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Apple History At folklore.org

Posted by timothy on from the fun-reading dept.

oaklybonn writes "Andy Hertzfeld seems to be the primary author on this fascinating site, which details many of his experiences in the Macintosh (Bicycle??) development efforts. It includes such choice commentary as: "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.", on a page describing a game bundled with the original IBM PC." Reader themexican adds "As a plus, Hertzfeld notes in the faq that the python code running the well-designed and easy to navigate site will be made public in the near future."

22 of 223 comments (clear)

  1. Mac Anniversary by ahacop@wmuc.umd.edu · · Score: 4, Interesting

    So, what happened with the rumors of a special announcement on Monday in commemorate the Mac's anniversary?

  2. Bicycle by mr100percent · · Score: 5, Informative
    What, no elaboration on why it was called the Bicycle? Fine, I'll enlighten you.

    Apparently there was a story in Scientific American, or Popular Science, or some such magazine where the scientists were trying to determine what was the most efficient of animals in terms of locomotion. Which creature moved with the least amount of calories burned? Well, humans were waay down the list, pathetic in terms of other creatures. The top animal with the most efficient means of movement was an eagle or something. Then, one guy had this idea to measure how efficient a human being is on a bicycle. It was awesome, he was drastically more efficient, able to go further and without burning as many calories. It knocked the bird out of first place.

    So, early on, Apple was planning on calling it the "Bicycle for the Mind." I don't know if it makes as much an impact if you don't know the story behind it.

    I got this anecdote from one of the Apple behind-the-scenes books (I forget which), like Apple Confidential.

    1. Re:Bicycle by kfg · · Score: 5, Interesting

      You also have to understand the energy crisis culture at the time the fact that more scientific research went into bicycles in the previous ten years than probably all of thier history previous.

      It was right about at that time that the number of bicycles in America once again outnumbered cars.

      In 1980 in think there like 10,000 people in America who had ever heard of the Tour de France. In 1984 it was nearly as commonly known as the World Series.

      Bicycle was actually a buzzword.

      There is a species of albatros that lives entirely at sea for months at a time, generally soaring at little more than wave hight. It is so adapted to this enviroment and so efficeint in flight that it can sleep while so soaring.

      Even though water is a dense medium animals that are adapted to it do not have to expend energy supporting their own weight. I've got the chart from MIT around here somewhere, but can't lay hands on it immediately, as I recall the dolphin and tuna and salmon topped the list for animal motion by its own power (a soaring bird may use little energy, but that's because it's not doing much of anything. Air and gravity are.) A Portugese Man-o-War simply floats with the tide, as a man in an innertube might. Torpor is very energy efficient.

      So what animal is the most efficeint will change with your definition of "motion."

      It is interesting to note, however, that not only is a man on a bicycle more energy efficient than a swimming dolphin, but he is more energy efficient than the same man riding a horse.

      This is why the invention of the bicycle was such a stunning technological step that transformed society even before the advent of the motor car. The first smooth paved roads were made for the bicycle. The cars uspurped them.

      KFG

    2. Re:Bicycle by kfg · · Score: 5, Informative

      Still haven't been able to dig that one up. I've got some graphs here comparing human power output to that of a horse, but that's a horse of a different color.

      On the other hand if you've done any riding of both it's surprising at first, but reflection bears it out.

      If you try to sit on a horse like you do on a chair you'll get pounded to death. Your butt will turn to hamburger, your spine will get crunched (forensic examination of Custer's troops showed spinal degredation even among teenagers as I recall). You have to lift yourself up and down in stirrups in rythmn with the horse. Saves your butt and spine, but until you've done a fair amount of riding you'l come home with your legs aching. Riding a horse is a lot of work. This is why the genteel class prefered the surrey. Even if, for some reason, you choose to sit like a sack and take the pounding you'll burn a fair number of extra calories in the process. Riding a horse works all the muscles of the body, each burning calories, no matter how slightly.

      On a bicycle you can simply sit; only the legs are really using extra calories; and fairly gentle pressure on the pedals will give you 8 mph or so on the level. Grandma can do this and keep it up all day. 12 mph is the speed a man with virtually depleted sugar stores can ride all day (although he won't enjoy it very much). An expert can ride at 15 mph until he falls asleep if he eats normally(the record average speed for crossing the US coast to coast is 15.3 mph, that average includes all downtime such as for sleeping. The clock started in California and stopped in Atlantic City NJ).

