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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."
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?
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.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!!!
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.
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)
I was mad at the time because it would have been a six month project, and meant a lot to me. It was my first experience with a computer manufacturer deciding what third party software would be allowed on their system. The software being ported was John Draper's Easywriter and Andy was pissed at John about something, and I was collateral damage.
Tevanian and the rest of NeXT's engineers did fantastic technical work, but NeXT didn't go anywhere until it was grafted on top of Apple in 1997.
Apple desperately needed a technology infusion, but NeXT's technology wasn't ready for deployment at Apple in a way the market could embrace until 2002.
It was Jobs who turned Apple and the Mac around in the interim, from 1997 to 2002, by taking Apple's System 7 and turning it into a product people would buy: the iMac, new Powerbooks, flashy new Macs with a strong brand rather than a confusing array of white boxes with Sony-like model numbers.
It's a disappointing reality that technology, like art, can't sustain itself. It needs marketing and merchandizing. Without Jobs, Apple would have quickly become another dead technology portfolio just like Amiga, OS/2, Taligent, etc. If technology itself sold products, Linux on the desktop would be whipping Windows and the Newton would have taken off. Technology needs to be made accessible, and Jobs has has a spectacular career at doing just that, despite lacking, as Hertzfeld notes in the interview, the technical expertise of his engineers.
If Apple had instead bought Be or teamed up with Sun, it would have been as successful as Be was at Palm or as OpenStep had been in Sun. That is: zero. A phenomenal amount of technical work performed for nothing because nobody there knew how to productize it.
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