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Interview With Mac Co-Creator Andy Hertzfeld
jeblucas writes "MacDevCenter interviews Andy Hertzfeld: formerly of Radius, Eazel, General Magic, and most famously, Apple. He discusses his recent book, Revolution in the Valley as well as sharing some anecdotes about his time at Apple developing the Macintosh personal computer. Check out this notebook page from the first cut of the memory layout. The book was reviewed here earlier."
LOL the first line in his personal notes is "Memory layout is a bitch." Nice.
-- (Score:i , Imaginary)
to see someone other than Woz and Jobs get attention for their time at Apple!
It is comforting to know that I'm not the only one who puts pen to paper when subtracting 44 from 128!
wow, there are little to no posts... /.ers are really rtfa
Evolution or ID?
You can just imagine other segments of the computer being written on cigarette packets and bits of scrap paper. Oh well, it worked :)
Do you have any idea how much 1Mb of RAM cost in 1984?
Mother is the best bet and don't let Satan draw you too fast.
Assuming a 4k RAM OS How much does XP take?
10 ?"Hello World" life was simple then
> Do you have any idea how much 1Mb of RAM
> cost in 1984?
Well even if it was up to $50 dollars a meg or even $100 dollars then it would have been worth it for speed all applications, can then use!
Online Nude Anime' Gallery's
if they were to have gone up to only 1MB ram then they could have had far more flexibility.
The original Mac had 128K of RAM; I bought one. The Mac Plus (with its megabyte of RAM) was available somewhat later, well after the design specs were done. Your idea sounds like it would consume all of that 1 MB.
Trolling is a art,
Try $300 for 1 meg.
This could then be implemented in about 1MB ram
1 MB of RAM? Even with 128K RAM the first Macintosh was reeeeally expensive. Maybe today you think that 1 MB RAM "couldn't have been so expensive in 1984". Believe me: it was expensive (but I'm too lazy to look it up)
Hey, at least the Mac was capable of adressing more than 640K (though that "should be anough for everybody")
I don't need a signature.
I think you seriously underestimate the cost of memory in 1983/84. SERIOUSLY.
"64k should be enough memory for everyone"
This is not the sig you are looking for...
So in other words, you don't have any idea. It was insanely expensive. I paid over $100/meg for RAM to upgrade my much later SE (though that was after Reagan's RAM tarrif). You're an idiot.
I love the part where it says 50k data for huge applications.
What if it was $500 or more?
Please stop.
Mother is the best bet and don't let Satan draw you too fast.
And in constant, inflation adjusted dollars . . .
Q:How many libertarians does it take to stop a Panzer division? A:None. Obviously market forces will take care of it.
Don't forget that back then hard disks were nonexistent and floppies(3.5 inch) only held 400KB. What is the ratio of RAM to disk space on your system today?
Woah. I was just going to assume you were trolling but your other comments don't look trollish.
1MB? Are you serious? Do you realise the first design had 128K of memory and given memory prices in those days the cost of that 128K was a significant portion of the cost of the entire machine?
You're suggesting that they should have included ten times the amount of memory, in order to get a speed increase which you haven't actually demonstrated in any way. A well-designed, but memory-constrained, system will run faster if given more memory, but there is no evidence that 16K of system heap space was memory constraining. Also, I suspect that running out of system heap didn't make the original Mac run slow. I suspect it just made it crash.
I mean this guy had a ton of stories and the article don't get me wrong was ended well.
It just seemed to brief.
The Woz story is just funny stuff.
It kind of reminded me of my only non-corporate IT work experience where I was a tech support guy for a small niche software company.
Very nice and some people here seem to thing that Andy does not get enough credit.
I typically agree but it is good to note that a number of tech friends interested in the history of computers know his name so perhaps the knowledge won't get totally lost.
ACK
IIRC, 4 MB cost about $200 in 1994, or about $50/MB. This is *ten* years earlier...
So, how much was a meg of ram in 1984?
Memory wasn't sold in increments of megabytes in 1984 -- it was sold by the kilobyte. 16kbit DIPs (no simms, dimms, etc, these were individual socketed chips) were $1.50 each, and you needed 8 of them to form a byte-wide memory line.
