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Here is a good place to get a little history on how the Mac came to be. Pretty interesting anecdotes from the people who made it happen.

No, it wasn't. The Mac was very much a team effort.

You lose the bet. According to Andy Hertzfeld, it was written by Steve Hayden, the same guy who conceived of the "1984" commercial.

To be fair to Steve, he did insist the key developers sign the inside of the case, and they did receive free Macs after the presentation (see the already-cited folklore.org site).

And if that's still not good enough, let's note that Andy Hertzfeld himself has given Steve Jobs the mantle of Father of the Macintosh:

"But ultimately, if any single individual deserves the honor, I would have to cast my vote for the obvious choice, Steve Jobs, because the Macintosh never would have happened without him, in anything like the form it did. Other individuals are responsible for the actual creative work, but Steve's vision, passion for excellence and sheer strength of will, not to mention his awesome powers of persuasion, drove the team to meet or exceed the impossible standards that we set for ourselves. Steve already gets a lot of credit for being the driving force behind the Macintosh, but in my opinion, it's very well deserved."

To be fair to Steve, he did insist the key developers sign the inside of the case, and they did receive free Macs after the presentation (see the already-cited folklore.org site).

And if that's still not good enough, let's note that Andy Hertzfeld himself has given Steve Jobs the mantle of Father of the Macintosh:

"But ultimately, if any single individual deserves the honor, I would have to cast my vote for the obvious choice, Steve Jobs, because the Macintosh never would have happened without him, in anything like the form it did. Other individuals are responsible for the actual creative work, but Steve's vision, passion for excellence and sheer strength of will, not to mention his awesome powers of persuasion, drove the team to meet or exceed the impossible standards that we set for ourselves. Steve already gets a lot of credit for being the driving force behind the Macintosh, but in my opinion, it's very well deserved."

The "chess" program was actually Alice.

the section just before the demo, Steve's buildup to the 1984 video.

If you are interested by this video, check out Andy Hertzfeld's accounts of that presentation. (Andy was one of the developer of the Mac back then.) While you're they're, check out the rest of the Classic Macintosh section of that site. It's a lot of stories (mostly by Andy) of how the Mac came to be.

(I'm not associated with folklore.org or Andy Hertzfeld or anything. I found the site a couple weeks ago while googling for little rubber feet, and got hooked.)

It was January 24, 1984, and the setting was Apple's annual shareholders' meeting.

Here's a description of the event from somebody who was there.

You can find a lot more interesting info surrounding the launch of the Mac at Andy Hertzfeld's Folklore.org. Probably most relevant would be the story about this very moment in time, The Times They Are-a Changin'. /karmawhore

You can find a lot more interesting info surrounding the launch of the Mac at Andy Hertzfeld's Folklore.org. Probably most relevant would be the story about this very moment in time, The Times They Are-a Changin'. /karmawhore

No, I imagine it's for the event at which the Mac was introduced; you know, "It sure is great to get out of that bag" and all that.

we -never- truly optimize our software systems.

Perhaps not whole systems, but one story about the original Mac calculator, that I didn't see on the Mac Folkore was how the original calculator was written in (IIRC) Pascal, and ended up being about 2k-3k in size. However, disk space on the 400k floppy was so much at a premium, that it was nearly dropped, until the creator then hand coded it in 68000 assembler, and got the size down to around 700 bytes.

You can tell a good programmer by how many lines of code he didn't write?

Yep!

I am wondering if that was a Macintosh prototype because I know that Apple was trying to get Microsoft to write some software for use on Mac before they even were officially released. Check out this site that has a whole lot of stories from the startup of the Mac. And the first mac was released in 1984.

This link talks about Microsoft being a 3rd party developer for Apple in 1983.

There is no demand for a 3D Windows on a Pentium Pro with Riva TNT. People with old hardware are happy running Win 98. It simply makes no sense to design 3D accelerated shell for old computers - the majority of the potential market have decent cards.

You should also not forget that making things as pretty as possible is important too. It's not just about accelerating moving windows and switching between applications. From the very beginning people were concerned about interface appearance. In 1981 Steve Jobs was pushing for rounded rectangles and was really happy when a solution for fast drawing of roundrecs was found.

