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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.
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...).
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Oh, the memories. QuickDraw. Wish I still had that box, bet it would fetch some bling-bling on Ebay
Sigs cause cancer.
Gerald Holmes made a nice cartoon about the Steve Jobs & Bill Gates rivalry in the early history of the PC.
You know, it's funny they should use that analogy, because every time I've used an Apple computer I've wanted lightning to strike me.
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?
... 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?
Hmm... something that will revolutionize the way we get around... cities will be built around this invention of the millenium... what was that thing again? Wasn't it banned from sidewalks in 30 cities around the country?
Too fast to be pedestrian and too slow to be a vehicle: the Segway was doomed to be a toy from the start. Oh yeah, and that price....
You do NOT speak ill of our LORD and SAVIOR Apple! Facts are not welcome on this site!
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(){}'
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.
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).
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!!!!
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.
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
For all these f-ing lusers that think they can use a computer.. If it wasnt for Apple, they wouldnt be here today..
Damn Jobs.. Damn him!!
Things were better when you had to almost be an EE to have your own computer at home..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
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...
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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 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
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.
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.
Oops. That's suppose to be 1972, not 1992. Sorry!
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.
Wow. Virtually everything you said here was wrong.
The Lisa was a commercial disaster. 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. The goal for the Macintosh unit was to sell 50,000 units in the first 100 days. They sold more than 70,000. The Mac exceeded every commercial expectation.
The real business problem of the Mac was that Apple basically saturated their market. Within a year of the Mac's introduction, everybody who could justify owning one owned one.
While it is true that desktop publishing was big for Apple, it's completely wrong to say that it "saved the Mac." To the contrary, the Mac created the desktop publishing industry. Apple had the Mac Plus and, as you point out, the LaserWriter, but those were just two pieces of the puzzle. The other three were LocalTalk, PostScript and PageMaker. These five things came together to be the desktop publishing industry.
So you see, it's wrong to say that publishing saved the Mac. It's more accurate to say that Apple and the Mac helped create desktop publishing. Apple built a product which saturated the market, so they went off and, along with some very smart people, created a whole new market. See?
That has, incidentally, been Apple's business model for the past 20 years. You saw it most recently with the iPod. Apple produced a product for a very small niche market, saturated that market, and used the resulting momentum to gain industry support and build a sort of coalition of businesses that could create an entirely new market: Internet music delivery.
That's Apple's way. That's how they do things.
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. : )
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
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.
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.
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.