      I have to note that all of this is highly speed dependant. For instance, it takes a world class athlete (horse or man) to hit 40 mph, but the jockey of a horse galloping at 40 mph is probably working at about the rate of a bicyclist going 20 mph; about .2 hp ( watch a horse race on the tube, the jockey ain't just sitting there), whereas it's obvious that a man on a bicycle going 40 mph is pushing the very limits of human capability. (I'll note though that American professional cyclist Jackie Simes III beat a trotter in a race at Saratoga Springs. I've ridden a bicycle race on the same track. Trust me, the horse was at the advantage here. I never, ever want to race a bicycle on a horse track again)

      The bicycle is at the disadvantage going uphill or into the wind. On the other hand riding a bicycle downhill requires very little energy while riding a horse downhill requires more human energy.

      None of it is very straight forward and thus the claim that a man on a horse uses more energy than a man on a bicycle is provisional based on the conditions.

      As I recall the figure I have is for a horse at a trot of about 8 mph (which is why I chose that figure above) and a man bicycling at the same speed on the level in still air.

      The man on the bicycle will be expending about .03 horsepower, barely more than walking to the fridge.

      Yeah, in the mid 70s I was a bicycle researcher, which is why I have that chart, and why it is "somewhere," although I concentrated more on dynamics.

      KFG

  3. Apple history by Kris+Thalamus · · Score: 5, Informative

    A model by model Apple history can be found here.

  4. A little more history... by Jon+Abbott · · Score: 4, Informative

    Andy Hertzfeld is one of the guys who helped design the original Mac, and also one of the people behind Eazel, the GNOME UI polishing group. Eazel was the group that contributed Nautilus file manager to GNOME. Strangely, Eazel's webpage now displays jibberish...

    --
    Slashdot's first reaction to VMware
  5. Why is Apple's UI so much better than the rest? by ObviousGuy · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I think it boils down to the core concept that "users do not want to use a computer". From this leads designers to think of ways of alleviating redundancies and mundanity and in its place add comfort and features. The Mac UI really was a significant milestone for computers when it was first introduced. The GUI concept was a long time in coming and the Mac was so far ahead of the rest that it is only the lack of business acumen of the folks at Apple that hampered such a revolutionary product.

    Even today the interface is still significantly different and better than the alternatives. The concept of only a single window frame with a single menu bar at the top of the screen is easy for new users to grok. The reduction of mouse buttons to one makes such things as "Press the right-click... nono the button on the right... no, don't double click it, only click it once... no, press Control-Z to undo that... no, just stop touching the computer until I can come over, mom" a thing of the past. Who would have thought that a seemingly backwards step as the single mouse button would be such a revolutionary step forward for computing?

    It's almost like Apple has sucked all the brainpower out of Silicon Valley and packed it all into their Macintosh line. I have never owned a Mac, but I have many friends who do and who constantly rave about how much they love it. And I believe deep down that the reason they love it so much is because fundamentally they hate computers, but their Mac behaves unlike any other computer out there. It does its job and gets out of the way, unlike other operating systems which force you to spend half your time fiddling with screen refresh rates and Config menus just to get down to your real business.

    --
    I have been pwned because my /. password was too easy to guess.
    1. Re:Why is Apple's UI so much better than the rest? by prockcore · · Score: 4, Interesting

      The reduction of mouse buttons to one makes such things as "Press the right-click... nono the button on the right... no, don't double click it, only click it once... no, press Control-Z to undo that... no, just stop touching the computer until I can come over, mom" a thing of the past.

      First of all, Apple invented the double click, which totally breaks the motif that Apple intended to create with the introduction of the mouse.

      Secondly, by getting rid of the right mouse button, Apple introduced things such as "control click.. no, control, not option.. no, not alt.. control.. yeah" You will never convince me that control clicking, or click-and-hold (which doesn't even work outside of the finder) is an adequate replacement for a second mouse button.

      Of course you can plug in a multibutton mouse into the mac and it works, this doesn't help people with laptops.

      The lack of a right mouse button and a scrollwheel on mac laptops makes things very frustrating.. and we have to resort to installing things like SideTrack to do things with the touchpad that PC touchpads do by default.

      In fact, Apple should just integrate SideTrack into the OS, or add a damn scrollwheel.

      Don't forget other UI disasters Apple is responsible for like Home and End keys that never seem to do what you expect.

      For example, in Safari, I expect that when I'm editing a text field, if I hit home, the cursor should move to the beginning of the field, not scroll to the top of the page. If I'm selecting emails in mail.app, hitting up and down selects the next and previous emails, but hitting home doesn't take me to the top of the email list, it scrolls the currently selected email.

