Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

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."

4 of 142 comments (clear)

  1. woohoo by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

    Kathleen is out of town for the weekend, and you know what that means: coke for my nose, cock for my ass. If you're hung like a nigger, give me a call.

    -- CmdrTaco

  2. 25 years of... by KasperMeerts · · Score: 0, Troll

    ...ripping of FOS software and giving nothing back except for the compulsory parts (thanks to GPL)?
    ...being backed by a 156 billion $ company behind it and still about the same marketshare as Linux?
    ...completely locking your users to that company, taking away all freedom?

    Congratulations, I guess.

    --
    As long as there are slaughterhouses, there will be battlefields.
    1. Re:25 years of... by abigor · · Score: 0, Troll

      Ah yes, yet another kid with absolutely no idea what he's talking about, but thinks he knows all about the collaboration between Apple, the KHTML team, GCC, etc., even though he's never written a line of code in his life.

      Linux has NO desktop market share, by the way. Stop deluding yourself. And I say this as someone who's been using it on the desktop since 1997, probably around the time you stopped wearing diapers.

  3. Re:What has he done lately? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

    The iPhone has been a massive success, idiot, technical problems in a small number of bad batches aside.

    On the other hand, what is a miserable failure is your posting history. Of all the "newer" regular posters I see here, you have to be one of the most staggeringly stupid.