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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."
The Indian IT worker has a job.
LOL the first line in his personal notes is "Memory layout is a bitch." Nice.
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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!
The heap diagram looks like a paragon of inefficiency.
:(
By using a grow heap you can with very little overhead, run faster. With a 8mghz processor you can use all the speedup you can get.
This could then be implemented in about 1MB ram, and you would get so much more speed!
But instead they insist on squeezing into a small amount of memory. Marketing at work then as it is now!. If they were to have gone up to only 1MB ram then they could have had far more flexibility. But marketing and cost cutting make for a broken design to begin with
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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 :)
apparently equals 36. Take a look in the left margin. Apple's finest.
Assuming a 4k RAM OS How much does XP take?
10 ?"Hello World" life was simple then
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.
"64k should be enough memory for everyone"
This is not the sig you are looking for...
I love the part where it says 50k data for huge applications.
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?
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
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.
Mr Hertzfeld wrote a lot of the articles on http://www.folklore.org, where some very interesting Apple history is recorded.
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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.
Yeah. I'm not surprised. All those unhappy mac faces - if only a brain was behind its design.
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)
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 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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What the hell is /. about if you can't post a story about the 3 products released and updated yesterday.
What the hell is this section here for?
I wrote an article, posted the stats and details of the update but it wasn't posted. are you morons?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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20+ years later, Steve Jobs is still parking a silver Mercedes in the handicapped spots in the Apple parking lot.
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.
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