    2. Re:Why is Apple's UI so much better than the rest? by typhoonius · · Score: 4, Informative

      Don't forget other UI disasters Apple is responsible for like Home and End keys that never seem to do what you expect. For example, in Safari, I expect that when I'm editing a text field, if I hit home, the cursor should move to the beginning of the field, not scroll to the top of the page. If I'm selecting emails in mail.app, hitting up and down selects the next and previous emails, but hitting home doesn't take me to the top of the email list, it scrolls the currently selected email.

      Use Command+Left to go to the beginning of a line or Command+Right to go to the end of a line. Alt+Left and Alt+Right skip words. It's not a bad system necessarily, just one you aren't used to.

    3. Re:Why is Apple's UI so much better than the rest? by sapporo · · Score: 4, Insightful
      Sorry, I have always considered this a confusing, bad design.

      IMHO, there's more to that design decision that you think. The fact that the Mac's menu bar is placed at the top of the screen makes it a lot easier to point at with the mouse, because you simply cannot move the mouse pointer too far. This makes it far superior in terms of usability that Windows-style menus at the top of each window.

      For more details, I recommend reading "The Humane Interface" by Jef Raskin. UIs should be based on scientific usability studies, not developers' tastes - that's what Gnome and KDE suffer from.

    4. Re:Why is Apple's UI so much better than the rest? by Bones3D_mac · · Score: 5, Insightful
      "Sorry, I have always considered this a confusing, bad design. It's a relic of single-tasking from the original Mac OS. The problem is that it's not just a single window frame. In the original Mac with single-tasking, the desktop was monopolized by a single app, even though that app might have multiple windows. But with multitasking, all the windows from different programs are on the desktop, yet there is no visual mapping from the menubar to its associated windows in the foreground program."

      There is good reason for the way the Mac OS handles itself the way it does. While it would seem like a good idea to contain all parts of a program within a single window, there are several problems with this... many of which become very confusing to the end user.
      • Too many menus!

      • As the user begins opening more and more applications, it takes longer for the user to find the correct menu among several windows. Going by the Human Interface Guidelines, a single menu on the screen reduces the time needed to locate the correct item. The menu also identifies the currently active application by displaying the application name/icon within itself.

      • Where did my menu go?

      • By making the menu part of the window, the menu is forced to travel around the screen with the window, unless the window is maximized to full screen. By locking the menu into a single, isolated place on the screen, it causes the interface to become much more predictable for the user. Predictability equals efficiency.

      • How do I create a new document after closing the last one, without having to relaunch the entire application?

      • With a menu stored entirely within a window, you can't... unless your application displays windows within other windows. Under the Human Interface Guidelines, this isn't an issue. The app continues running until the user decides to kill it himself. As applications get bigger over time, so does their load time. The time wasted per year by creating a new instance of an app each time the user mistaken closes the previous document when he meant to create a new document, could add up to hours or even days worth of time.
      There are other issues, but these are the major ones that tend to cause the most trouble. This is not to say there aren't problems with the Mac OS in it's current form though. For whatever reason, Apple apparently did away with most of the Human Interface Guidelines somewhere between Mac OS 8 and Mac OS X. As a result, things are now much more complicated than they need to be. So, if there is a problem with something in Mac OS 9/Mac OS X, blame Apple... not the Human Interface Guidelines they should have been following.
      --


      8==8 Bones 8==8
  6. Re:MS co-founder? by javiercero · · Score: 4, Interesting

    LOL! Nice try at Troll dom. Actually it was Allen who wrote most of the code, and it was not DOS but BASIC. One is an operating system, the other one is a language. Actually Bill Gates did not graduate from Hardvar, and it got there due to family conections not sheer brilliantness (scion). Oh, and he claims he dropped out, officially he got in trouble with the administration because the machine him and Allen used to develope the basic code, a PDP, did not belong to them.. but rather the school. They actually moved the computer that was not their property to their dorm room, they used university property to develop a commercial language. Actually BASIC was not even their own invention, so they basically made a port of the language.

    DOS was not an MS product, they bought the code from a Seattle based company. As far as I know MS were in the compiler business before 1981, and I doubt Gates wrote a single line of DOS code, he definitively was not in any shape way or form the main architect/coder of DOS. And if you even had any remote idea about what you are saying, you'd know that the DOS that gates and CO. bought was a quick and dirty copy of CP/M-86.

    Gates may be a good marketer and commercial thug, he is by no means a decent coder. And BTW next time try harder, pulling a never existing article from Byte out of your arse is just too boring.

  7. Re:iPods predicted in 1984? by mr100percent · · Score: 4, Interesting
    The 1984 adhas been sorta re-released by Apple, with the iPod added in. Looks like a pretty good post-addition, doesn't look very obvious of an edit.

