant design for the hardware and software of the Apple II created the foundation for Apple’s initial success. While he didn’t work directly on the original Macintosh, his engineering genius, impeccable integrity and playful sense of humor were a primary inspiration for the Macintosh team. He also founded Cloud 9 in 1985, where he created the first universal remote control, and Wheels of Zeus in 2001, which is creating wireless technology to “help everyday people find everyday things.”

  part one

  The best way to predict the future is to invent it.

  Alan Kay

  Andy Hertzfeld, Burrell Smith, and Brian Howard in 1987

  I’ll Be Your Best Friend

  August 1979

  Burrell Smith was creative in more than just engineering

  Toward the end of my first week as an Apple employee in August 1979, I noticed that someone had left a black binder on my desk, with a handwritten title that read, Apple II: Principles of Operation. The binder contained a brilliant, concise description of how the Apple II hardware worked, reverently explaining details of Steve Wozniak’s epic creative design hacks in a clearer fashion tha
n I’d ever read before. I didn’t know who left it there, but the title page said it was written by “Burrell C. Smith.”

  Later that same day I was approached by a young, animated, slightly nervous guy with long, straight, blond hair, who entered my cubicle and walked right up to me.

  “Are you Andy Hertzfeld?” he asked. “Wow, it’s amazing to meet you. I read your articles in Call A.P.P.L.E. and Dr. Dobb’s. Apple’s lucky they got you to work here. I want to shake your hand.”

  With exaggerated formality, he extended his right arm stiffly, almost in a parody of a handshake offer. “I’m Burrell. Burrell Carver Smith. Pleased to meet you. I wrote that manual and left it on your desk,” he said, pointing to the black binder. We shook hands and then he suddenly turned around nervously and darted off, without explanation. “See you later!” he said, without looking back.

  My cubicle in Bandley 1 was in the hardware engineering section because my first project was writing the firmware for the Silentype thermal printer. It was across the aisle from Wendell Sander’s office. Wendell was the designer of the Apple III and an extremely brilliant and seasoned engineer who used to design RAM chips for Fairchild and who understood the Apple II hardware design inside out. All the other hardware engineers on the team, except for Woz, usually came to Wendell for advice.

  I noticed that Burrell, even though he was supposed to be working in the service department in a different building, often hung around outside of Wendell’s office. Sometimes he waited hours for Wendell to have a free moment, so he could ask him to verify his latest insight about the Apple II timings. At times, when Wendell was busy, he would try the insight out on me instead, or discuss a fine point of the Apple II firmware. Soon, we started to occasionally go out for lunch together.

  The first time we went to lunch, I found out that Burrell’s creativity extended beyond his engineering work. He would often try to convince our waitress to concoct variations of the standard fare on the menu, thinking of something different every time.

  For example, after he successfully persuaded a waitress to divide his pizza toppings into thirds, he asked her to do fifths the next time. Or he ordered mixed sodas, as if they were cocktails, in ever varying proportions, like three-quarters Coke and one-quarter Sprite. The waitress often balked, but Burrell was sometimes charming enough to convince her to comply. He also obsessed on certain foods, becoming fixated on Bulgarian Beef sandwiches from Vivi’s for a while, then going through a Pineapple Pizza phase (see “Pineapple Pizza” on page 43), before evolving to his most enduring favorite, sushi, which provided a new range of interesting choices and combinations.

  Burrell also had a distinctive way of expressing himself, often by applying technical jargon to ordinary life—like describing a situation as meta-stable, or someone being a state machine—mixed with a dash of baby talk, such as adding plurals to people’s names. An attractive woman was referred to as a good prototype, or a good proto for short. Burrell had a great sense of humor and periodically performed hilarious impressions of everyone else on the team, caricaturing their personality quirks with an incisive phrase or nickname (see “I Invented Burrell” on page 8). He also liked to make fun of various language conventions; for example, when pleased with new software, he’d say “Happiness comma software.”

  One of his favorite expressions was, “I’ll be your best friend.” He offered “best friendship” for a wide range of activities, like making some change in the software for him or getting him a Coke from the gas station. “Best friendship takes place,” he would declare if pleased with the results. He also had a habit of reducing phrases to initials, like “B.F.R.” for “Best Friendship Relationship.”

  Once, right after Burrell conferred best friendship upon me, I heard him offer best friendship to someone else for a different favor. “Wait a second,” I challenged Burrell. “How can you give out best friendship to someone else? There can be only one best friend at a time, can’t there?”

  Burrell had a quick reply, delivered with a smile. “Of course there can be only one best friend at a given instant of time. But best friendship relationships may be highly dynamic. The average length of a best friendship is three to five milliseconds. So there’s no problem in having a new B.F.R. a second or two later.”

