Slashdot Mirror
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.
We all know that the GUi came out of Xerox's PARC. They didn't do anything with it. And yes, Microsoft got the GUi out there, becuase they had name recognition after riding on IBM's success with it's PC's Apple, however, packaged it first, made it useable (considering the times it was quite a nice interface) and marketed it first. I agree that saying that Apple invented the GUI is wrong, however, this is a common thing to do in the IT world. How many of Microsofts "invention" were bought from other companies?
Hasn't lightning struck again with the iPod? I wonder if the lightning analogy makes sense... maybe they're just good...?
perl -e 'foreach(values %SIG){$_="IGNORE";}while(){}'
It wasn't Xerox, that invented the GUI, that revolutionized computers. It wasn't Microsoft, that actually delivered the GUI to millions of people, that revolutionized computers. It was Apple, that made a commercial about the GUI, THEY revolutionized computers.
Yes, Junior, you have it right.
If Apple hadn't stolen/borrowed the GUI from Xerox, it might never have seen the light of day.
Xerox management did not think the GUI was useful and did not plan to create any product using it.
Microsoft, in turn, stole/borrowed the GUI from Apple and their version didn't actually become useful until 1992 or so, with Win 3.1!
So yes, Apple gets the credit for the first widely available and actually usable GUI, by being first to market.
Go read some history...
Goofy, Geeky Gifts and More!
I'll bite, but first let's straighten out the chronology:
Xerox - invented GUI, did nothing with it.
Apple - designed usable GUI, built computer around it.
Microsoft - saw Apple GUI and feared it. Designed inferior GUI and forced its OEM partners to distribute it, thus guaranteeing its success.
Apple designed and built a system (remember, there was a hardware component to Apple's GUI - the Toolbox ROM). Microsoft glued pictures onto DOS.
I think the word "revolution" is thrown around far too casually lately.
The iPod is a neat gadget, granted, but it's not going to change the world. I'm not even sure I'd classify the Apple II or Macintosh as "revolutionary".
Cutting-edge for their time? Absolutely. But "revolutionary", next to databases and the Internet, just doesn't apply.
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
I agree on all counts.
Part of it is having "taste". E.g. Apple "copied" Xerox's and others' earlier work and produced the Mac UI -- which was better than anything that preceded it. With Apple's UI to borrow from, Microsoft repeatedly made kludgier, inferior imitations. Everyone copies someone, but taste determines what you've copy, and know when you've done a good job.
Another part of it is avoiding kludges. E.g. QuickTime was a revolutionary product, but it also had a fully extensible and general architecture which none of its clones can yet match. A single QuickTime movie can automatically select between multiple audio and video tracks to cope with different localization, bandwidth, and hardware requirements -- this is a 1.0 feature. Consider that MPEG came out initially without a robust mechanism for keeping audio and video in synch (just start playing both tracks at the same time, and hope).
Apple without Steve managed to produce the Newton (which could have been another stroke of lightning, but was released too early and with software too far in advance of its hardware) and managed the PowerPC transition flawlessly. Steve without Apple built Pixar and created NeXT (which for most of OS X's elegance deserves credit) and WebObjects.
Having just purchased a TiVo, I expect Apple to show TiVo a thing or two next... Sure, the UI is PRETTY...
Reality is more like this:
The Lisa was Apple's useful machine. A multitasking OS, virtual memory, a hard drive, and networking made it a usable machine. But at $10K, it was far too expensive. And Apple's abysmal hard drive, the LisaFile, hurt it badly. But the real problem was that Motorola was years late with the MMU for the 68000. The Lisa had an MMU built out of register-level parts, which ran the parts count and the system cost way up. And there was a bug in the 68000 which made page fault processing unsafe. Instruction backout/resumption didn't work. So the compiler had to generate only idempotent memory-referencing instructions, ones that if done twice had the same effect as doing it once.