My 16kbyte upgrade for my 48k Apple ][+ was $80, and I had to do the soldering myself. Yeah, yeah, and I had to walk to school in the snow barefoot -- I'm just trying to tell you that we have it incredibly lucky today, being able to carry 1gb around on your keychain.
Chip H.
Let me guess. You're a first year university student hoping to get his CS. Were you even out of diapers when the Mac came out?
Well even if it was up to $50 dollars a meg or even $100 dollars then it would have been worth it for speed all applications, can then use!
This was the price in the late 80s, if I remember correctly. At that time, I was proud owner of a 386SX with 1 MB RAM.
I don't need a signature.
Well, either he's trolling or he's just young.
...obviously both crimes :D
Nice interview, and sounds like a nice book to pick up at the Border's outlet near me next year. Unfortunately, Cult-o-Mac stuff like this book don't sell well around here. I particularly love the arguments about memory from the children on here.
C'mon- back in the day you didn't just automatically load every freaking library that your compiler offered you in the expectation that your users loved your bloatware. Hell, I remember paying $50 for a 1K RAM chip back in the 70's when boys built computers with wire-wrap guns and lots of gate chips. And when you could see a processor's cycles on a cheapo Korean War surplus o-scope.
And we had to code 5,000 lines each day, uphill both ways...
I think all the children who posted "Gee, but 4 digits for the year isn't that much more memory than 2" in the Y2K story really ought to look at this guy's notebook page to get an understanding of the environment in those days. 4K (or 18K) for the OS. I love the notation: "40K code, 50K data for huge applications" /frank
And the worms ate into his brain.
Well, finding ram prices wasnt easy, because back then there were so few computers with incompatible ram interfaces, but i found something in the december 83 issue of the CT magazine:
64KB of RAM for a commodore VC20 for 265DM, that should have been around 100$ back then.
So 1MB would have been 1000$+.
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
In 1984, 1 MB of RAM cost about 350$.
And that was when you could buy a house for 500$. Ah, well, not quite. But the price is correct (more or less).
I don't need a signature.
This could then be implemented in about 1MB ram, and you would get so much more speed!
Yeah, and floppy disks? Seriously, they should have put a Serial ATA hard drive in there. Way faster and way more capacity.
~jeff
Mr Hertzfeld wrote a lot of the articles on http://www.folklore.org, where some very interesting Apple history is recorded.
X _ X
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0F0064
One time when I was a Sophomore in High School, my friend was experimenting with dialboard.com, when it then still had free parts. Anyway, we got a wild hair to use Yahoo! People Search to look for this guy. We found his number and called him, but he didn't answer. WE left a 5 minute voice mail saying how cool he was and shit like that. We tried to call again a few days later, but he'd changed his number i guess because it didn't work. WE tried to search, but he didn;t show up this time. And that is my Andy Hertzfeld Story.
Take another look. The 2 is written over a 1.
Also, I spoke with Andy (a great a guy personally as he is professionally -- he is the engineering team member you wish you could have) and he admitted that he might have done things differently if it weren't for the insane rush job in producing a real product. After the Lisa marketing and Apple /// "molex" and "National Semi clock chip" debacles, Steve (Jobs) was a more driven than those he drove.
(After all I heard from others in Bandley III, Steve told Wendell where to put the clock chip on the motherboard...oops.) But look at the big picture. Regardless of how anyone might have done anything differently, the Apple II and Macintosh put the billions in the bank so Apple could do things like, say, the iPod.
A lot of perfectly engineered things are still in the closet because they missed a competitive opportunity window.
Do you have any idea how much 1Mb of RAM cost in 1984?
Plus, don't forget, he's designing this in 1981.
In any case, not to be overly precise, the answer is IIfx (Too f****** expensive).
My other Slashdot ID is much lower.
This will open a brand new market share for Apple, since a simple KVM switch can make that mac very tempting, for me at least.
The power of Mac OS X, suddenly very affordable. (also, expect that box to have the same clean pure white design lines of other current models)
Seriously? Seriously? You're gonna go out on a limb here and say they could've done more with a meg of memory than 128K?
Since you're so clueless about the 80s, let me introduce you to to another tidbit from that era: "LIKE, DUH!"
And $100 for a meg?! IN 1983?! Even the other estimates in this thread are pure fantasy. Try over $2000 for a meg of memory. Yeah theat's right. Read it:
http://www.jcmit.com/memoryprice.htm
The only home machine around that time with a meg of memory was the Apple Lisa, which was $10,000, and as those of us who remember, a dismal, dismal flop.
