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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."
LOL the first line in his personal notes is "Memory layout is a bitch." Nice.
-- (Score:i , Imaginary)
to see someone other than Woz and Jobs get attention for their time at Apple!
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.
I love the part where it says 50k data for huge applications.
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.
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 $50 for a 1K RAM chip back in the 70's when boys built computers with wire-wrap guns and lots of gate chips. And when you could see a processor's cycles on a cheapo Korean War surplus o-scope.
And we had to code 5,000 lines each day, uphill both ways...
I think all the children who posted "Gee, but 4 digits for the year isn't that much more memory than 2" in the Y2K story really ought to look at this guy's notebook page to get an understanding of the environment in those days. 4K (or 18K) for the OS. I love the notation: "40K code, 50K data for huge applications" /frank
And the worms ate into his brain.
In 1984, 1 MB of RAM cost about 350$.
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.
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
Mr Hertzfeld wrote a lot of the articles on http://www.folklore.org, where some very interesting Apple history is recorded.
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
... 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.
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.