The original Mac was a dismal flop. Ever use a 128K Mac? No hard drive. One floppy (dumb). No MMU. No multitasking. You spend all your time changing floppies and looking at the watch icon. It sold badly and for a while, Apple looked doomed.
Apples's big success wasn't the Mac at all. It was the LaserWriter. The LaserWriter saved the Mac line. Once the LaserWriter was out, there was a reason to use the Mac. Before the LaserWriter, the Mac was an expensive toy.
E.g. Apple "copied" Xerox's and others' earlier work and produced the Mac UI -- which was better than anything that preceded it.
Let me correct you and everybody else on this point. Apple PAID for the GUI in the form of stock which Xerox desperately wanted at the time.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
At the exact same time, I bought an Amiga 500, with an 68000 CPU, 512 KB memory, blitter, 4096 colors on screen, 4 channels of 22KHz hardware-assisted sound, an 800 KB floppy, pre-emptive multitasking, a unix command-line system, a unix-like filesystem that allowed filenames up to 256 characters...imagine how dump Commodore was not to dominate the computer business with such a marvel in its hands!
Microsoft, in turn, stole/borrowed the GUI from Apple and their version didn't actually become useful until 1992 or so, with Win 3.1!
Actually, Microsoft teamed with IBM to create OS/2.
In fact, Windows 3.0 and OS/2 1.3 were a collaberative effort and were released at the same time in 1990. Both had a very similar gui.
The kicker is that OS/2 1.0 was released in 1987 with a GUI. Windows 1.0 (released in 1985) was also released with a really crude gui, that was in no way a rip off of anything else out there (it was quite ugly and lame compared to OS/2)
Go read some history...
Actually, I thinky ou should go read some too...
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
Good point. Apple runs on proprietary hardware. By comaprison, gluing puctures onto DOS and making run on every POS IBM-compatible was just a walk in the park, right?
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
What's Apple got?
Existence?
All that talent and they were absolutely crushed by a guy who is a college dropout (Bill Gates). Today Apple has about 2% marketshare as opposed to Microsoft's 97% share.
I don't think Jobs and company were ever trying to have the most market share. Maybe the best computer and enough customers to support it. but no, having the most market share requires sacrificing too many goals of good engineering design.
Most people want to buy a satisfactory computer - that's all. Once they find computers that promise to satisfy their needs, then they shop by price. They don't care if the disk drive dies in a year or if the fan sounds like a jet taking off. If you've ever noticed, those specs aren't mentioned in the advertised specs. If you buy a Macintosh, it will still be working quite well five years down the road. Whereas users in the Windows world are developing a throw away mentality, when it gets so clogged with viruses and spyware, they just toss it out and buy another Wal-Mart Price Point Special. Sure, you can buy 3 of those for the price of an Emac, but then, you will need at least 3 if you throw it out when it gets sluggish. Or you will need to learn a lot more about viruses and other products of the darkside than interests me.
If you must moderate, please moderate as irrelevent, not something bad, because I'm sure someone will find this interest
Win 3.1?
Usefull?
Have you used it? Or used anything that is actually less stable than Windows 95(!)?
Oh, the BSODs...
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of llamas.
There is a bit of "yes and no" to the points you bring up. There are a lot of exceptions to your points and in some cases Apple has succeeded depite themselves.
Like Steve Jobs other companies Pixar and NeXT, there is a substance to Apple's products that tells a story. It goes beyond simple packaging to encompass the whole user experience.
NeXT wasn't exactly successful, despite it's original product being just as "insanely great" as some other things Jobs touched.
If a product does not meet these criteria, it is shelved like so many other projects that never rise to the top at Apple.
Apple's track record ain't perfect. The Apple III was less than spectacular, and their first attempt at a GUI-based, 16/32-bit machine (the Lisa) is pretty much universally considered a failure. Both of these products "rose to the top" for a brief time--long enough to be released.
The other interesting thing about Apple is the diversity of folks that actually work for them. They prefer to employ folks with advanced degrees, have a significant number of artists and creative folks working there...
