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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?
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.
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.
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!!!
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