  8. Offtopic: python by Negative+Response · · Score: 4, Funny
    that the python code running the

    Site is terribly slow, it is running python all right.

  9. Nostalgic by CHaN_316 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Just looked at that site, and saw the 1998 iMac. I shuddered when I saw those awful hockey puck mice that Apple chose to include with iMacs. Worst episode ever....

    At my university, they replaced them pretty quick with *REAL* mice. (Yes, I risk of sounding like a troll... but you know what I mean if you've ever used one of those mice)

    But the Macintosh Classic brought back some fond memories of elementary school. I remember sitting in computer class, and the teacher would say, now double click on clarisworks, and then she'd lecture for about 5 minutes then let us use the program.... because clarisworks took that long to load.

    --
    "There is no spoon." - The Matrix
  10. Re:I'll play devil's advocate by javiercero · · Score: 5, Informative

    Actually the PC was not "open" at all, IBM was not too happy when the clones started appearing.

    It was copied, that is for sure, but it was far from "open." A plagiarized design doesn't make it "open" in the same fashion that a blown up safe lock box is also an "open" box.

    And most of the games you mention have more in common with the machines you dissed than the actual original PC. I.e. most of the Doom engine was actually developed in NextStep, a lot of the 3DS software that game designers adopted in the 90s come from an Atari ST design program, most of the multi channel audio we know assume as standard was inspired by the Amiga (.mod's were the .mp3's of the 80s! :)), and on and on.... the PC ended up becoming more like the mac, the amiga, and the ST, not the other way around... to the point where current PCs have far more in common with those platforms in "spirit" than the original PC.

  11. For those interested in Apple history... by the+JoshMeister · · Score: 5, Informative

    Here are several other great Apple history resources.

    Sites:

    Books:

    Other:

    --
    the JoshMeister on Security
  12. Liked DONKEY.BAS? by Dahan · · Score: 5, Funny

    If you liked DONKEY.BAS, try the all new Donkey .NET!

  13. Re:Cheapest Mac by boaworm · · Score: 4, Informative

    I'm looking to get the cheapest Mac that runs Darwin.

    There is a difference between the cheapest Mac that runs OS X, and that runs Darwin. Darwin (the core) will run on a lot older hardware than OS X itself. For instance, you can run Darwin on the PowerMac 8NNN series, but dont try to take a retail OS X and install.

    Have a lookt at Low End Mac and Accelerate your Mac. Perhaps they can give you some kind of hint. Now finally, i'd just like to point out that if you indeed want to run OS X, keep in mind that the "minimum requirements", like 128MB ram, is NOT sufficient imho. My G5 even choked on 512MB :)

    --
    Probable impossibilities are to be preferred to improbable possibilities.
    Aristotele
  14. Speaking of Apple History... by MochaMan · · Score: 5, Interesting

    They are responsible for what I am sure must have been the longest line-up in history!

  15. Uh, check the history books by Brataccas · · Score: 5, Informative
    I'm soooooo tired of people claiming Gates (or MS for that matter) created BASIC. The language and compiler were invented in Dartmouth while nine-year old Bill Gates was hundreds of miles away in his nice cushy private school in WA. Hell, even the original C reference pre-dates the formation of MS.

    As was mentioned by another poster, MS is a marketing marvel, but this myth about it's founders being technnical geniuses has just got to go. It scares the kids...

  16. Very early MS history. by rs79 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Bill Gates and Paul Allen wrote a ROM BASIC they sold to Altair/MITS, an S-100 CP/M computer with real neat switches and lights. Ironically it was written on a PDP-11 running what would ultimatly become SCO UNIX. The Altair was a neat machine, but no it didn't run Linux and no you wouldn't like to see a Beowolf cluster of them.

    Microsft DOS came from Seattle Computer Products QDOS; MS licensed QDOS-86, told IBM they had an exclusive (a lie) and the rest was history.

    QDOS was a bad clone of CP/M, which was written by Gary Kildall of Digital Research, which was sold to Novell which was sold to Caldera, now SCO. Gary originally worked at Shugart and, lucky devil that he was, ended up with a very expensive 8" floppy drive. He decided to write a disk loader for it, hence "Disk Operating System" or "DOS". The rest of us loaded software from casette tapes using the BIOS; disk drives were very evry expensive.

    Back in the day, Digital Reaserch sold Operating Systems and Microsoft sold languages. When DR decided to sell a langauge around '83 the rumor was MS retaliated by selling an OS. The motivation may be a myth, but it was a popular one back then.

    Gates pubilshed some undocumented Z-80 instructions in, I think, Dr. Dobbs. It was the last usefull thing he ever did.

    --
    Need Mercedes parts ?