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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."
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.
What part of "A well regulated militia" do you not understand?
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?
*makes a-ok sign* It stinks!
Now begins the moderation war between mac addicts and MST3K fans. *grins evilly, sips iced tea*
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
*makes a-ok sign* It stinks!
Now begins the moderation war between mac addicts and MST3K fans. *grins evilly, sips iced tea*
I know! And the hardcore MST3K fans are going to mod him down for not saying: *puts on a white shirt with black font that reads "I'M A VIRGIN" across the front of it*
My work here is dung.
I know! And the hardcore MST3K fans are going to mod him down for not saying: *puts on a white shirt with black font that reads "I'M A VIRGIN" across the front of it*
Idiot control now, flying over trout! heh, so many great lines from that episode.
Huzzah!
Dark one, supreme being, chief? McLeod!
Trumpy, you do stupid things!
It looks just like a potato. What's this, winged potatoes.
Pod people got no reason to live.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
being backed by a 156 billion $ company behind it and still about the same marketshare as Linux?
yeah, but how much money did Linus make off of his marketshare? (I know, I'm just kidding about that) Still, you seem to be implying that being a $156 billion dollar company makes them a failure if they don't also have a monopoly in their space. I would argue that shareholders care a lot more about their marketcap than their marketshare.
Android will crush you all, it won't have a kill switch. We underestimate the General Magic heritage. It was a pretty cool device, I knew a guy who knew a guy who knew a guy who had one.
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
Nevermind "monopoly". Being seen by grannies as a drop in replacement
for Windows and being able to withstand the usual Lemming FUD about
compatability would be a nice start.
Quite a bit of "common good" would come from that achievement.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
I would argue that shareholders care a lot more about their marketcap than their marketshare.
Yes, but you have to get investors from somewhere. Even though MS keeps making money, if I had invested in MS I would be selling my stocks. Why? Because MS's marketshare has went down sharply. If McDonalds had a monopoly on drive thrus and everyone wanted to go to a drive thru and so McDonalds prospered, but yet when Burger King had a drive thru and food that tasted better than McDonalds I'm sure that many people would take out their McDonalds shares and invest in Burger King.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Get the heck off my lawn. And take your fruit machine with you.
Throw us a bone, will ya? Come on, god damn PC history every other day. Give us more of that Netherlands Neanderthal Cow magnet stuff. Those are good.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
We don't know if Google will work in the long run. And in the long run I am thinking AOL. Google's success depends on the advertising market tolerating secretive and random marketize techniques which appear to be abuse of the near monopoly that Google now has in advertising. The success is also dependent on the ability of cheap commodity severs to provide six nines service, externalizing the majority of the cost of content creation to third parties, and externalizing the majority of infrastructure costs to the taxpayer. I am not saying that at some point their house of cards will fall al a AOL, but I am not quite sure how they are going to make money off cloud computing, other than selling personal information collecting from the love letters of their users to third parties.
All Apple has to do is come up with the next cool thing that people will pay for. This is not a simple thing, but something that Apple has been doing with some success for quite a while. We now see a diversification outside of computers, so, when the Mac OS does become something that is not limited to any machine, and when, by the same rules, MS is not able to limit OEM versions to run only on the machine it was originally shipped with, Apple will be able to enter this brave new work of zero profit computer equipment with new consumer appliances.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Trumpy, you can do magic things!
(-1, Raw and Uncut is the only way to read)
So, now that we've got the Cell CPU out the door, do you think we're going to see a G6 soon? The PowerPC line of CPUs has never been so prosperous!
I doubt that Apple's ditching Intel anytime soon, but since they already have a PPC compatible OS, might they dip their toe back into those waters again?
(-1, Raw and Uncut is the only way to read)
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.
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.
Maybe this order will change soon with "cloud computing" (sounds like trying to find the diameter of a fart) but I doubt it.
Anti-Globalism, Traditionalism, and FreeBSD.
You miss a couple important factors. While market share is important, also important is the forecast for the market, and the margins on the product sold in the market.
In terms of expected profits (and hence, expected share value or dividends), who cares if market share is dropping a couple percent a year if the market is growing, say, five percent a year? Or if the margin is increasing likewise?
Of course, you might be making a valid point, I haven't crunched the numbers on MSFT. But, AFAICT from a quick googling, long-term projections for MS are still very good.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
...is doing just fine, thanks a lot, on my MacBook.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
But these are investors. They have no loyalty, they just want to get a quick buck or be able to retire in 20 years rich. When someone tells you that your marketshare went down from 97% to 93%, a drop of 4%, some people will get scared and take out money. Likewise, if Apple can say that the Mac gained 3% in the last year, investors don't really care if it went from 3% or 6%.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
You might want to study this before posting again. Familiarizing yourself with this wouldn't hurt either.
Yar! Twenty-freaking-five years later and I'm still trying to find some real choices in my virus scanning and spyware removal software. Damn you Apple!!!
If you had invested in MSFT you'd know that their stock has been essentially flat since 2000. Certainly if you were vested back then, selling off during the periodic spikes would help, but ultimately it has been a non-performer for nearly a decade now.
Jeff Goldblum!
Man, had to stop reading that interview. Kept hearing Jeff Goldblum answer all the questions, what with the stops and starts.