Sorry for the unnecessary flaming, you're probably just joking around, but seriously. A meg. For the first Mac. Insanity.
I kno dude I read once about this UNIVAC computer which toke up the whole floor of a buildng and it was liek dude taht's inefficient if they just used ATHLON with claw hammer and mayby some WATER COOLING thay could make it a lote smaller and more powrful!!!! ad thay could giev it liek 3 GB of DDR and a GEFORCE card and it wold be hella fast... what are thay thinkng???????
Eight times more memory.
;-)
Not to be picky, but as the thinkgeek shirt says, there are 10 types of people in the world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
1 meg of ram in the early 80's cost over $1500, in most cases at least $2000. The other estimates in this thread are ebing way too optimistic.
Regards,
Steve
Well... the Atari 1040ST was the first computer with 1MB of memory that cost under $1000 when it was released, and this was a bit after the Mac. Because Macs were so expensive back then (MacSE was over $3000), there was a device that would accept Mac ROMs and plugged into the Atari STs that would 'turn it into a Mac'. This was more popular in Europe where Macs were even more expensive. MagicSac, I think it was called. Anyway, 1M of memory back then cost more than your complete Athlon64 rig with 1GB of memory and a high end graphics card today.
And then: "40 k equals 10 pages of text." Yes, at least that's still true today, unless you happen to use Word, where 20 k equals 0 pages of text. Wow.
It's a pity they didn't have you to advise them. By the way, perhaps you could email Apple and give them some similar advise but applicable for the current product lineup.
For instance, why not get rid of those whiny and hot HDs they put in their computers. I mean, if they would put in only 150 gig of flash instead they could get rid of the HD altogether!
Heh. Whoops!
It always amuses me when folks these days talk about building a computer.
My first machine was a Ferguson Big Board, a Z80 based kit.
I was doing my Undergraduate degree (Math & Computer Science) and didn't have much money. A bunch of us bought these kits - and the cheapest options, just the etched board - then begged, borrowed and stole parts (well, I didn't really steal any but you get the idea).
We'd get together every Friday night for a soldering session - great excuse to drink beer! It took us almost three months to get them assembled, and another month or two of screwing about before they'd boot into CP/M.
I wanted a machine before that but waited for Z80's since they required substantially fewer support chips than 8080s. Some of my buddies built 8080 based systems, and it took them far, far longer.
Now that's building a computer!
I've integrated quite a few since, but don't really enjoy the experience as much as that first time.
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Adding 64K (1/16th of a megabyte) to an Apple //e was $199 at introduction in 1983, IIRC (the //e memory slot expansion board that provided 80 columns and bank-switched memory. Later on, double-high-res graphics). 64KBit chips were the highest tech. I can go home and dig out some magazines for exact prices. And that was in 1983 dollars, which are worth twice what a dollar is today.
I was proud when I tallied up all the memory in that computer and came up with 480 K. Nearly half a megabyte. More than even the folks with IBM PCs had bothered to install.
It wasn't that they were convinced he had values, it was that they could see that his opponent obviously had none.
>Let me guess. You're a first year university student hoping to get his CS. Were you even out of diapers when the Mac came out?
A first year university student would be about 18 years old. The Mac came out in 1984. Most probably his parents were thinking about whether they could afford him at the time.
Then shouldn't that be 100x more memory?
Enable 3D printed prosthetics!
When I first saw that notebook page, I worried that someone had posted a page from one of my notebooks from an undergraduate EE class. Seriously though, it is pages like those that generally lead to great progress.
Obviously I am a Mac fan. However, even if I weren't, I would still read Andy Hertzfeld's book and enjoy interviews such as these. I have visited the folklore site and it is pretty cool. Maybe I am too much of a nerd, but I think reading about the history of technology is simply a great read. One of my early faves was Soul of a New Machine. Obviously this interview was too short to really get into details, but there were a few little tidbits in there that were interesting. I am really looking forward to anything he puts out on Woz.
Having done so much with so little for so long, I now can do anything with nothing at all.
