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Andy Hertzfeld Shares His Thoughts on 25 Years of the Mac

Posted by timothy on from the never-forget-your-first-mac dept.

blackbearnh writes "It may make you feel very, very old, but the Macintosh will be turning 25 in January. As we approach this momentous anniversary, O'Reilly News had a talk with Andy Hertzfeld, one of the original Macintosh designers, about the long and storied history of the Mac. Hertzfeld, who tells the story of the Mac in his book A Revolution in the Valley, shares his thoughts about how the Mac has aged over time, how life might have been different if Steve Jobs had stayed on at Apple, and the differences between working for Apple, and for Google (his current employer.)" Read on below for a bit of what Hertzfeld had to say.

"They're very similar in certain ways — essentially both Apple and Google want to rewrite the rulebook; they don't want to do things in conventional ways. They want to come up with a better way — for everything; that's not even just the technology but the work processes, the work environment, everything has to be unique and better, so they're very similar in that way. One of the ways that they're different has to do with essentially trust of employees. Apple is very secretive within the company; people working on Macs don't know anything about the new iPods, et cetera. Google is extremely open within the company; once you're a Google employee you have access to just about every piece of information there is."

5 of 142 comments (clear)

  1. More Andy Hertzfeld by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    He was the first interview of the very good NerdTV series of 2005.
    http://www.pbs.org/cringely/nerdtv/shows/

    Who's got other gems?

    1. Re:More Andy Hertzfeld by jeblucas · · Score: 4, Informative
      I had a story posted here years ago when the book came out.

      It includes a link to the awesome notebook page and it's timeless classic, "Memory layout is a bitch."

      --
      blarg.
  2. Re:What has he done lately? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    what are you talking about? The company he co-founded, General Magic, went on to create OnStar. I wouldn't call that a failure.
    Most of his other ventures like Radius and all that weren't failures, but they weren't big-time hits either.

  3. Re:What has he done lately? by Chris+Parrinello · · Score: 5, Informative

    Ummm... no. OnStar existed before General Magic added speech recognition services to it and Hertzfeld was gone before General Magic started getting into speech recognition applications.

  4. Re:25 years of... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Hi AsperFarts

    Apple is one of GCC's biggest contributors. Or maybe you're thinking of WebKit. It's such a significant improvement over khtml that Trolltech will be including it as part of QT and KDE will be using it as well. Too bad more people don't "rip off" FOS

    OS X has a larger marketshare on the desktop (you know, their target audience). But speaking of market cap, VA Linux went from 22 billion to 44 million.

    Your other point is just plain stupid.