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Revolution In The Valley
At the heart of this revolution was a set of brilliant engineers and coders who through their work inspired individuals and companies alike. Andy Hertzfeld captured this revolutionary time at Apple through the eyes of the engineers involved at his site, folklore.org. Now he's published these stories in the book Revolution in the Valley.
Apple Confidential 2.0 will give you history. Cult of Mac describes the phenomenon from the outside. But only Revolution in the Valley tells the story of a computer revolution from the perspective of the team in the center of the storm.
The book consists of concise stories, separated by pages of notes, drawings and photographs from the three years it took to develop the original Mac. The stories run in length between one and eight pages, with most ending in the two- or three-page range. Each is told from a personal perspective, mainly by Hertzfeld himself. Sidebars with comments from Woz and others are included to round out the perspective.
The stories are organized chronologically, starting with Hertzfeld's first days at Apple and ending around the time when Jobs was ousted in Sculley's palace coup. Most of the stories are technical in nature, often going down into the level of hardware detail. Others are more personal in nature, detailing Jobs' odd hiring or management style, talking about the stresses of a 90-hour work week, or recounting Adam Osbourne's threats about the destruction of Apple and Jobs' famous response.
With its roughly one hundred stories weighing in at a little under 300 pages this is a relatively quick read. This is especially true since the stories work on many levels and are told with remarkable skill. There are some standouts: The development of the GUI, replete with Polaroids taken at key points along the way, is excellent. The story on the first meeting with Microsoft is told from a whole new perspective from what we have heard in the past. The genesis of the 1984 commercial is fascinating, and the meeting with Mick Jagger is hysterical.
There isn't a whole lot here that you won't find on folklore.org, though some of the later chapters do some summation work that I couldn't find on the site. These bring the book together as a coherent, readable whole. The note pages, which separate the chapters and are not on the site, are interesting on their own, particularly the notes from the session with Alan Kay.
Apple's development of the Macintosh has been seen as the prototype of the dot-com death marches that would follow. What we see here is the potent mix of technical brilliance, insane work hours and pressure, and management arrogance that paints a much more chaotic and realistic picture.
On a personal level, this is the book I have been waiting for my whole career. Andy Hertzfeld and Bill Atkinson are legends to me and many others. The passion and brilliance they demonstrated set the bar for all of us who look at computer science not as a job, but as a calling. To see the Mac development from Andy's perspective is simultaneously deflating and uplifting. Their project suffered from all of the usual trials. But somehow the team got through it, their creativity and hard work paid off, and they changed the world.
How many revolutions can there be? How many times can lighting strike? How can one small group of people change the world? That's what we all got into this business to find out. And this book shows us an example of how it was done and inspires us to do the same. Thank you, Andy, for what you did then and what you are doing now.
Jack Herrington is an engineer with a twenty-year career inspired by people like Andy Hertzfeld, and the editor-in-chief of the Code Generation Network, as well as the author of Code Generation in Action. You can purchase Revolution in the Valley from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
another good read on the history of the Mac is "Insanely Great" by Steven Levy. Maybe not the most accurate piece of litterature on the planet, but a very entertaining read nonetheless.
He also wrote "Hackers" (don't confuse it with the lame movie of the same name) which deals with the origins och hackers and really cool old-school stuff.
I enjoy large posteriors and I cannot prevaricate.
Have you not heard the story behind the Commodore 64? Jack Tremeil's venerable "computer for the masses, not the classes."
The thing was developed in TWO WEEKS. The OS took another TWO WEEKS.
In 1981.
And blew the doors off of anything Apple was selling. And kept blowing the doors off of Apple until 1992.
You all were playing Sticky Bear and Oregon Trail while I was playing, well, everything from Donkey Kong to Project Firestart.
And, oh yeah, it's still in Guinness for selling better than any other single PC ever. 30 million units were sold.
Apple doesnt deserve nearly the amount of admiration they get. They've always been a me-too company with hipster doofus appeal, all the way from the first kit computers to the iPod.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
I'm not even sure I'd classify the Apple II or Macintosh as "revolutionary".
The Apple II may not have been revolutionary in terms of technology, but they definetly started the revolution of the way technology is used in classrooms.
The Apple II was found in a very large number of schools, even if it was just a single machine in the library, and introduced millions of children to computers.
(S(SKK)(SKK))(S(SKK)(SKK))
I disagree, since the Apple II predated those computers by several years and lasted just as long in the marketplace (there was still software being published for Apple II as late as the early 1990s).
Aside: You must be European, as the Vic-20 and C64 didn't catch on nearly as much in the USA as the Apple II did.
What are you on about? Apple bought it from Xerox fair and square. Even that crummy made-for-tv movie Pirates of Silicon Valley got that right. In fact, PARC wasn't even able to sell the concept to Xerox's board. So if they didn't even know what they had or cared what they did with it, why give them the credit? They were too blind to even see what they had. They're dumbasses and deserve to be relegated to the history bin of shame.
Support the First Amendment. Read at -1
It is also interesting to note that even after the introduction of the Lisa and the Macintosh, the Apple IIe was in such demand, it was actually produced up until 1993 for a platform lifetime of the Apple II for seventeen years or so which is an eternity in the desktop computing world.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
Oops. That's suppose to be 1972, not 1992. Sorry!
The Amiga 500 you are referring too was release 3 years after the Macintosh in 1987. Hardly the exact same time.
The only 128K Mac I could find on eBay was priced at $406, which seems horribly overpriced to me (I've seen 128K Macs bundled with dot matrix printers in local want ad magazines for $25 to $50), even if it does still boot. Everymac.com says its list price was $2500, though the street price was closer to $1800, IIRC. I bought a 512K Mac (2nd generation) for $1299 in 1985. Comparable PC clones were $1500 to $2500.
Still have it, still boots, albeit from an external floppy drive (the internal Sony died after 12 years of use). For about 10 years it served in my recording studio doing MIDI sequencing and acting as a front end for an Ensoniq Mirage sampling keyboard (via Digidesign Sound Designer I and an Opcode MIDI interface).
I've also managed to collect another 512K (free), a Plus (also free...plucked from a neighbor's garbage), an SE ($5 at a thrift shop), and an SE/30 ($10 at another thrift shop and now running NetBSD). Then there's my collection of Mac IIs, Quadras, and early PowerPCs, currently languishing in a storage facility in Boston.
Yeah, I'm a Mac zealot, even though I'm typing this on a Toshiba WinXP laptop (hey, it was cheap) and I work for a company that supports Windows desktops and servers (though we run Linux on Cobalt Raq4s and Acer beige boxes as our internal servers).
k.
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
The GUI was developed at the Stanford Research Institute (now SRI) by a team including Doug Engelbart (who invented the mouse.) The early system, called NLS, was somewhere between a demo and a product. It was used internally by SRI, but never developed into a product. Until...
Xerox refined it and tried to commercialize it. Xerox did build a functional computer (the Star) which sold poorly.
Apple refined it further, creating the Lisa, and finally succeeded in commercializing it, with the much cheaper Macintosh. The Lisa/Mac interface was probably the first interface that was designed for absolute beginners who had no previous computer experience. The Xerox and SRI systems were stunning, but required user training.
Microsoft, as you said, capitalized on the work of Apple, Xerox, and SRI before it, while adding essentially nothing original.
In other words, you seem to have found yourself in one of the few places in the world where Apples were more popular than Commodores. They were outnumbered everywhere else by a 5:1 margin.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?