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.
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....
WTF is BART?
bay area rapid transit
What the fuck is WTF?
I tried for 5 years to come up with a clever sig...only to realize that I am not clever.
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...
What's Apple got?
Existence?
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.
The Amiga 500 you are referring too was release 3 years after the Macintosh in 1987. Hardly the exact same time.