It makes no sense to make things ugly, no sense at all. And while I am currently happy using Windows 2000 in classic 9x mode (even on a good computer with a Radeon 9600PRO) and even though I removed all shell customizations apps I tried (Object Desktop, various docks, Entbloss (Expose analog for Windows)), I would still appreciate a decent looking environment to replace this boring shell, be it Mac Mini with Tiger or not-yet-created desktop Linux system. I do not hold my breath for Longhorn, though... Especially since it's likely to include more DRM crap.

True, but he also has a history of saying he hates an idea and then coming back later and acting like it was his idea to begin with. As Andy Hertzfeld quotes Bud Tribble, "Well, just because he tells you that something is awful or great, it doesn't necessarily mean he'll feel that way tomorrow. You have to low-pass filter his input. And then, he's really funny about ideas. If you tell him a new idea, he'll usually tell you that he thinks it's stupid. But then, if he actually likes it, exactly one week later, he'll come back to you and propose your idea to you, as if he thought of it."

OK, so it's been a bit longer than one week, but considering the circumstances, perhaps it just hasn't been long enough yet. Of course, when the Apple pen-based portable comes out, it will be called an iWrite or iPad or something, and be made out of white plastic, not black, so as to distance itself as much as possible from the earlier product, but the handwriting recognition will most certainly be based on the same awesome technology (which, incidentally, Apple now includes in OSX, as Inkwell, and you can use it today on any OS X system by adding a graphics tablet).

From the last paragraph:

"Microsoft was founded by programmers and is still run by programmers, and the bias of programmers is that software can do anything"

From Donkey:

"We thought the concept of the game was as bad the crude graphics that it used. Since the game was written in BASIC, you could list it out and see how it was written. We were surprised to see that the comments at the top of the game proudly proclaimed the authors: Bill Gates and Neil Konzen ... we were amazed that such a thoroughly bad game could be co-authored by Microsoft's co-founder, and that he would actually want to take credit for it in the comments."

The problem isn't that Microsoft was founded by programmers. The problem is that it was founded by bad programmers.

Here you go. http://www.folklore.org/ProjectView.py?project=Mac intosh&characters=Burrell+Smith

Folklore.org is a great place to see what they were doing back in 1980-1982. They were doing things with windows that MS didn't get to for another decade.

You might enjoy this site which has lots of material written by Andy about the early years at Apple.

Mr Hertzfeld wrote a lot of the articles on http://www.folklore.org, where some very interesting Apple history is recorded.

Sorry if I don't spend the time to properly format this post, to bring a sense of eloquence to my writing style. I'm a computer programmer, I have not time for such things. I cannot even believe I spent my time responding to an elitist bastards comment...

The disk swapping bug you're referring to is referenced here, and other than a superficial similarity has nothing to do with your pet OS, your conspiracy rant notwithstanding.

In fact, Andy says he introduced it himself at 2am the day they built the final masters, but I'm sure he's in it with the Regents and Freemasons, or something.

Here's the link to the Folklore.org article

Anon Joe

this kinda reminds me of this story about the pricing of the original mac. their initial target price was $500, but the final design ended up being around $1,500. Then due to incresed costs and a lame decision by the board, it ended up starting out at $2,500, which prevented them from ever gaining a huge marketshare, which led to all sorts of problems later on.

maybe now with microsoft looking pretty weak with their security problems and continually delaying longhorn, and with the problems intel is having and the rest of the PC market is having Apple is seeing this as a chance to make up for past mistakes and finally sell the "computer for everyone" they originally intended.

When can we have an open source unix version of this software please? I am mathematically dyslexic.

Absolutely -- if Steve had been working there at the time, he would have been designing the calculator himself!

MS had it first, and they probably caught it from Apple -- remember when Apple were threatening to sue people (including MS) they claimed had copied the interface...

Microsoft did copy the interface from Apple. It was a pretty blatant ripoff. Even the internal API was a direct ripoff, even down to the identical function names and the peculiar use of handles.

Go read Folklore.org. In particular, read this story about Microsoft employee Neil Konzen. Basically he was working on Microsoft Office for the Mac and he (ab)used his close relationship with Apple to leak implementation details to the Microsoft Windows team.

... Apple had nicked from Xerox?

... Apple licensed from Xerox.

MS had it first, and they probably caught it from Apple -- remember when Apple were threatening to sue people (including MS) they claimed had copied the interface...

