Revolution in the Valley: The Insanely Great Story of How the Mac Was Made (17 page)

Capps quickly became a crucial member of the Mac team, adding fresh energy and talent as we entered the home stretch, helping to finish the Toolbox and the Finder, as well as working on other stuff like "Guided Tour" diskette. But he also found time to embellish Alice with more cool features.

One day he showed me Alice's hidden "Cheshire Cat" menu, which allowed you to adjust various preferences. Alice didn't have a menu bar, so it was sort of part of the game to figure out how to invoke the preferences. It was accomplished by clicking on the score at the top of the screen, which caused a detailed, John Tenniel inspired Cheshire Cat bitmap to slowly fade into view; clicking on different parts of it set various preferences. Capps also created an exquisite, tiny rendering of the Cheshire Cat to serve as Alice's icon.

Over time, he added some interesting variations, invoked by clicking on various parts of the Cheshire Cat. For example, one variation made some of the squares of the chessboard disappear at random, causing unlucky pieces to fall through to oblivion below. He also added a feature that Woz suggested: as the cursor moved to the back of the board, its image got correspondingly smaller, adding to the illusion of depth.

Alice's packaging's interior

By the fall of 1983, Capps started thinking about the best way to get Alice to market. One possibility was publishing it through Electronic Arts, which was founded a year earlier by Trip Hawkins, Lisa's former marketing manager. But Steve Jobs thought that the game at least partially belonged to Apple, and insisted that Apple be the publisher. He negotiated a modest deal with Capps, promising him that Apple would do a deluxe job with the packaging and marketing.

hidden DK logo

Alice was announced at the launch and featured in the original brochure, but it didn't became available until a couple of months later. True to Steve's word, the packaging was beautiful. The game disk was enclosed in a small cardboard box designed to look like a finely printed, old fashioned book, complete with an elaborate woodcut on the cover, that contained a hidden Dead Kennedy's logo, in tribute to one of Capp's favorite bands. Since Alice didn't take up the whole disk, Capps including a few other goodies with it, including a font and "Amazing", a fascinating maze generating program that he wrote.

When I saw the completed packaging, I was surprised to discover that the game wasn't called "Alice" anymore; apparently, that name was already trademarked for a database program. It was rechristened "Through The Looking Glass" for its commercial release.

Unfortunately, Apple never put the promised marketing effort into Alice. They were in a quandary because the market didn't understand the graphical user interface as a productivity enhancement yet; graphics meant games, so the Mac had to live down an initial reputation as being unsuitable for business tasks. Apple didn't exactly want to promote a game for the Mac at the time, no matter how sensational, so Alice never quite reached as wide an audience as it deserved.

Creative Think

by Andy Hertzfeld in July 1982

Alan Kay, in
the PARC days

In July of 1982, while I was in the midst of writing the Control Manager part of the Macintosh toolbox, my friend Bill Budge invited me to a computer industry seminar called "Creative Think", where interesting people gave purportedly inspiring talks. It was organized by Roger van Oech, a consultant who had written a book about creativity entitled "A Whack On The Side Of The Head". I usually avoided both creativity seminars and industry schmooze-fests, but my friend Bill had somehow finagled free tickets and I thought it would be worth it just to see him.

Carver Mead gave an interesting talk on newly emerging VLSI technology, and some old chip industry veterans recounted amusing war stories, but the last talk of the day was the one that mattered to me. It was given by Alan Kay, the inventor of Smalltalk and the Alto, and the driving force behind Xerox PARC. I had read about Alan, and been inspired by his article in the September 1977 issue of Scientific American, but I had never seen him before in person or heard much about him.

Roger's Book

Alan's speech was revelatory and was perhaps the most inspiring talk that I ever attended. I grew increasingly excited as he made one brilliant, insightful remark after another, and took out my notebook to write as much of it down as I could. Alan was articulating the values behind the work that I was doing, even though he wasn't aware of it, in a way that really resonated with me. After I got back to my office in Cupertino, I transcribed it onto a single page, and copied it to give out to the rest of team.

I still have those notes, so I thought it would be interesting to reproduce them here, as an example of some of the thinking that inspired our efforts.

