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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. Re:The heap diagram by WzDD · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  2. Interesting article too brief by ACK!! · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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 /ak/ interj. 2. [from the comic strip "Bloom County"] An exclamation of surprised disgust, esp. i
  3. Re:The heap diagram by chiph · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  4. Enlightenment for the children... by FrankSchwab · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.
  5. Re:4 digit years by momus_radar · · Score: 3, Interesting
    Well, IDRC. According to this article at LowEndMac the hardware of the first Mac can handle dates until A.D. 2040, the Mac OS can work correctly through A.D. 2019.

    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.