Microsoft did copy the interface from Apple. It was a pretty blatant ripoff. Even the internal API was a direct ripoff, even down to the identical function names and the peculiar use of handles.

Go read Folklore.org. In particular, read this story about Microsoft employee Neil Konzen. Basically he was working on Microsoft Office for the Mac and he (ab)used his close relationship with Apple to leak implementation details to the Microsoft Windows team.

... Apple had nicked from Xerox?

... Apple licensed from Xerox.

They're ultimately all ripoffs of Apple's Desk Accessories {more info}.

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Jef did not want to incorporate what became the two most definitive aspects of Macintosh technology - the Motorola 68000 microprocessor and the mouse pointing device. Jef preferred the 6809, a cheaper but weaker processor which only had 16 bits of address space and would have been obsolete in just a year or two, since it couldn't address more than 64Kbytes. He was dead set against the mouse as well, preferring dedicated meta-keys called "leap keys" to do the pointing. He became increasingly alienated from the team, eventually leaving entirely in the summer of 1981, when we were still just getting started, and the final product utilitized very few of the ideas in the Book of Macintosh. In fact, if the name of the project had changed after Steve took over in January 1981, and it almost did (see Bicycle), there wouldn't be much reason to correlate it with his ideas at all.

source

A guy who invented the Mac interface deserves at least that.

Are you freakin' nuts? What Raskin wanted to create in the original Macintosh project was, essentially, the Canon Cat. No mouse, no GUI, no 32-bit CPU. In short, an information appliance rather than a computer, and something no one would ever recognize as a Macintosh. He lost a power struggle with Jobs early on, when his Mac team was a half-dozen people, and left Apple.

Viz, www.folklore.org

I think history has pretty much spoken on the viability of his design choices, especially the relative success of the Cat vs the Mac's GUI. Ask yourself this, if those leap keys were such a breakthrough in the UI, why hasn't something analogous caught on in the last two decades?

Tyler

More to the point, it seems that Raskin has had some chip on his shoulder since Jobs kicked him off the Mac team years ago. Raskin also uses this as another opportunity to hock his book. This is not even the first time this year. Witness an earlier occasion with Berkeley Groks in March of this year.

Apple now does development by accretion, and there is only a little difference between using a Mac and a Windows machine.

Because every time you want to add a feature, you should redesign the OS from the ground up.

There's some good background on Raskin at Folklore.org, including my favorite, I Invented Burrell

Apple now does development by accretion, and there is only a little difference between using a Mac and a Windows machine.

Because every time you want to add a feature, you should redesign the OS from the ground up.

There's some good background on Raskin at Folklore.org, including my favorite, I Invented Burrell

The closest widely-marketed computer to Jef Raskin's vision of How Computing Should Be was the Commodore Plus/4.

Where did you read he was against a GUI? He was against a mouse, but everything I've read has implied the interface would, nonetheless, be graphical:

Jef did not want to incorporate what became the two most definitive aspects of Macintosh technology - the Motorola 68000 microprocessor and the mouse pointing device. Jef preferred the 6809, a cheaper but weaker processor which only had 16 bits of address space and would have been obsolete in just a year or two, since it couldn't address more than 64Kbytes. He was dead set against the mouse as well, preferring dedicated meta-keys called "leap keys" to do the pointing. He became increasingly alienated from the team, eventually leaving entirely in the summer of 1981, when we were still just getting started, and the final product utilitized very few of the ideas in the Book of Macintosh. In fact, if the name of the project had changed after Steve took over in January 1981, and it almost did (see Bicycle) , there wouldn't be much reason to correlate it with his ideas at all.

While performance is something that should always be kept in mind, we are a long way away from the days of the original Macintosh where a desk accessory had to weigh in at 600 bytes in order to make the cut and fit into both memory and on a floppy disk. As current desktop machines outperform the high end servers of a few years ago, it would be nice to put a lot of that muscle to use in improving the user experience. I'm not excusing bloated and slow code here, but we don't really need to be counting bytes.

In any case, database based operating systems have been around for decades, from OS/400 to the BeOS. Many BeOS users claimed it was hands down faster than any other shipping OS at the time, and it featured a journaling, database-styled file system. One of the primary developers of that file system is now working at Apple on Mac OS X 10.4's spotlight functionality.