Alan Kay's talk at Creative Think seminar, July 20, 1982

Outline of talk: Metaphors, Magnetic Fields, Snobbery and Slogans

The best way to predict the future is to invent it.

Humans like fantasy and sharing:

Fantasy fulfills a need for a simpler, more controllable world.

Sharing is important - we're all communication junkies. We have an incredible bandwidth disparity (easy to take in, hard to give out); our devices have the reciprocal disparity (hard to take in, easy to give out)

Metaphors:

Computer as medium (like clay or paint)

Computer as vehicle

Computer as musical instrument

Magnetic Fields:

Find a central metaphor that's so good that everything aligns to it. Design meetings are no longer necessary, it designs itself. The metaphor should be crisp and fun.

Smalltalk is object-oriented, but it should have been message oriented.

Snobbery:

Turn up your nose at good ideas. You must work on great ideas, not good ones.

Appreciate mundanity: after all, a pencil is high technology

One goal: the computer disappears into the environment

The computer shouldn't act like it knows everything.

The whole notion of 'programming language' is wrong.

Slogans:

Better is the enemy of best

Relative judgements have no place in art

Systems programmers are high priests of a low cult

Point of view is worth 80 IQ points

Good ideas don't often scale

Remember, it's all software, it just depends on when you crystallize it.

People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.

Final advice: content over form, go for fun.

You Guys Are In Big Trouble

by Andy Hertzfeld in August 1982

By the spring of 1982, the Mac team was growing so rapidly that we had to move from Texaco Towers back to the main part of the Apple campus on Bandley Drive. We moved into Bandley 4, a medium sized building across the street from Apple's main office.

One of the things that I liked about Bandley 4 was that the software team was in the very back of the building, near the parking lot, so we could go out the back door to our cars, or to play basketball, without having to walk all the way around the building. This worked out well for a couple of months, but eventually the facilities group decided to put an alarm on the back door, so you couldn't go in and out freely. They didn't arm the alarm until 5:30pm, but that didn't help me, since I usually didn't go out to dinner until after 7pm, and then usually came back to work another few hours. The alarm became a major annoyance, since it made me walk significantly out of my way a few times every day.

Every once in a while someone would forget that the alarm was there, and walk out the door anyway. The alarm would produce a head-splitting wail, destroying any chance of concentration until a security guard arrived to disarm it, which sometimes could take more than ten minutes.

I complained about the alarm every way that I knew how, but to no avail. About one quarter of the software team worked late, and the alarm was unnecessary while we were there, so I begged the facilities supervisor not to turn it on until after midnight, even offering to arm it ourselves when the last person left. But my pleas fell on deaf ears.

Every couple of months, Bud Tribble would come down from Seattle and visit with us. We'd show him the latest work we were doing so he could make his great suggestions. Late one afternoon, he showed up in the software area, and we all gathered around to demo to him, including Bill Atkinson and Steve Jobs.

Bill had done some neat hi-resolution scans with an improved dithering algorithm, and he wanted to show them to Bud. They were on his hard disk in the Lisa building, so he ran out the back door to get it. It was after 5:30pm, so that set off the alarm, and a horrible, loud, pulsating noise filled the room.

It went on for at least three minutes before Steve yelled out, "Can't someone figure out how to stop that thing?"

I saw a chance to vanquish my nemesis. "Are we allowed to damage it to get it to stop?", I asked him.

"Yes, do anything you want, I don't care if you break it," he replied, holding his hands over his ears. "Just get the damn thing to stop!"

Bruce Horn and I ran over to the nearby hardware lab and picked up every tool we could find. I got a hammer and screwdriver, and proceeded to pound the screwdriver into the center of the alarm, driving a stake through the demon's heart. The screwdriver went all the way through to the other side, but the alarm kept sounding.

Finally, Bruce took over and gave the screwdriver a mighty twist, and the whole thing flew apart into a half dozen pieces and fell to the ground. The horrible noise finally stopped.

At that very moment, a grizzled security guard entered the back door, just in time to see us cheering as the wrecked alarm finally gave up the ghost. He looked at us, our tools of destruction still in our guilty hands, and said, "You guys are in big trouble!!! Who is in charge here? You better show me your badge."

Steve stepped forward and handed the guard his badge. "I'll take responsibility for this", he told him.