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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).
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.
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...
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
What's Apple got?
Existence?
The Amiga did. And then some.
Excellent argument. Somewhat akin to:
Dude 1: My '83 Chevy Citation was better than your '87 Dodge Daytona.
Dude 2: No. Clearly it wasn't.
Dude 1: Yeah, well the '87 Corvette sure was.
Dude 3: WTF?
I'm Dude 3.
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.
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.