The thing is - as our desktop storage continues to grow at the pace that it does, and as we curiously find ways to fill it up, new ways of looking at and finding the information we store are going to be needed.

DBFS, Gnome Storage, Apple's Spotlight, and WinFS, all take different routes to get there. It's worth looking at all and what they offer and where they differ. WinFS, is a new storage layer that combines file system resources with more structured data in a Relational/XML hybrid system, with the aim (from what I gather) of turning the file system into a global "soup" of data. That sort of soup can be seen in office suites or PDA style applications, and in older Operating Systems like the Newton OS, where everything is a shared and available resource that is stored and available through common structures. Spotlight, on the other hand, combines file system searches and indexes (think 'locate') with full content indexes and a metadata index, which uses 'importers' to parse out other file formats. Spotlight is not a new file system, but an indexing system that acts on files in the file system. From what I remember of Gnome Storage, it is similar, using the VFS layer and Postgres triggers and callbacks, along with plug-ins, to parse and extract relevant metadata and contents out of files. DBFS looks to be like WinFS in that it purely wants to be a new kind of information store. I don't know which style will win out. My theory is that technologies like Spotlight will eventually evolve into a new kind of storage system, while remaining familiar and file based for todays users and developers. But this is an idea whose time has more than come. It's something that's been promised for the desktop for at least a decade, and has been shown to work, albeit in targeted OS's (the Newton) or ones that never achieved mass market penetration (BeOS).

So I think that performance concerns aren't that big of a concern, so long as (like all development) there are good people working on the solution.

Conversely, a number of the companies in California (some of them quite big) have also had moments where they benefitted from interactions with Microsoft. For instance, Apple gained a lot of Apple ][ sales through the bundling of MS BASIC, which was more capable than Wozniak's Integer BASIC [the original in-ROM language]. The Macintosh did rather better than it might have otherwise, because of the existence of graphical versions of Microsoft's apps. The Apple /// only sold at all because of the availability of MS software, a market that gave MS enough money to expend into the international market. Latterly, Microsoft's cash injection through the purchase of $150M in non-voting stock assisted Apple, along with their five-year mission to continue supporting Office:Mac.

And yes, there have been many occasions when Apple have been hurt by MS, not least through user interface licensing issues. However it's not as black-and-white as sometimes suggested.

Conversely, a number of the companies in California (some of them quite big) have also had moments where they benefitted from interactions with Microsoft. For instance, Apple gained a lot of Apple ][ sales through the bundling of MS BASIC, which was more capable than Wozniak's Integer BASIC [the original in-ROM language]. The Macintosh did rather better than it might have otherwise, because of the existence of graphical versions of Microsoft's apps. The Apple /// only sold at all because of the availability of MS software, a market that gave MS enough money to expend into the international market. Latterly, Microsoft's cash injection through the purchase of $150M in non-voting stock assisted Apple, along with their five-year mission to continue supporting Office:Mac.

And yes, there have been many occasions when Apple have been hurt by MS, not least through user interface licensing issues. However it's not as black-and-white as sometimes suggested.

the salesman
different generation, different locale. Jobs was around at the birth of the PC revolution. He's had plenty of time to create products (hardware + software), make mistakes and sell to a large domestic then international market. I dont think Jobs has ever given away code. Jobs has a knack (and the appropriate reality distortion field ) to foster an ideas environment, root out the better ones (for good or bad: read Insanly Great and think Andy Herzfeldt (And another thing)), take a punt and back the idea to the hilt.

For that Apple, Next, Pixar have delivered big bucks.

the engineer
Compared to Jobs and Apple, Linus and Linux are babies. Linux is a product of it's time. Just like in Victorian England where amateur gentleman had the time (and money) to ponder, think, question and execute their way into the industrial revolution, Linus tucked away in his bedroom with a donated '386 and copy of GCC gave heart and life to the GNU suite of tools in the form of the Linux kernal.

This is one big block in the Information revolution that is now occuring. And while Linus maybe currently *worth less* than Jobs the potential for Linux to generate new wealth is staggering.

In Killer App, Downes and Mui argue that moore + metcalf = law of disruption + coase . Linux and the birth of the Internet has in a way directly influenced this. Anyone who can exploit these effects and sell products stand to make $$$.