I drank what? -- Socrates
The original Mac team was filed with absolute sheer geniuses. You may not appreciate that fact unless you've read folklore.org or the book form, Revolution in the Valley, since there is the tendency in the popular media not to focus on the technical side of the Mac's creation. The incredible work they did, especially given the paucity of computing resources at their disposal at the time, is truly awe inspiring. And one piece of knowledge you gain through these stories is the fact that the Mac's engineers viewed themselves as far lower in ability as compared to the Woz. If you haven't read these stories yet, you only know a small part of the story of the Mac's creation. This interview should whet your appetite for the rest of the story.
Part of the hardcore faithful who believed in Apple long before it was cool again to do so
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...
Karma: Excellent Birds (mostly as a result of listening to Laurie Anderson)
"The Mac at 25" makes me think back to when I bought my first mac in 1984. These days I'm on linux. My wife has an aging "iLamp" G4 on her desk, which we're probably going to get rid of soon and switch her to a linux box. But anyway I've continuously had a mac in the house for 24 years now.
Looking back, I see that time as dividing into three periods:
Find free books.
Judging by the number of posts like this on slashdot, Apple is so great that they even have their own brand of homophobia now.
It needs it's own name.
"by that I mean people who don't sit on slashdot all day wondering why everyone else isn't building robots" DECS
I know about the big argument that lasted for two years while the KHTML team was asking for the changes in WebKit, only to be given a pile of crap which they couldn't use. I guess Apple didn't know how to do a diff.
I know about that part of the "collaboration." Is there more?
But you're right about Linux having no market share in the U.S. Other countries, though....
Also using Linux on the desktop since 1997, BTW.
Put identity in the browser.
Ooh ooh... can I join the using Linux since 1997 club too?!
It was a good year. :D
Put identity in the browser.
Join here!
Put identity in the browser.
Not really, I should have expected it with such a post.
I probably was a bit too harsh.But still, Troll is a tad too much.
As long as there are slaughterhouses, there will be battlefields.
I appreciate that building the Mac was a big thing in Hertzfeld's life. To not mention it in an interview would be like interviewing Churchill and not mentioning the war. But what about the pioneering and extraordinary work at General Magic? Those guys saw the future and tried to create technology to bring it to the public, but somehow they got it completely and entirely wrong. I find it astonishing that most of what General Magic came up with died on the spot, and hasn't trickled through to modern devices, yet the world they envisioned is here right now.
And then there's Eazel. Hertzfeld was one of those who invented Nautilus. It's changed beyond all recognition since then. How does Hertzfeld feel about it? He obviously had faith in open source. Why?
These are the things I want to hear the great man talking about!
The issues between the KHTML and WebKit teams did not last two years, and have long since been resolved. If you have to dig that deep to find some dirt, I count that in Apple's favor.
And 1998, and 1999. 2000 sucked pretty badly, though, if I rememeber correctly.
Put identity in the browser.
Yar! Twenty-freaking-five years later and I'm still trying to find some real choices in my virus scanning and spyware removal software. Damn you Apple!!!
Not to mention games...
What? You're just making things up. An increase in market share of 100% (from 3% to 6%) is much more significant than an increase of 50% (from 6% to 9%), which assuming a constant market size, is the difference in your example.
Please, before you make claims about what investors do based upon marketshare figures, I suggest you spend some time working in the field. You don't give investors much credit for doing their homework, which I think is mistaken. And you place too much weight on marketshare numbers, which is a very small part of the hard numbers that contribute to profitability.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
The key player that "saved the Mac" was Steve hiring Tevanian from CMU who understood modern software technology and software engineering (originally for NeXT). Andy's group did a great job for its time. And the Xerox PARC crowd, while making brilliant inventions, did not how to engineer something durable for the market (all PARC commercial software failed). But the early Mac code was pretty "cowboy" and brittle. Apple was desperately shopping for a "workstation generation" operating system in the late 1990s, considering where to go with Sun, BeOS or NeXT. All three would have been good choices from a technology point of view, but they got Steve back with #3.
For OS X platform specific code.
Which took so many years for the original KHTML team to decipher and make it useful because of how Apple released the sourcecode initially.
Indeed, there is no point for them have projects running in parallel, thus the KDE team's decision to unify efforts which Apple didn't do initially is quite beneficial.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
Well, Google is, after all, the company that wants to make all information transparent and available to everyone. Apple, on the other hand, is an often-imitated company that must get its product to market before someone else gets a mimicked product out there. Once its on the market, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, but if something like that shows up earlier, it pisses Apple off.
McCain/Palin '08. Now THAT's hope and change!
Do you totally not get the "Hi I'm a Mac! I'm a PC!" commercials? ;)
Twenty-five years, dang. That went fast. I wrote my first commercial game on the Mac in '84 - ChipWits - and remember the feeling of being dazzled again and again by all the neat goodies in the Mac OS. Especially resources - when I discovered how to store bitmaps as resources I thought I'd gone to developer heaven. Developing on the Mac that first year was like a treasure hunt because the doc was poor and communicating with other developers was difficult. Most Mac developers wrote their software on a Lisa but I was too poor for that so I used the native MacFORTH. Andy H was one of the stars of the Mac world. His Switcher, which allowed multiple programs to run (sort of), was a neat hack.
Channel Zilch: In Your Face From Outer Space!