Revolution in the Valley: The Insanely Great Story of How the Mac Was Made (14 page)

Gobble, Gobble, Gobble

by Andy Hertzfeld in March 1982

When Bud told us in early December of 1981 that he had to leave the Mac team to go back to Seattle to keep his place in medical school, both Burrell and I were pretty shaken. We were worried that we couldn't pull it off without Bud and that we'd get some authoritarian manager instead, who would wreck the unique spirit of our team. We expressed our concerns to Steve, who promised us that we'd have a big say in hiring the new manager, and that he would personally protect us if a situation like the one we were fearing ever arose.

In January, we began interviewing candidates for the software manager position. We had high standards and expectations and interviewed a number of outstanding people, like Ed Taft (who became one of the first employees at Adobe) and Tim Mott (who helped start Electronic Arts), who for one reason or another didn't take the job. But we also interviewed some more mundane candidates, which could sometimes get pretty wild if Steve decided he didn't respect someone.

For example, Burrell, Steve and I interviewed Angeline Lo's former manager, whom she highly recommended. As soon as the guy walked into the room, I knew it was going to be problematic, because he seemed extremely straight-laced and uptight, dressing more like an insurance salesman than a technologist. He also seemed very nervous as he fumbled at our first few questions.

I could tell that Steve was losing patience when he started to roll his eyes at the candidate's responses. Steve began to grill him with some unconventional questions.

"How old were you when you lost your virginity?", Steve asked

The candidate wasn't sure if he heard correctly. "What did you say?"

Steve repeated the question, changing it slightly. "Are you a virgin?". Burrell and I started to laugh, as the candidate became more disconcerted. He didn't know how to respond.

Steve changed the subject. "How many times have you taken LSD?"

The poor guy was turning varying shades of red, so I tried to change the subject and asked a straight-forward technical question. But when he started to give a long-winded response, Steve got impatient again.

"Gooble, gobble, gobble, gobble", Steve started making turkey noises. This was too much for Burrell and myself, and we all started cracking up. "Gobble, gobble, gobble", Steve continued, laughing himself now.

At this point, the candidate stood up. "I guess I'm not the right guy for this job", he said.

"I guess you're not", Steve responded. "I think this interview is over."

And Then He Discovered Loops!

by Andy Hertzfeld in April 1982

Bob Belleville in 1983

We interviewed quite a few candidates to replace Bud as the software manager before encountering Bob Belleville, who was one of the main hardware designers of the Xerox Star, the first commercial computer with a graphical user interface. He was intelligent and soft-spoken, and dryly skeptical about human nature. One of his many aphorisms was "The Law of Conservation of Misery" (no matter what course of action is taken, the total human misery in any given situation is maintained), which seemed particularly applicable to large computer companies.

Bob's background looked to be a lot stronger in hardware than software, so we were somewhat skeptical about his software expertise, but he claimed to be equally adept at both. His latest project was a rebellious, skunk-works type effort to make a low cost version of the Star called "Cub" that used an ordinary Intel microprocessor (the 8086), which was heresy to the PARC orthodoxy, who felt that you needed custom, bit-slice processors to get sufficient performance for a Star-type machine. Bob had written much of the software for Cub himself.

"I've got lots of software experience", he declared, "in fact I've personally written over 350,000 lines of code."

I thought that was pretty impressive, although I wondered how it was calculated. I couldn't begin to honestly estimate how much code I have written, since there are too many different ways to construe things.

That evening, I went out to dinner with my friend Rich Williams, who started at Apple around the same time that I did. Rich had a great sense of humor. I told him about the interview that I did in the afternoon, and how Bob Belleville claimed to have written over 350,000 lines of code.

"Well, I bet he did", said Rich, "but then he discovered loops!"

I Still Remember Regions

by Andy Hertzfeld in April 1982

Regions were the heart of QuickDraw

The single most significant component of the original Macintosh technology was QuickDraw, the graphics package written by Bill Atkinson for the Lisa project, which pushed pixels around the frame buffer at blinding speeds to create the celebrated user interface. One of QuickDraw's main jobs was to provide the primitives for quickly drawing text and graphics into overlapping windows, when the window that you're drawing into may be partially obscured by other windows. Applications could just draw without worrying if their window was obstructed because Quickdraw, with a little help from the window manager, would take care of the clipping to make sure pixels stayed inside in their window.

Overlapping windows can form complex shapes, especially if their corners are rounded. The key data structure in QuickDraw was called a "region", which compactly represented an area of the screen. QuickDraw provided routines that allowed the programmer to define regions by using the built-in drawing primitives, and to perform operations with them like union and intersection. Most importantly, all of the QuickDraw drawing primitives clipped to the intersection of three different regions, to allow drawing into obscured windows. We considered QuickDraw's speed and deftness at region handling to be the most significant "crown jewel" in Apple's entire arsenal.