• I can't help think of Frank Capras, Its a wonderful life, where instead of Jimmy Stewart it's Linus giving up his big dreams of making lots of money for the good of the (software) community. Only to have that goodwill repayed when it really counts.

Linux is a product. How Linus utilises his time, programming and creating or selling: Its up to him.

'... Beyond that, make $$$ by selling some commercial software that people are not willing to write for their own enjoyment or use. ...'

think diesel not ford
or to put in a different light ... produce software that others have yet to think of or cannot do for themselves. Not everyone want's to sit behind a keyboard and have to understand computers. But to think you can make a living the old way, ignoring mr more and metcalf and hope that distruption and coase go away is shere lunacy.

I like to think of Linux as revolutionary as the Diesel engine (which by the way was not patented and possibly led to the early death of Rudolf

the salesman
different generation, different locale. Jobs was around at the birth of the PC revolution. He's had plenty of time to create products (hardware + software), make mistakes and sell to a large domestic then international market. I dont think Jobs has ever given away code. Jobs has a knack (and the appropriate reality distortion field ) to foster an ideas environment, root out the better ones (for good or bad: read Insanly Great and think Andy Herzfeldt (And another thing)), take a punt and back the idea to the hilt.

For that Apple, Next, Pixar have delivered big bucks.

the engineer
Compared to Jobs and Apple, Linus and Linux are babies. Linux is a product of it's time. Just like in Victorian England where amateur gentleman had the time (and money) to ponder, think, question and execute their way into the industrial revolution, Linus tucked away in his bedroom with a donated '386 and copy of GCC gave heart and life to the GNU suite of tools in the form of the Linux kernal.

This is one big block in the Information revolution that is now occuring. And while Linus maybe currently *worth less* than Jobs the potential for Linux to generate new wealth is staggering.

In Killer App, Downes and Mui argue that moore + metcalf = law of disruption + coase . Linux and the birth of the Internet has in a way directly influenced this. Anyone who can exploit these effects and sell products stand to make $$$.

• I can't help think of Frank Capras, Its a wonderful life, where instead of Jimmy Stewart it's Linus giving up his big dreams of making lots of money for the good of the (software) community. Only to have that goodwill repayed when it really counts.

Linux is a product. How Linus utilises his time, programming and creating or selling: Its up to him.

'... Beyond that, make $$$ by selling some commercial software that people are not willing to write for their own enjoyment or use. ...'

think diesel not ford
or to put in a different light ... produce software that others have yet to think of or cannot do for themselves. Not everyone want's to sit behind a keyboard and have to understand computers. But to think you can make a living the old way, ignoring mr more and metcalf and hope that distruption and coase go away is shere lunacy.

I like to think of Linux as revolutionary as the Diesel engine (which by the way was not patented and possibly led to the early death of Rudolf

the salesman
different generation, different locale. Jobs was around at the birth of the PC revolution. He's had plenty of time to create products (hardware + software), make mistakes and sell to a large domestic then international market. I dont think Jobs has ever given away code. Jobs has a knack (and the appropriate reality distortion field ) to foster an ideas environment, root out the better ones (for good or bad: read Insanly Great and think Andy Herzfeldt (And another thing)), take a punt and back the idea to the hilt.

For that Apple, Next, Pixar have delivered big bucks.

the engineer
Compared to Jobs and Apple, Linus and Linux are babies. Linux is a product of it's time. Just like in Victorian England where amateur gentleman had the time (and money) to ponder, think, question and execute their way into the industrial revolution, Linus tucked away in his bedroom with a donated '386 and copy of GCC gave heart and life to the GNU suite of tools in the form of the Linux kernal.

This is one big block in the Information revolution that is now occuring. And while Linus maybe currently *worth less* than Jobs the potential for Linux to generate new wealth is staggering.

In Killer App, Downes and Mui argue that moore + metcalf = law of disruption + coase . Linux and the birth of the Internet has in a way directly influenced this. Anyone who can exploit these effects and sell products stand to make $$$.

• I can't help think of Frank Capras, Its a wonderful life, where instead of Jimmy Stewart it's Linus giving up his big dreams of making lots of money for the good of the (software) community. Only to have that goodwill repayed when it really counts.

Linux is a product. How Linus utilises his time, programming and creating or selling: Its up to him.

