Interview With Mac Co-Creator Andy Hertzfeld 165
jeblucas writes "MacDevCenter interviews Andy Hertzfeld: formerly of Radius, Eazel, General Magic, and most famously, Apple. He discusses his recent book, Revolution in the Valley as well as sharing some anecdotes about his time at Apple developing the Macintosh personal computer. Check out this notebook page from the first cut of the memory layout. The book was reviewed here earlier."
First Line in the notes (Score:5, Funny)
Also good: (Score:2)
Re:Also good: (Score:2)
Re:Also good: (Score:2, Funny)
Re:First Line in the notes (Score:3, Funny)
What's really bad is when you start taking notes from arguments you have inside your head.
Glad (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Glad (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Glad (Score:3, Interesting)
I heard Andy interviewed about the book recently and he had a lot to say about Burell Smith as an unsung hero of the Mac's development. I think (memory is fading) that he said that Smith is reclusive and that they hadn't talked in years. He dropped of a pre-release copy of the book on Smith's door and also took one over to Steve Jobs. He told Jobs that there were some things in the book that were unflattering to him but that he wanted to be tru
Re:Glad (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Glad (Score:2)
Well that's because Raskin is an arrogant prick.
Re:Glad (Score:2)
"[A] kind of living ghost from the Apple years returned to haunt and torment Steve. It was as if Steve were being punished for his past sins.
In December, Steve's car windshield was broken by a vandal, as were sixteen windows in his house in Palo Alto. A few days later, Laurene [Steve Jobs's wife] saw a man sitting on the curb across the street and holding a bag of rocks.
The man wasn't a stranger. He was Burrell Smith, who has been the chief hardware
Re:Glad (Score:2)
Re:Glad (Score:2)
Folklore.org is a great place to see what they were doing back in 1980-1982. They were doing things with windows that MS didn't get to for another decade.
Re:Glad (Score:2)
Andy always got a lot of attention in Mac circles. Classic Mac owners knew Andy very well.
It's just that Jobs gets a lot of press (being the on-again, off-again CEO of a large failing company since 1985 (sarcasm)).
And Woz is well known in geek circles for being the only famous nuts-and-bolts engineer in the history of the world. And he looks like an engineer too.
Andy - In my book, he's famous for taking Job's vision a
128 - 44 = 84 (Score:2, Funny)
Re:128 - 44 = 84 (Score:1, Funny)
I used xcalc to verify his figures...
Re:128 - 44 = 84 (Score:1, Funny)
Re:128 - 44 = 84 (Score:1)
Re:128 - 44 = 84 (Score:3, Funny)
I checked it on my old Pentium/90 box and got 83.999999999997426.
Reminds me of Superman 3 (Score:2)
Wise Words (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Wise Words (Score:2)
Huge Applications (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Huge Applications (Score:3, Interesting)
The size of the display, and it's black and white nature, was burned into the the design of the memory bus itself. Sure that would be horrible today, but this was 1984. A GUI was an insane
Re:Huge Applications (Score:2)
Interesting article too brief (Score:5, Interesting)
It just seemed to brief.
The Woz story is just funny stuff.
It kind of reminded me of my only non-corporate IT work experience where I was a tech support guy for a small niche software company.
Very nice and some people here seem to thing that Andy does not get enough credit.
I typically agree but it is good to note that a number of tech friends interested in the history of computers know his name so perhaps the knowledge won't get totally lost.
Tripping down Memory Lane (Score:5, Insightful)
C'mon- back in the day you didn't just automatically load every freaking library that your compiler offered you in the expectation that your users loved your bloatware. Hell, I remember paying $50 for a 1K RAM chip back in the 70's when boys built computers with wire-wrap guns and lots of gate chips. And when you could see a processor's cycles on a cheapo Korean War surplus o-scope.
And we had to code 5,000 lines each day, uphill both ways...
Re:Tripping down Memory Lane (Score:2)
In BASIC. Kids these days...
Re:Tripping down Memory Lane (Score:2)
Re:Tripping down Memory Lane (Score:2)
"It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration."