The region data structure was a variable-sized list of what Bill called "inversion points", the coordinate values where black changed to white or vice versa. Since most regions were mostly rectangular, there weren't many inversion points, so regions were quite compact. But occasionally, there were lots of inversions, like in a circle, so regions grew as necessary.

QuickDraw was written entirely by Bill Atkinson, and in the spring of 1982 it was still evolving. He had recently sped up region operations by more than a factor of four. The concept of "pictures", a set of drawing operations grouped together for easy playback, was just added to the package, and hadn't really settled down yet. At this point, the Lisa applications were beginning to come together and Bill was changing QuickDraw in response to what they needed.

One morning, we were shocked to hear that Bill had gotten into a really bad car accident on his way into work. Apparently, he had turned a corner and not seen a parked truck, and slammed his little Corvette into the truck, shearing the roof off the top of his car. Bill was knocked unconscious and got pretty banged up, although he was still in one piece - one of the police officers who surveyed the wrecked Corvette commented that it was a miracle that Bill wasn't decapitated. This was a little more than a year after Woz's plane crash, but it brought back memories of that.

When Steve Jobs heard about the accident, he immediately jumped into his car and drove to the hospital where they had taken Bill. He was in a hospital bed, and had only recently regained consciousness by the time Steve arrived. He sustained a head injury and lost some blood, but luckily there were no major problems.

Steve entered the hospital room and was relieved to see that Bill had regained consciousness. "Is everything OK?", Steve asked. "We were pretty worried about you."

Bill turned his head and looked at Steve. He managed a painful smile. "Don't worry, Steve, I still remember regions."

Bouncing Balls

by Caroline Rose in May 1982

Caroline Rose in 1982

When I interviewed for a job in the Macintosh group in May 1982, I was working at Tymshare (just down the block), where I had been immersed in the computer timesharing industry for so long that I hadn’t kept up with what was going on in the world of personal computing. But I’d always been quick to learn new technologies, so I wasn’t worried when I went to talk to Chris Espinosa about the possibility of writing what would come to be known as Inside Macintosh.

I should add that at Tymshare, in a group acquired from SRI, I’d worked for a while under Doug Engelbart and used a rather complicated mouse device he’d invented. It had struck me as an interesting experiment but a bit gimmicky. I’d also played Hangman on a computer at Xerox PARC with a friend who worked there; the graphics seemed pretty cool, but I thought of it only as a game/toy — otherwise why wouldn’t Xerox have been attempting to market it for more serious purposes? Much earlier I had used electronic messaging on the ARPAnet, mainly to communicate with fellow workers in the building, and at first thought it a silly substitute for walking down the hall to talk to someone in person. So you can see that the light about the potential for such innovations dawned very slowly on me.

At Apple, the interview with Chris went well. He was very enthusiastic about my skills, and of course about what the Mac group was doing. He demonstrated a prototype of the menu command interface on the Mac, but was even more excited to show me a demo of balls bouncing all over the screen, as yet another indication of how this little computer would “change the world.” I guess he thought a picture was worth a thousand words, because he didn’t fill in a lot of the blanks for me: it certainly seemed cute enough, great for games and such, but I couldn’t see much beyond that.

Later that day, back at Tymshare, a programmer friend of mine asked me how the interview had gone. When I got to the part about the balls bouncing on the screen, my friend became tremendously excited. He pushed me into a conference room, closed the door, and proceeded to point out the significance of what I’d seen. I don’t recall the details, but I remember that he opened my eyes to see beyond Hangman in terms of what graphics — and especially animated graphics — might come in handy for on a computer. I felt like I was looking into a crystal ball; I did, finally, get the picture. (And, of course, I got the job!)

You Can't Fire Bruce!

by Andy Hertzfeld in May 1982

Even though he was only twenty two years old when he joined the Mac team, Bruce Horn already had seven years of experience tinkering with graphical user interfaces. He was recruited as a 14-year-old by Ted Kaehler to do some programming experiments in Smalltalk at Alan Kay's Learning Research Group in the mid-seventies, and he took to it so well that he had worked part-time at Xerox PARC ever since. By the time he joined the Mac team in late 1981, he was an expert in object-oriented programming and graphical user interfaces.

Bruce was a bright, idealistic and uncompromising programmer who fit right in with the prevailing values of the team, and he quickly became an important contributor to the Macintosh system software effort. He was slated to work on the application that graphically represented files, which Bud Tribble had dubbed the "Finder", but after a few weeks he convinced us that we were missing a crucial level of the system that he called the "Resource Manager", which was a way to manage the various chunks of data (like text strings and images) that an application relied on, and which was going to be needed for the Finder application as well for managing icons and bindings between documents and applications (see
resource manager countdown
).