  We’ll See About That

  November 1979

  Burrell proves his mettle with the 80K language card

  Burrell Smith was a 23-year-old, self-taught engineer, without a college degree, who was drawn to Apple by the sheer elegance of the Apple II design. Apple hired him in February 1979 as employee #282, a lowly service technician responsible for fixing broken Apple IIs that were returned by customers. As he debugged broken logic boards, sometimes more than a dozen in a single day, he developed a profound respect and empathy for Steve Wozniak’s unique and creative design techniques.

  Meanwhile, the Lisa software team was writing their first code in Pascal running on Apple IIs because the Lisa hardware wasn’t ready yet. They had been at it for almost a year and had written more code than would fit in the 64K bytes of memory in a standard Apple II. In fact, the Apple II had only 48K bytes on its main board, but it used a “language” card to give it an extra 16K bytes to run Pascal. To accomplish this, the language card had to bank switch its RAM over to the ROM on the Apple II motherboard.

  Bill Atkinson was the main programmer for both the Apple II Pascal system, as well as the new Lisa system. He was in the service department picking up some extra language cards when Burrell heard him lamenting about overflowing the Apple II’s memory limitations.

  “Well, why don’t you add more memory to the language card?” Burrell suggested.

  Bill was intrigued, but he complained, “You can’t add any more memory because we’re out of address space. 64K is the limit of what we can address.”

  Burrell had already thought of that. “Well, the language card is already bank-switching the RAM, even double-banking the last 2K where the monitor ROM is. We’ll just make it bank-switch another bank.”

  Bill was enthusiastic, so Burrell built him a prototype while Bill modified the Pascal runtime to support the extra bank-switching. It worked like a charm, so soon Burrell was busy manufacturing 80K language cards for all the Lisa programmers.

  Around this time, Bill ran into Jef Raskin. Jef had written a series of papers about a consumer-oriented computer that would be extremely inexpensive and radically easy to use. He was ready to start building a hardware prototype and was looking for a talented hardware designer who could pull off his vision of a brutally simple, ultra low-cost machine.

  “I’ve got someone who you ought to meet,” Bill told Jef. He made arrangements to bring Burrell over to Jef’s house in Cupertino over the weekend.

  Bill and Burrell showed up at Jef’s house at the appointed time, and Bill introduced Burrell to Jef by saying “Jef, this is Burrell. He’s the guy who’s going to design your Macintosh for you.”

  “We’ll see about that,” Jef replied. “We’ll see about that.”

  Andy and Burrell in 1983

  “I Invented Burrell”

  Burrell had a great sense of humor, and he was capable of performing devastating impersonations of everybody else on the Mac team, especially the authority figures.

  Whatever idea that you came up with, Jef Raskin had a tendency to claim that he invented it at some earlier point. That trait was the basis of Burrell’s impersonation of Jef.

  Jef had a slight stammer, which Burrell nailed perfectly. Burrell began by folding his fingers together like Jef and then exclaiming in a soft, Jef-like voice, “Why, why, why, I invented the Macintosh!”

  Then Burrell would shift to his radio announcer voice, playing the part of an imaginary interviewer. “No, I thought that Burrell invented the Macintosh”, the interviewer would object.

  He’d shift back to his Jef voice for the punch line.

  “Why, why, why, I invented Burrell!”

  Scrooge McDuck

  Februa
ry 1980

  The very first image on the very first Macintosh

  Burrell Smith liked to do intensive design work over the Christmas break, so the very first prototype of the very first Macintosh sprung to life early in the first month of the new decade, in January 1980. It wasn’t really a standalone computer yet because the prototype resided on an Apple II peripheral card, but it already contained the essential hardware elements of Jef Raskin’s Macintosh dream: a Motorola 6809E microprocessor, 64K of memory, and a 256 × 256 bitmapped graphic frame buffer, which was hooked up to a cute, 7-inch, black-and-white display. Burrell used the Apple II host to poke values into the memory of the prototype so he could initialize the control registers and run small programs with the 6809.

  I went out to lunch with Burrell a few weeks later, and, knowing my appreciation for Woz-like hardware hacks, he explained the crazy way he’d contrived for the Apple II to talk with the prototype. He didn’t want to waste time designing and wiring up hardware to synchronize the memory of the two machines, since it wouldn’t be needed by the real product. Instead, he delegated the memory synchronization to the software, which required the Apple II to hit a special memory address to tell the prototype how many microseconds later to grab data off of the common data bus. It was weird enough to make me interested to see if it really worked.

  By now, Burrell thought he had the graphics running properly, but he wasn’t really sure; he still needed to write some software to try it out. I told him that I’d look into it when I had some time. He gave me a copy of a handwritten page that contained the magic addresses that I’d have to use and hoped I’d get around to it soon.

  I was used to coming back to the lab at Apple after dinner to see if anything interesting was going on and working on various extracurricular projects. I had some spare time that night, so I got out Burrell’s instructions and wrote an Apple II (6502) assembly language routine to do the necessary bit-twiddling to transfer whatever was on the Apple II’s hi-res graphic display to the Mac prototype’s frame-buffer, using Burrell’s unusual synchronization scheme.