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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."
I think you seriously underestimate the cost of memory in 1983/84. SERIOUSLY.
What if it was $500 or more?
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
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.
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.
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.
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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"Would be especially nice to read more about Burell Smith."
I heard Andy interviewed about the book recently and he had a lot to say about Burell Smith as an unsung hero of the Mac's development. I think (memory is fading) that he said that Smith is reclusive and that they hadn't talked in years. He dropped of a pre-release copy of the book on Smith's door and also took one over to Steve Jobs. He told Jobs that there were some things in the book that were unflattering to him but that he wanted to be truthful. Jobs told him that the truth was OK and that he could accept it. (Being on top of the world must help one to be at peace with one's legacy.)
Andy also mentioned that he resisted for years talking about the people involved in the development of the Mac, despite the incredible interest in its history, because he respected their privacy. Despite his admitted discomfort in speaking ill of others he did not have anything nice to say about Jef Raskin.
I hope I am remembering this correctly. It was an interview on an NPR show so there may be an audio link. I'll post it if I recall which show it was.
The size of the display, and it's black and white nature, was burned into the the design of the memory bus itself. Sure that would be horrible today, but this was 1984. A GUI was an insanely great new thing.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
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.
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.
--
It was a bug, Dave.
If you look at inflation, $350 in 1984 would be $616.63 in 2003.
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.