Perhaps they do prefer to employ well-educated people, but those with advanced degreed were not responsible for all their greatest successes. There is a difference between education and intelligence/creativity/ingenuity. Woz did not have an advanced degree when he created the Apple 1 and II computers. Woz is still an engineering genious though. If you know much about electronics you should study the designs of the Apple I and II. They are elegant to the point of being works of art. It is obvious that Woz worked with what he could get and what he knew--and analogue electronics was still a mystery to him at that point. In the Apple II he had difficulty making it display an NTSC colour signal the "proper" way (modulating the phase of the chroma subcarrier) so he took great advantage of the artifacting side effect of NTSC (basically a "monochrome" display made up of fine, closely-spaced vertical lines--making the luma signal pulse digitally at frequencies near that of the chroma subcarrier...cool hack!).
And if Woz was the catalyst for the "first strike" then another "uneducated" genious brought about the second strike--Burell Smith, the chief designer of the original Mac, was pretty much self-taught in digital systems design. Smith was also very intelligent and absorbed information like a sponge. The original Mac hardware was not technically cutting edge--it made less use of custom ICs than even the 8-bit Commodore and Atari computers did--but it was also a very elegant design, and because the software and hardware designers worked together so well the end result was fantastic.
Apple (more precisely the people that comprise Apple) are driven by a common passion to create something just that much better than what is available and to create "cool" things
I wouldn't say that was always the case--Jobs could be very confrontational, and he deliberately crafted the Mac team as a "rogue element"--giving them offices in a separate building and openly stating they were the future and all those Apple II people were has-beens. The Apple II people by then were often less than passionate, though a dedicated core kept the line fresh and successful for many years after 1984.
Overall, the passion within Apple sometimes led to division, mass firings and coups. One thing that is for sure though is that within each team there is a lot of passion and a common vision.
Microsoft saw this as an opportunity and copied it, unfortunately they failed in it's eye-candy (3.1 - 3.11 etc..). As Apple continue to become better, MS would release more versions, updated to compete. I remember seeing the early screenshots of OSX on rumor sites and then during keynotes. Sure enough, XP was out the door. In fact if I remember correct there were early basic versions of XP released - it would seem that MS wanted to make the general public beleive they were first at bat... Apple Music Store, Microsoft Music Store - QT, Win Media Player - If you see Apple release something, MS is not far behind to release the same thing. It suprises me that MS even bothers to change the graphics from the apple logo to their own.
Oh.. I love my unix (any and all flavors - it simply can't be beat), and I use Win 2k mostly due to work requirements, so the Apple Fanatic clause does not apply here. It's merely the facts - MS has historically repeated itself with copies. I can't remember the last thing that MS released first - actually thought it up, developed it, revised it and released it.
And it's not just Apple that MS does this to. Look at the recent Search Engine Wars..Google, Yahoo and MS.
Oh and lets not forget how MS pushed the whole USB is great.. it will be the standard! It supports so many things on the chain... ummm, but Apple always did this... In "The Day" I remember having modems, printers, FM Radio Tuners, Graphics Tablets, Keyboards and Mice all on a single chain.. no problem for Apple. At the same time USB was widely wupported by Microsoft (the company) Firewire was also debuting... Looks like Firewire won.. Apple won, again.
And for a company that everyone seems to down all the time - I must give it to Apple, last year (I beleive it was a year ago) it was reported that they became debt free - as far as I know they are the only one that can say that. Other than operational expenses (day to day) they owe no one.. zip, zilch, nada, zero. They must be doing something right. 10 years ago everyone said Apple wouldn't make it, they be closed in a year.. the saem thing again 8 years ago, then 5 years ago, then two years ago.. and then less that a year ago.
Fact is, despite Linux, MS needs Apple. Without Apple MS becomes a true monopoly. Hence the reason for MS's developement departments for Linux and Apple - They need competition, without it they lose!
