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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."

9 of 165 comments (clear)

  1. Glad by phydror · · Score: 5, Insightful

    to see someone other than Woz and Jobs get attention for their time at Apple!

    1. Re:Glad by capmilk · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Would be especially nice to read more about Burell Smith. That guy was a Mac mastermind. Seems to have vanished, though.

    2. Re:Glad by capmilk · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Could the interview be this one? I read that, too. :)

  2. Re:The heap diagram by Dot.Com.CEO · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.
  3. 1 MB??? by koi88 · · Score: 2, Insightful


    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.
  4. Re:The heap diagram by jdcook · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.
  5. Tripping down Memory Lane by cbelt3 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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...

  6. Re:Those were the days by EvilTwinSkippy · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Keep in mind though, work processors in those days would only load the page you were currently editing into memory. Oh Bank Street Writer, so many fond memories (sniff.)

    --
    "Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
    --Dr.W.Edwards Deming
  7. Re:Enlightenment for the children... by Hektor_Troy · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Yes, because memory prices didn't drop at all until 2001, right? I can certainly remember paying a dollar per byte when I bought my first 128 MB RAM stick back in 1995 ...

    No. Wait. Memory has been plenty cheap to use four digits to store the current year in since before 1990. Maybe that's why some of us find it idiotic that you had applications (modern applications written after 1990) running on comodity PCs, that only use two digits.

    --
    We do not live in the 21st century. We live in the 20 second century.