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.
This book seems to leave off when Steve Jobs left after Sculley took over the company and misses the whole revolution that has occurred since then so while the book ends with Macintosh, we really should be considering: Apple II, Macintosh, the new Macintosh (nee OS X) and now iPod.
Perhaps the answer to this question this book asks about lightning striking twice lies in the care and craftsmanship that Apple puts into their products. 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. With Apple's products, there is considerable effort put into 1) Will this product meet a need and accomplish that goal better than anything else available? 2) Crafting the user experience to optimize their interface with whatever task the product is designed to serve 3) Make sure it does not suck (high praise). If a product does not meet these criteria, it is shelved like so many other projects that never rise to the top at Apple. (like the Palm device and an early effort at co-branding a phone)
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 and I seem to remember that one of their product managers was an MD, PhD. So, many of the folks there are creative and are trained to think critically about issues which is reflected in the products Apple creates. The reality with producing great things is that they evolve during development. There is great pain and effort that go into producing significant things and it requires a dedicated team of folks that are brought together by a common vision. 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 that influence how we interact with computers and the data that drives our lives (movies, music, scientific data etc...etc...etc...).
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
Oh, the memories. QuickDraw. Wish I still had that box, bet it would fetch some bling-bling on Ebay
Sigs cause cancer.
... with the iPod. I still find it amazing to see how many people on BART during the commute hour have the telltale white headphones. And the number keeps growing, and growing...
The CB App. What's your 20?
Sorry, I'd have to say that the real revolution in the first phase wasn't the Apple II, but the Vic-20 and Commodore 64.
The Atari 400/800 were close, but the VIC20/C64 democratized it. Since all 3 were 6502-based (OK, 6510 in C64), they all had the same basic inherent limitations, but Commodore blew up the markets for both the Apple II and Atari computers.
Too bad Commodore couldn't market Eternal Life (tm).
Guy invents digital optical media and gets nothing because his company did nothing with it - Sony & Phillips are bad for commercializing the technology and not giving credit
Xerox invents GUI and does nothing with it - Apple is good for commercializing the technology and not giving credit
D6 63 0D 70 89 81 BB 8E 7B 7C 5F 5D 54 EA AB 73
The C64 ceased to be an interesting machine in 1987. When the Mac II came out. Thanks for playing though.
Hmmm, I don't remember playing either of those games on the Apple IIe. I do remember playing a lot of arcade games tho. An oft-quoted number from Jack which is, as I'm sure you're well aware, highly suspect, as it would suggest a C64 in every fourth household in America. Jack's not the most trustworthy person to cite.The C64 probably sold around 1-2 million units. That number was surpassed by the IBM PC AT.
As I recall (and this may be apocryphal - somebody correct me) some workstations overcame this in a second way - they ran two 68K's in parallel, one a clock cyle or two ahead of the other and, when the early one faulted, they asserted an interrupt (which saved state properly) on the second processor. They reloaded the state of the first processor from the second after the "page fault" was handled and went on their way. Yes, it was slow and it sucked, but it worked.
That is all.
The MacOS did gain the ability to use an MMU later on, however(at least by System 7). Apple kept omitting it on the lower-priced Macs using 020's, though.
:(
There was much wailing and gnashing of teeth when I discovered several neat-looking shareware games that listed "requires memory-management unit" in their catalog entries, while the family was still poking along with a Mac LC. We eventually upgraded to an LC 3 which gained the MMU, but not the FPU. I remember feeling triumphant when I found a freeware extension that simulated it via the Apple integer math--only to be let down a few minutes later when the 3D visualization program took a full minute to render a viewport.
--
The Macintosh -- which lacked a memory management unit not because of shortfalls on Motorola's part but rather because it was deliberately omitted as a cost-saving trade-off --sold spectacularly well.
Minor technical nitpick--Motorola in fact did not have an MMU available at all until well after the first Macintosh shipped, and they didn't have a working CPU/MMU combination for a couple of years after that. The posts above this about the dual-68010 hacks are true. I know; I was working with Masscomp workstations at the time and have seen the pair of 68010s on a big old circuit board first-hand, many times.
The key (and indisputable) facts are well documented:
c pus.htm/
http://www.commodore.ca/products/default.htm/
1: the MOS / Commodore KIM-1 was the worlds first single board computer, released in 1976
2: the Commodore PET was the worlds first recognizable computer. It was announced and released several months before the TRS80 or Apple I
3: Apple I through III all used Commodore / MOS CPU's. Therefore no Commodore, no Apple (Motorola and Intel were just too slow to market and way too expensive for home users)
4: Commodore sold more computers than anyone prior to 1985/6. They were the first computer company to sell a million units of anything and were the first computer company to have a billion dollars in sales. To this day Commodore is credited by the Guiness Book of Records for having the best selling single computer in history, The Commodore 64.
5: The juggernaught that was Commodore took 10 years of bad decisions to go bankrupt after its founder and visionary Jack Tramiel quit in, you guessed it 1985.
It is definately true that Jobs and Apple made an enormous contribution to the PC/Home Computer world but it is just plain wrong to claim that Apple was responsible for the growth or development the PC market. Without any question Commodore was the single most important driver behind the genesis of home computing and Commodore is the only company that can legitimately claim such a title.
For a mid-80's validation of Commodore's total dominance click the COMMODORE VIC-20 STARTED HOME COMPUTING link on http://www.commodore.ca/gallery/video/video.htm/ which is from the TV show The Computer Chronicles in December of 1985.
For the amazing list of hughly successful computers which used the Commodore 6502 CPU click the 6502 link at the top of this article:
http://www.commodore.ca/history/company/6502/6500
Damn straight. It wasn't Xerox that invented the GUI, it dates back at least as far as Douglas Englebart's research at Stanford in the late 60's.
Xerox certainly advanced the game a very long way from Englebart's original concepts, but there's little doubt that they took a lot of their ideas from the system he demonstrated in 1968, which included a very basic form of GUI, a mouse, and local area networking.
There is no doubt in my mind that Englebart's ideas were the inspiration for the Alto and Star computers that Xerox created, and which inspired Apple to adopt the GUI and mouse for their next generation of computers.
Neither of Xerox's GUI computers were commercially successful, and Microsoft's early attempts at GUIs were embarassingly poor, and laughably unsuccessful. Microsoft may have commercialised the GUI successfully now, but Apple did it right the first time. Several years before Microsoft released a usable version of Windows.
You may dislike Apple, but that doesn't give you the right to try to belittle the company's achievements, or rewrite history.