Even in 1995, it was over $50 a MB until China started bombarding the Taiwanese coast during "training missions", resulting in the Taiwanese fabs frantically dumping their stock in case war broke out and China bombed them to ashes.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
You might enjoy this site which has lots of material written by Andy about the early years at Apple.
an ill wind that blows no good
It's kind of dull reading the memoir of a 50 year old obscenely wealthy ex developer who did something stupedous 20 years ago. I mean isn't it little like Newton in middle age telling you how smart he used to be?
... with Andy and most or all of the people on the design team, as well as all the other articles on and reactions to the Mac (What?!? Only one disk drive??? This things' gonna flop!).
There was of course hype of the Mac and put-downs of the IBM PC line, I recall a line about the Mac having three crystals (for main processor, clock, and is there a third? Maybe I can spent $2 at the thrift store to buy one and find out), and the PC color card by itself having three crystals. There's lots more, partly about the social aspects of being on the team and being "paid like baseball players", and partly technical, programming the 68000 and 'keeping the registers full'.
The '84 Byte would be a great thing to (re)read along with Hertzfeld's book, to put this in historical perspective.
"It was Twenty Years Ago Today..." (Oh, it was LAST year - my, how time flies)
Tag lost or not installed.
YOU DO NOT KNOW SHIT ABOUT SHIT
Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted!
Reason: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.
1 MB of memory was so expensive in 1983, just a year before the Mac came out that it drove the price of the Mac's predecessor, the Apple Lisa, north of $10,000. While the Mac should have shipped with more memory (256 KB would have been better), or at a lower price point (Jobs wanted it to be $1,999), to expect 1 MB of memory in a $2,499 computer in 1984 is absurd. Hell, a few months after the Mac shipped, it cost several hundred bucks to swap out those 128 KB for 512 KB.
Never trust anyone who treats a collection of myths like a science book, or a science book like a collection of myths.
The interesting bit about the development of the Mac and the Y2K story is that the Mac was built to address four digit years. IIRC the Date & Time control panel in the MacPlus my Dad brought home in '86 (System 3.2) could be manually set to about 2016 and the OS itself could recognize years into the late 2900's.
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It was a bug, Dave.
That's still not bad for early '80's thinking.
Even more interesting is the article also notes that Power Macs are designed to handle dates through A.D. 29,940.
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It was a bug, Dave.
Saven Marek is the guy who posted that he thought the tsunami was an act of a higher power punishing non-believers. /. signature feature, and he misuses apostrophes.
He also writes a "sig" in every post instead of using the
These are the facts. Trolling? Complete gibbering idiot? You decide!
I was consulting with a small computer maker in 1982. They were excited-- they'd just gotten a good price for memory chips. Intel would sell them 64K bit RAM chips for $21 each. That's ... $2,688 for just the RAM chips, in quantity.
And oh, the chips had to go back to Intel so they could laser-drill a hole in the top and pump in some gas they forgot to do the first time around.
Not quite what you asked for, but you can read old issues of Creative Computing from that same time frame (they had an Apple column) at this website.
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
Wow. Here's a proper link. It's well worth a look, especially the graph. The first data point from 1957 is particularly astounding: 411 million dollars per megabyte. Although the computers of the time would probably have run out of address lines long before you had installed all the 10000-bit flip-flop arrays.
Sounds more like in middle school. Stereotypical 13-year-old?
first Macintosh and upgrading it to a Fat Mac (512k) was ~$500.
That must have been Dr. Dobb's Journal, IIRC Jan. 1985. I bought a 128k Mac around when the 512k came out and 128k was about $1500. It was several months before I did my own upgrade, but afterward I did about ten others. By the time I was doing it the RAM was under $100.
Tag lost or not installed.
This should be Offtopic! Mr.Pro Republican moderator...
Most likely that was $350 for 1 Mbit, so 1 MByte would be $2800.
In those days memory was sold as individual 1-bit wide dynamic RAM chips (static RAM was much more expensive). Their size went up in multiples of four as an extra address bit was added (row/column addresses were multiplexed). Thus you'd get 16K x 1, 64K x 1, 256K x 1, 1024K x 1, etc.
-Rolf
the Apple II and Macintosh put the billions in the bank so Apple could do things like, say, the iPod.
...? But some of it will be shown on jan. 11th.
And now the iPod give Apple the billions to do...
Seven years and four months from Slashdot's founding, anonymous cowards are still attempting bad humor and posting obvious troll comments. >=(
Keep your eyes to the sky.