Revolution In The Valley

Jack Herrington writes "For most companies, lightning never strikes. The promised miracle product fails, and the revolutionary dreams meet evolutionary reality. But for Apple, lightning struck twice: first with the Apple computer, which can be justifiably named the first personal computer, then with the Macintosh. Introduced with the groundbreaking 1984 commercial the Mac started the GUI revolution which brought millions of new users into the once inhospitable world of computing." Read on for Herrington's review of Revolution in the Valley. Revolution in the Valley author Andy Hertzfeld pages 240 publisher O'Reilly rating 9 reviewer Jack Herrington ISBN 0596007191 summary The birth of the Mac, as told by one of its creators

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.

Comments

Does it say how they ripped off UCSD Pascal?

[stanwirth]

UCSD Pascal Operating System was an Open Source Operating System developed in the 70's at University of California, San Diego.

It was, up until some time in the early 80's, widely ported to and distributed on microcomputers. Terak, Olivetti and Apple, for example. All you had to do, really, to port the UCSD Pascal Operating System to a new machine was to write a Pascal P-code compiler for it, make a few tweaks for the custom devices -- and you were off and running. There was a vibrant and active community of developers around the world writing applications and coming up with solutions to other problems for the UCSD Pascal Operating System at that time. We typically communicated via BITNET.

It had a few features -- one of them, a cool logo of a trident made up of ascii characters -- and of course a few bugs, the most notable being the disk deadlock problem, which went something like this:

1. open a document from floppy
2. edit the document
3. attempt to write the document back to floppy
4. oops, need to insert the system disk so the OS knows how to write a file
5. insert system disk
6. oops, in order to write the file to the floppy it came from need to insert the other floppy
7. insert the document disk
8. oops, need to insert the system disk so the OS knows how to write a file
9. insert the system disk
10. oops, in order to write the file to the floppy it came from need to insert the other floppy
11. insert the document disk
12. oops, need to insert the system disk so the OS knows how to write a file
13. insert the system disk
14. oops, in order to write the file to the floppy it came from need to insert the other floppy
15. insert the document disk
16. oops, need to insert the system disk so the OS knows how to write a file
17. insert the system disk
18. oops, in order to write the file to the floppy it came from need to insert the other floppy
19. insert the document disk
20. oops, need to insert the system disk so the OS knows how to write a file
21. insert the system disk
22. oops, in order to write the file to the floppy it came from need to insert the other floppy
23. insert the document disk
24. oops, need to insert the system disk so the OS knows how to write a file
25. insert the system disk ...

You get the picture. There is no actual breaking out of the deadlock. Your modifications are lost and you would also often lose the original document, since it would wind up in a corrupt state.

The usual solution was to get a second floppy drive (5 1/4", natch).

Two things happened in the early 80's: The Reagents of the State of California, under the terms of the Open Source (not GPL, not Free Software -- the terms hadn't even been invented yet) license, were free to withdraw, from public distribution, the UCSD Pascal operating system.

Coincidentally, Apple Software released the Lisa -- which had a remarkably similar operating system--from which the original MacOS was derived. Apple claimed (and still do) that they did not rip off UCSD Pascal because see? we wrote our own compiler!

BZZZT! misleading answer. Anyone can write a P-code compiler. BUT WHAT ABOUT THE OS?? Hrmmm... No response!

If they didn't use large chunks of the UCSD Pascal Operating System in the Lisa and then the Macintosh OS, why on earth could you still bring up the UCSD LOGO on-screen when doing a raw read of certain parts of the ROM and ... why on earth did they replicate the one most annoying BUG ???

Darlin', you have such lovely natural blonde hair! But do tell us... why on earth do you dye your roots black?

Well, obviously, Apple "borrowed heavily" from the UCSD Pascal Oper

Mac's were lame right up until OS X....

[nazzdeq]

Amiga's kicked mac's ass. That old little ass Mac w/ the screen the size of my watch. WTF was that? Shit even Atari ST's were better. I have Macs now because of OS X, that is the only reason Macs are cool. THe worst of it is, there are still idiots running "Classic". lol. -Nazz