Edsger Dijkstra quotes (Dutch computer scientist. Turing Award in 1972. 1930-2002)
Re:Tripping down Memory Lane (Score:2)
Two: Bill Gates and Paul Allen made their first mint selling BASIC for Z80 family CPUs. Bill got himself in a lot of trouble by complaining that the homebrew set was freely copying MS-BASIC instead of paying Microsoft for it. You could get BASIC if you wanted it.
Point the Third:Among other languages, I've coded in Binary, Assembler (several flavors), BASIC, and INTERCAL. Of the four, BASIC was the least pleasant. Thus the joke.
Building vs Integrating (Score:3, Interesting)
My first machine was a Ferguson Big Board [ornitron.com], a Z80 [lowendpc.com] based kit.
I was doing my Undergraduate degree (Math & Computer Science) and didn't have much money. A bunch of us bought these kits - and the cheapest options, just the etched board - then begged, borrowed and stole parts (well, I didn't really steal any but you get the idea).
We'd get together every Friday night for a soldering session - great excuse to drink beer! It took u
Re:Building vs Integrating (Score:2)
Re:Building vs Integrating (Score:2)
Man, those were the days... but they sucked compared to my iBook and house full of Macs!
Upgrading Memory Lane (Score:2)
That must have been Dr. Dobb's Journal, IIRC Jan. 1985. I bought a 128k Mac around when the 512k came out and 128k was about $1500. It was several months before I did my own upgrade, but afterward I did about ten others. By the time I was doing it the RAM was under $100.
Enlightenment for the children... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Enlightenment for the children... (Score:3, Insightful)
No. Wait. Memory has been plenty cheap to use four digits to store the current year in since before 1990. Maybe that's why some of us find it idiotic that you had applications (modern applications written after 1990) running on comodity PCs, that only use two digits.
Re:Enlightenment for the children... (Score:2)
Has something to do with a statement called 'Moore's Law'..
I remember waiting for prices on 2102's to drop so we could afford to populate the other half of an 8K S100 memory card...
They were $5 each, 1024 bits/chip.
Re:Enlightenment for the children... (Score:3, Interesting)
One of my college roommates and computer science classmates paid something like $5,000 for 4MB of RAM for his Macintosh II in around the 1988 timeframe. There was a memory price "bubble" at the time, but he needed it to run MPW (the Macintosh Programmer's Workshop) for his independent study project, so unfortunately had to suck it up. There was certainly a lot of swearing involved, though. Especially when prices went back down a few
Re:4 digit years (Score:2, Informative)
--
It was a bug, Dave.
Re:4 digit years (Score:3, Interesting)
That's still not bad for early '80's thinking.
Even more interesting is the article also notes that Power Macs are designed to handle dates through A.D. 29,940.
--
It was a bug, Dave.
Re:Enlightenment for the children... (Score:2, Informative)
On the Apple ][ and Mac, you didn't have space to store the date in human readable format most of the time, so you used packed binary notation. Typically you would reuse several bits for other purposes as well.
For example, byte 1 would be year, byte 2 would be month, byte 3 would be day. This lets you store a 256 year period (not a 100 year period) in the program. It lets you sort the records without having to process text, etc. If you were working w
Folklore.org (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Folklore.org (Score:2)
About that notebook... (Score:2, Funny)
\
0F0064
Re:About that notebook... (Score:1, Informative)
That has nothing to do with the memory . It's a sad mac error code you get when trying to load a newer disk (HFS format) using a Mac with the old (64k) ROMs which didn't recognize HFS. (Actually, it may be an error for not recognizing the format, period, but I'm not too sure about that.)
Goddamit I feel like a complete dork for knowing the answer to that....
Re:About that notebook... (Score:1)
Those were the days (Score:2, Funny)
And then: "40 k equals 10 pages of text." Yes, at least that's still true today, unless you happen to use Word, where 20 k equals 0 pages of text. Wow.
