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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."

46 of 165 comments (clear)

  1. First Line in the notes by dcarey · · Score: 5, Funny

    LOL the first line in his personal notes is "Memory layout is a bitch." Nice.

    --

    -- (Score:i , Imaginary)

    1. Re:First Line in the notes by Deinhard · · Score: 3, Funny

      His notes look the same as mine...sort of a stream of consciousness-based conversation with himself.

      What's really bad is when you start taking notes from arguments you have inside your head.

      --
      Successfully condensing fact from the vapor of nuance since 1998.
  2. 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 Octagon+Most · · Score: 2, Interesting

      "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.

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

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

  3. 128 - 44 = 84 by General+Alcazar · · Score: 2, Funny

    It is comforting to know that I'm not the only one who puts pen to paper when subtracting 44 from 128!

    1. Re:128 - 44 = 84 by Octagon+Most · · Score: 2, Funny

      "It is comforting to know that I'm not the only one who puts pen to paper when subtracting 44 from 128!"

      I checked it on my old Pentium/90 box and got 83.999999999997426.

  4. 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.
  5. Re:The heap diagram by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    Try $300 for 1 meg.

  6. 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")

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  7. Re:The heap diagram by NoData · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I think you seriously underestimate the cost of memory in 1983/84. SERIOUSLY.

  8. Wise Words by M3rk1n_Muffl3y · · Score: 2, Funny

    "64k should be enough memory for everyone"

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  9. Huge Applications by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    I love the part where it says 50k data for huge applications.

    1. Re:Huge Applications by EvilTwinSkippy · · Score: 2, Interesting
      The thing you have to remember about the original mac, the video board actually used the memory bus to raster the screen. Sure, PC's had DMA, but on the Mac, the lower chunk of ram WAS the video ram. They had a device known as the "Bob Baily Unit" that divided time between the microprocessor and the video display engine.

      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
  10. Re:The heap diagram by Chucker23N · · Score: 2, Interesting

    What if it was $500 or more?

  11. 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.
  12. 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.

  13. 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
  14. 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.

  15. Re:The heap diagram by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny


    Let me guess. You're a first year university student hoping to get his CS. Were you even out of diapers when the Mac came out?

  16. 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...

  17. 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.
    1. 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.
    2. Re:Enlightenment for the children... by DJSpray · · Score: 2, Interesting

      No, memory prices haven't always gone _down_. Sometimes they've gone _up_.

      One of my college roommates and computer science classmates paid something like $5,000 for 4MB of RAM for his Macintosh II in around the 1988 timeframe. There was a memory price "bubble" at the time, but he needed it to run MPW (the Macintosh Programmer's Workshop) for his independent study project, so unfortunately had to suck it up. There was certainly a lot of swearing involved, though. Especially when prices went back down a few months later.

    3. Re:Enlightenment for the children... by dbacher · · Score: 2, Informative

      Actually, the two digit year was never about memory.

      On the Apple ][ and Mac, you didn't have space to store the date in human readable format most of the time, so you used packed binary notation. Typically you would reuse several bits for other purposes as well.

      For example, byte 1 would be year, byte 2 would be month, byte 3 would be day. This lets you store a 256 year period (not a 100 year period) in the program. It lets you sort the records without having to process text, etc. If you were working with the dates, you almost certainly used a pattern like this.

      It takes a minimum of six bytes to store a date in ASCII format, and most of the bits aren't used. Nobody would want to use that format if they could avoid it, because of that. You have maybe 8k total for your data, maybe 143k if you swap out onto the second floppy drive (286k if you're willing to make the user flip the disk).

      I don't think that people understand this anymore, or how hard it was to get anything to run on these, but the Y2K problem was almost exclusively about data entry.

      You take your three bytes, and you parse them to 19__-__-__ on some report, and so you have a problem when the date rolls over because the 19 is hard coded. It doesn't cause any operational problems, just display problems.

      Similarly, you might do data entry that same way (only make the user enter two digits), because users don't like to type. The storage still would be OK, but entering the data would break at 2000.

      But it was never about the memory taken up by the extra two digits. ASCII and Unicode are inherently inefficient, and were rarely used in data structures.

      --
      If your code is acting bloated, and is running rather slow, it's likely and predicted that some loops you will unroll.
  18. I took a look at an old magazine... by imsabbel · · Score: 2, Informative

    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?
  19. 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).

    --

    I don't need a signature.
    1. Re:OK, I looked it up by Fear+the+Clam · · Score: 2, Interesting

      If you look at inflation, $350 in 1984 would be $616.63 in 2003.

  20. Re:The heap diagram by jeffehobbs · · Score: 4, Funny


    This could then be implemented in about 1MB ram, and you would get so much more speed!

    Yeah, and floppy disks? Seriously, they should have put a Serial ATA hard drive in there. Way faster and way more capacity.

    ~jeff

  21. 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.

  22. Re:The heap diagram by spywarearcata.com · · Score: 2, Informative
    Remember the memory prices then. I paid something like $500 for 256kb (yes, that is $2000 for one MB).

    Also, I spoke with Andy (a great a guy personally as he is professionally -- he is the engineering team member you wish you could have) and he admitted that he might have done things differently if it weren't for the insane rush job in producing a real product. After the Lisa marketing and Apple /// "molex" and "National Semi clock chip" debacles, Steve (Jobs) was a more driven than those he drove.

    (After all I heard from others in Bandley III, Steve told Wendell where to put the clock chip on the motherboard...oops.) But look at the big picture. Regardless of how anyone might have done anything differently, the Apple II and Macintosh put the billions in the bank so Apple could do things like, say, the iPod.

    A lot of perfectly engineered things are still in the closet because they missed a competitive opportunity window.

  23. Re:The heap diagram by dar · · Score: 2, Funny

    Do you have any idea how much 1Mb of RAM cost in 1984?

    Plus, don't forget, he's designing this in 1981.

    In any case, not to be overly precise, the answer is IIfx (Too f****** expensive).

    --
    My other Slashdot ID is much lower.
  24. Re:The heap diagram by NoData · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.

  25. Those were the days by Zestius · · Score: 2, Funny
    From the note: "40 k code, 50 k data for huge applications." (my emphasis)

    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.

    1. 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
    2. Re:Those were the days by dbacher · · Score: 2, Informative

      In addition to the other child, keep in mind we had word Processors on the Apple ][, where 16k of RAM was bank switched with ROM (if it was installed at all), and high end units had 48k total memory, about 16k of which was available for use depending on what the design was.

      So this was indeed huge for the day, you were talking about a huge increase. And things like fonts were single or maybe a pair of control codes, in a non-extensible binary format custom to the specific word processing application.

      And you want to know what is really scarey is we did word processing on machines that ran 1Mhz, and some that even ran SLOWER than that.

      --
      If your code is acting bloated, and is running rather slow, it's likely and predicted that some loops you will unroll.
  26. Building vs Integrating by The+Mutant · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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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  27. Are those my embedded systems notes? by elecngnr · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.
  28. Re:Also good: by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

    Do you formulate your posts by using magnetic poetry or something?

  29. 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.

    --
    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.

  30. 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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  31. Re:4 digit years by momus_radar · · Score: 2, Informative

    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.

    --
    It was a bug, Dave.

  32. 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.

  33. Re:I remember the (Feb?) 1984 Byte Magazine/Interv by slapout · · Score: 2, Informative

    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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