Andy Hertzfeld Shares His Thoughts on 25 Years of the Mac

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."

Comments

Re:What has he done lately?

[Reality Master 101]

I'm curious as to why people are still interviewing Mr. Hertzfeld, given that his most recent successful project was the Mac. Even more puzzling is that he continues to be able to raise funds, attract developers, etc., in view of his decades-long track record of failure.

I don't know why people give him money, but as for an interview subject, he was a witness to history.

Re:What has he done lately?

[Bryan Ischo]

Perhaps so, but he does have interesting things to say and a very intelligent way to say them. That was one of the best interviews I have read in a while, because both the questions and answers were intelligent and interesting.

Re:How Microsoft and Intel won the West

[RetiredMidn]

It was probably the decision to openly license it. The Mac--when the Mac came out and for two years thereafter it was at least four or five years ahead of Windows and possibly could have taken the place of Windows if it was openly licensed, but because the Macintosh was restricted to a single member, Apple, it never could become an industry rather than a single platform.

Highly insightful. The Mac was like the old order, where one company made hardware, OS and software. The PC is part of the new order.

I disagree with Andy's assessment. The Mac may have been years ahead of Windows, but it's real problem, IMHO, is MS-DOS was already pretty entrenched, and the Mac didn't offer a migration path. I was working for Lotus at the time (working sometimes on the Mac, sometimes on DOS), and we had a pretty large community of 1-2-3 users who would not leave behind their accumulated DOS spreadsheets and what-not for the Mac even if they wanted to.

A few nice words about Andy Herzfeld...

[InterruptDescriptorT]

I just wanted to take a few bytes of badwidth to say that Andy Herzfeld is one of my personal heroes and should be to any creative, true old-school hacker-type programmers/engineers out there. Among other things, he is the father of the desk accessory in the original Mac OS.

The original Mac had 128K of memory, some 27K of which was used for the screen buffer alone, and although much of the OS was in ROM, it used a significant amount of the available RAM for itself. And this isn't even to mention any currently running application. A Desk Accessory, then, and the ability to invoke it while an application was running (many people forget that the original Mac OS was not multitasking at all), required some pretty incredible feats of programming to make it fit in the tiny amount of memory left. And he found a way to make it work.

People often speak in awe of how the 512K Amiga did multitasking on its tiny memory budget, and while I also admire that effort (especially having been a Commodore kid from VIC 20 to C64 to Amiga), I still think the original Mac OS represents one of the most incredible feats of software engineering of the early microcomputer era. I get slightly down every so often when I think about how modern developers, including myself, have gigabytes of memory and ultra-fast processors to work with and don't often have to think about the resource consumption of their algorithms/designs. Must have been so cool to work that kind of stuff back there...

Fawning mode off now...