Re:Those were the days (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Those were the days (Score:2, Informative)
So this was indeed huge for the day, you were talking about a huge increase. And things like fonts were single or maybe a pair of control codes, in a non-extensible binary format custom to the specific word processing application.
And y
Are those my embedded systems notes? (Score:2, Interesting)
When I first saw that notebook page, I worried that someone had posted a page from one of my notebooks from an undergraduate EE class. Seriously though, it is pages like those that generally lead to great progress.
Obviously I am a Mac fan. However, even if I weren't, I would still read Andy Hertzfeld's book and enjoy interviews such as these. I have visited the folklore site and it is pretty cool. Maybe I am too much of a nerd, but I think reading about the history of technology is simply a great read. On
More stuff written by Andy (Score:4, Informative)
You might enjoy this site [folklore.org] which has lots of material written by Andy about the early years at Apple.
Re:More stuff written by Andy (Score:3, Informative)
The folklore.org site is mentioned in the interview...
There's another site with a lot of excellent content on the making of the Macintosh:
http://library.stanford.edu/mac/ [stanford.edu]
I think the "Technical Writing" part on that site is extremely valuable. It explains how the Inside Macintosh books were written and how that process affected the development of the MacOS APIs.
As far as technical documentation is concerned, the original Inside Macintosh books are still some of the best that I have ever read.
I remember the (Feb?) 1984 Byte Magazine/Interview (Score:4, Informative)
There was of course hype of the Mac and put-downs of the IBM PC line, I recall a line about the Mac having three crystals (for main processor, clock, and is there a third? Maybe I can spent $2 at the thrift store to buy one and find out), and the PC color card by itself having three crystals. There's lots more, partly about the social aspects of being on the team and being "paid like baseball players", and partly technical, programming the 68000 and 'keeping the registers full'.
The '84 Byte would be a great thing to (re)read along with Hertzfeld's book, to put this in historical perspective.
"It was Twenty Years Ago Today..." (Oh, it was LAST year - my, how time flies)
Re:I remember the (Feb?) 1984 Byte Magazine/Interv (Score:2, Informative)
Re:The heap diagram (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The heap diagram (Score:2, Funny)
> cost in 1984?
Well even if it was up to $50 dollars a meg or even $100 dollars then it would have been worth it for speed all applications, can then use!
Online Nude Anime' Gallery's [sharkfire.net]
Re:The heap diagram (Score:2, Informative)
Re:The heap diagram (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:The heap diagram (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:The heap diagram (Score:2, Funny)
Re:The heap diagram (Score:2)
Re:The heap diagram (Score:1)
Regards,
Steve
Re:The heap diagram (Score:1)
Well even if it was up to $50 dollars a meg or even $100 dollars then it would have been worth it for speed all applications, can then use!
This was the price in the late 80s, if I remember correctly. At that time, I was proud owner of a 386SX with 1 MB RAM.
OK, I looked it up (Score:5, Informative)
In 1984, 1 MB of RAM cost about 350$.
And that was when you could buy a house for 500$. Ah, well, not quite. But the price is correct (more or less).
Re:OK, I looked it up (Score:1)
Re:OK, I looked it up (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:The heap diagram (Score:3, Interesting)
Since you're so clueless about the 80s, let me introduce you to to another tidbit from that era: "LIKE, DUH!"
And $100 for a meg?! IN 1983?! Even the other estimates in this thread are pure fantasy. Try over $2000 for a meg of memory. Yeah theat's right. Read it:
http://www.jcmit.com/memoryprice.htm
The only home machine around that time with a meg of memory was the Apple Lisa, which
Re:The heap diagram (Score:1)
Re:The heap diagram (Score:2, Funny)
Plus, don't forget, he's designing this in 1981.
In any case, not to be overly precise, the answer is IIfx (Too f****** expensive).
Re:The heap diagram (Score:2)
Re:The heap diagram (Score:2)
I was proud when I tallied up all the memory in that computer and came up with 480 K. Nearly half a megabyte. More than e
Re:The heap diagram (Score:1)
if they were to have gone up to only 1MB ram then they could have had far more flexibility.