Never try to beat a professional at his own game!
It's easy to look at technology that we use every day and know so intimately and disregard it as mundane. But think of the people who don't read /. for fun, the non-techies. What we take for granted they may marvel at.
The Apple II was revolutionary because it successfully moved home computing from kits to mass appeal. The Apple II flooded schools, giving a generation of children hands-on experience with computers. Apple did it first on a wide scale, if not best. The success of the Apple II also pushed IBM into the PC market.
The Macintosh was revolutionary because it brought the graphical user interface to everyday use. Predecessors tried and failed (including Apple's Lisa). But at the time the Macintosh hit the market, the command-line mentality was entrenched. I remember vividly reading monthly screeds railing against icons and the mouse by major voices in the computer industry. Where are we now? The GUI dominates everything, for good reason. It makes the computer a more accessible tool, even if far from perfect.
The other, less recognized, benefit of the Macintosh is the blossoming of desktop publishing and image editing. With Mac OS and laser printers people were able to create beautiful, expressive documents instead of just printouts. Coupled with the GUI it led to a much easier way to lay out all aspects of the page before printing. Photoshop provided similar ease of use for image manipulation on the Mac.
Sony's Walkman, while not a spectacular device from a purely technical standpoint, was revolutionary because it gave everyone portable music. The iPod seems to be heading in the same direction for digital music, even though the iPod is far from the first mp3 player.
Revolutions are not founded just on brilliant technology but on the right mixture of technology with social acceptance, like Henry Ford who altered the course of society by mass-producing the automobile. Changing the way people conduct their lives should be the measure of what is and is not revolutionary, not whether or not the technology is something unique.
To certain extent there is a shorthand that is used to communicate that says "the most exposed example" is the original. It is not about obscuring reality. I can tell you with absolute clarity my father operated an air-cushion, 2-stroke lawn mower that he built himself in Trinidad W.I. in 1969. Have the pictures to prove it, complete with me following behind picking up cuttings. My dad is not the creator of the Flymow. I understand the somewhat glamerous light in which Apple and its employees are sometimes painted. But I think the fundamentally important point raised is; Apple did copy, as does everyone, but they made improvements that went beyond the original. Even this doesn't seem that flash an achievement, but I am hard-put to point out a single other company that has consistently produced this effect. I would say that the most remarkable thing (to me) about Apple is that it has grown so large, and so influential, whilest remaining passionate. Loopy, eccentric, painful, expensive... creative. Lightning is striking because creativity is happening, but it is happening in an environment where "just enough to ship" is not sufficient. I strive to make my own company work like that. : )
I see lots of comments claiming it wasn't revolutionary. In reality, no, the Mac wasn't the first system with a GUI. That would be Ivan Sutherland's Sketchpad application from the 1960s. And we all know about the Alto. But at the time, back in 1984, the Mac was an atomic bomb dropped on the computer world. People used 8-bit computers like the Atari 800, Apple II, and Commodore 64. People used IBM PCs and clones, back when all popular PC software was written for text-mode MS-DOS. So then here comes the Macintosh with:
1. A 32-bit (internally; it had a 16-bit bus) microprocessor.
2. Bitmapped graphics *only*. No text mode. The visual difference was huge.
3. High-resolution graphics: 512x384, compared with the roughly 320x200 graphics of the 8-bit home computers. (Note that you could get better graphics for the PC, but as an expensive add-on.)
4. Applications geared toward using bitmapped displays, like MacPaint (which was stunning at the time) and MacWrite.
5. Lots of other little things taken for granted: the mouse, the desktop metaphor, shutdown and disk ejection controlled by the system, digitized sound, icons representing applications.
All in all, this was quite a shock to the average person who didn't know about the research going on elsewhere.
Please.
Sony was never that great, merely overpriced. The chumps buying Sony gear in 1980 are the same chumps buying Bose speakers and Monster Cables today: People who want "hi-fi", but don't know any better.