'... Beyond that, make $$$ by selling some commercial software that people are not willing to write for their own enjoyment or use. ...'

think diesel not ford
or to put in a different light ... produce software that others have yet to think of or cannot do for themselves. Not everyone want's to sit behind a keyboard and have to understand computers. But to think you can make a living the old way, ignoring mr more and metcalf and hope that distruption and coase go away is shere lunacy.

I like to think of Linux as revolutionary as the Diesel engine (which by the way was not patented and possibly led to the early death of Rudolf

The original NeXT system, like the Macintosh, needed to be supplied with its own hardware platform because it was impossible to get the appropriate features and performance out of commodity hardware at the time. Originally NeXT sold exclusively to the academic market. It fit their requirements for a 3M machine (a megabyte of memory, a megapixel display, and a megaflop rating of processor performance) It was priced competitively to workstation offerings from Sun, HP, and others.

Be also made novel hardware for the time. Hardware that showed off the advantages of BeOS far greater than commodity hardware could at the time. (What great gains can a thoroughly low latency multithreaded OS show without dual processors to exercise it.) Although I don't think the realized it at the time, managed to find themselves in a quirk of pricing that made component prices low enough that they could affordably build a machine. BeBoxes used Motorola two 603 processors for their dual processor system. This was the first PPC chip that Motorola designed and manufactured on their own. (the 601 was mostly IBM's work.) During the design and manufacture of of Apple's first 603 systems, they found that the cache design of the 603 was entirely insufficient to run their 68k emulator that was originally written on the 601. (the 601's unified 16K cache could keep most of the emulator cached, the 603's separate 8D+8I cache could not.) Motorola fixed Apple's problem quickly by producing the 603e, which bumped things to 16D+16I, but that left a glut on the market of the smaller, cheaper 603s. You could buy two 603s for the same price as a 603e, which made the business case for building a dual proessor 603 system. Eventually, the processor market rectified itself and Be's manufacturing costs made it unviable to continue to make their own hardware.

The problem with this is, at the time, the kind of hardware needed for a GUI was extremely expensive. The idea, originally, was for the Mac to be a very cheap ($1000) machine, and the Lisa to be a high-profit machine. But the hardware required to do everything kept increasing as development proceeded. Apple was not focused on profits, nor on market share. They were letting the engineers and programmers drive develolpment, and they kept demanding more powerful hardware. See Folklore.org for more. The result was an extremely well-designed, but also expensive, machine. Much better than you could get by improving the Apple II, or using PC-standard hardware. Indeed, with the Apple IIGS, they did try to create a Mac-AII hybrid, but the result was yet another bastard platform (GS-OS) that almost nobody was interested in.

The Lisa ended up as a $10,000 flop, and the Mac as a $2500 luxury machine. And I won't debate you that Apple quickly decided to use the Mac as a high-margin profit center. But in the beginning, the Mac was not as overpriced as you imply.

The inside story on Steve Jobs

One testing app created for the first Macintosh by Steve Capps was Monkey Lives, which created random desktop events in order to find bugs.

Story here at folklore.org: Monkey Lives

Folklore.org is a really neat site made apparently by Andy Hertzfeld, one of the original Macintosh team. It has lots of anecdotes, of which one of my favorites is I'll Be Your Best Friend, including the choice humor of convincing a waitress to divide toppings in thirds on a pizza.

One testing app created for the first Macintosh by Steve Capps was Monkey Lives, which created random desktop events in order to find bugs.

Story here at folklore.org: Monkey Lives

Folklore.org is a really neat site made apparently by Andy Hertzfeld, one of the original Macintosh team. It has lots of anecdotes, of which one of my favorites is I'll Be Your Best Friend, including the choice humor of convincing a waitress to divide toppings in thirds on a pizza.

They popped the card in and it kept working, enabling them to finish the test that night:

"Cliff told me that he could insert a disk controller card into Burrell's Apple II with the power still on, without glitching it out, a feat that I thought was miraculous - you'd have to be incredibly quick and steady not to short-circuit any of the contacts while you were inserting it, running the risk of burning out both the Apple II and the card. But Cliff said he'd done it many times before: all that was required was the confidence that you could actually do it. So I crossed my fingers as he approached Burrell's Apple like a samurai warrior, concentrating for a few seconds before holding his breath and slamming the disk card into the slot with a quick, stacatto thrust."