The original Mac had 128K of RAM; I bought one. The Mac Plus (with its megabyte of RAM) was available somewhat later, well after the design specs were done. Your idea sounds like it would consume all of that 1 MB.
1 MB??? (Score:2, Insightful)
This could then be implemented in about 1MB ram
1 MB of RAM? Even with 128K RAM the first Macintosh was reeeeally expensive. Maybe today you think that 1 MB RAM "couldn't have been so expensive in 1984". Believe me: it was expensive (but I'm too lazy to look it up)
Hey, at least the Mac was capable of adressing more than 640K (though that "should be anough for everybody")
Re:The heap diagram (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:The heap diagram (Score:2)
Re:The heap diagram (Score:5, Interesting)
1MB? Are you serious? Do you realise the first design had 128K of memory and given memory prices in those days the cost of that 128K was a significant portion of the cost of the entire machine?
You're suggesting that they should have included ten times the amount of memory, in order to get a speed increase which you haven't actually demonstrated in any way. A well-designed, but memory-constrained, system will run faster if given more memory, but there is no evidence that 16K of system heap space was memory constraining. Also, I suspect that running out of system heap didn't make the original Mac run slow. I suspect it just made it crash.
Re:The heap diagram (Score:2)
Not to be picky, but as the thinkgeek shirt says, there are 10 types of people in the world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
Re:The heap diagram (Score:1)
Re:The heap diagram (Score:1)
Re:The heap diagram (Score:5, Interesting)
My 16kbyte upgrade for my 48k Apple ][+ was $80, and I had to do the soldering myself. Yeah, yeah, and I had to walk to school in the snow barefoot -- I'm just trying to tell you that we have it incredibly lucky today, being able to carry 1gb around on your keychain.
Chip H.
Re:The heap diagram (Score:2, Funny)
Let me guess. You're a first year university student hoping to get his CS. Were you even out of diapers when the Mac came out?
Re:The heap diagram (Score:2)
I took a look at an old magazine... (Score:3, Informative)
64KB of RAM for a commodore VC20 for 265DM, that should have been around 100$ back then.
So 1MB would have been 1000$+.
Re:I took a look at an old magazine... (Score:2)
Re:The heap diagram (Score:5, Funny)
This could then be implemented in about 1MB ram, and you would get so much more speed!
Yeah, and floppy disks? Seriously, they should have put a Serial ATA hard drive in there. Way faster and way more capacity.
~jeff
Re:The heap diagram (Score:2, Informative)
Also, I spoke with Andy (a great a guy personally as he is professionally -- he is the engineering team member you wish you could have) and he admitted that he might have done things differently if it weren't for the insane rush job in producing a real product. After the Lisa marketing and Apple /// "molex" and "National Semi clock chip" debacles, Steve (Jobs) was a more driven than those he drove.
(After
Re:The heap diagram (Score:2)
And now the iPod give Apple the billions to do...
Re:The heap diagram (Score:1, Funny)
Re:It's all relative (Score:1)
Don't forget that back then hard disks were nonexistent
Actually I had a 10 MB hard disk from Sunol Systems on my Apple ][+ in ~1983-84. $2300CA if memory serves ("I'll never need more!") larger disk packs and other removable units were on mainframes for years before that.
Re:22K + 4K + 20K (Score:1)
Take another look. The 2 is written over a 1.
Re:I have a joke: (Score:1)
Re:I might actually buy a mac now (Score:2)
Don't get me wrong, it's certainly possible, but it's far from certain.
Re:I might actually buy a mac now (Score:2)
It's about as likely...
Re:I might actually buy a mac now (Score:1)
Re:I might actually buy a mac now (Score:1)
-chargen
Re:I might actually buy a mac now (Score:2)
Re:A Hertzfeld Story (Score:2)
Re:Memoirs, ho hum, where's Guy Kawasaki? (Score:2)
Re:Memoirs, ho hum, where's Guy Kawasaki? (Score:2)