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Interview With Mac Co-Creator Andy Hertzfeld

Posted by timothy on from the debt-of-gratitude dept.

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."

5 of 165 comments (clear)

  1. OK, I looked it up by koi88 · · Score: 5, Informative


    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).

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    I don't need a signature.
  2. Folklore.org by corrie · · Score: 3, Informative

    Mr Hertzfeld wrote a lot of the articles on http://www.folklore.org, where some very interesting Apple history is recorded.

  3. More stuff written by Andy by amightywind · · Score: 3, Informative

    You might enjoy this site which has lots of material written by Andy about the early years at Apple.

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    an ill wind that blows no good
    1. Re:More stuff written by Andy by jmunkki · · Score: 3, Informative

      The folklore.org site is mentioned in the interview...

      There's another site with a lot of excellent content on the making of the Macintosh:

      http://library.stanford.edu/mac/

      I think the "Technical Writing" part on that site is extremely valuable. It explains how the Inside Macintosh books were written and how that process affected the development of the MacOS APIs.

      As far as technical documentation is concerned, the original Inside Macintosh books are still some of the best that I have ever read.

  4. I remember the (Feb?) 1984 Byte Magazine/Interview by antispam_ben · · Score: 3, Informative

    ... 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)

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