Revolution in the Valley: The Insanely Great Story of How the Mac Was Made (2 page)

One of my recent side projects involved using Woz's new, one-to-one interleave floppy disk routines to make very fast slideshow disks on the Apple II. I had just made one full of Disney cartoon characters, that were scanned by Bob Bishop, one of the early Apple software magicians. Bob adored the work of Carl Barks, the Disney artist who specialized in Donald Duck, and he had scanned dozens of Barks' Donald Duck images for the Apple II. I selected an image of Scrooge McDuck sitting on top of a huge pile of money bags, blithely playing his fiddle, with a big grin on his beak. I'm not sure why I picked that one, but it seemed to be appropriate for some reason.

Even though it was starting to get late, I was dying to see if my routine was working properly, and it would be very cool to surprise Burrell when he came in the next day with a detailed image on the prototype display. But when I went to try it, I noticed that Burrell's Apple didn't have a disk controller card, so there was no way to load my program. Damn! I couldn't shut the computer down to insert the card, because I didn't know how to reinitialize the Macintosh board after power-up; Burrell hadn't left the magic incantation for that. I thought I was stuck, and would have to wait until Burrell came in tomorrow.

The only other person in the lab that evening was Cliff Huston, who saw the trouble I was having. Cliff was another early Apple employee, who was Dick Huston's (the heroic programmer who wrote the 256-byte Apple II floppy disc boot ROM) older brother and an experienced, somewhat cynical technician. I explained the situation to him and was surprised when he started to smile.

Cliff told me that he could insert a disk controller card into Burrell's Apple II with the power still on, without glitching it out, a feat that I thought was miraculous - you'd have to be incredibly quick and steady not to short-circuit any of the contacts while you were inserting it, running the risk of burning out both the Apple II and the card. But Cliff said he'd done it many times before: all that was required was the confidence that you could actually do it. So I crossed my fingers as he approached Burrell's Apple like a samurai warrior, concentrating for a few seconds before holding his breath and slamming the disk card into the slot with a quick, stacatto thrust.

I could barely make myself look, but amazingly enough Burrell's machine was still running, and the disk booted up so I could load the Scrooge McDuck image and my new conversion routine. And even more suprising, my routine actually worked the first time, displaying a crisp rendition of Uncle Scrooge fiddling away on the Mac's tiny monitor. The Apple II only had 192 scan-lines, while the embryonic Macintosh had 256, so I had some extra room at the bottom where I rendered the message "Hi Burrell!" in a nice-looking twenty-four point, proportional font.

By the time I came in the next morning, an excited Burrell had already showed the image to everyone he could find, but then he accidentally reset the prototype somehow, and didn't know how to get the image back on the screen. I loaded it again so he could show it to Tom Whitney, the engineering VP. I think Jef was pretty pleased to see his new computer start to come alive, but I don't think he was very happy about me giving the demo, since he thought I was too much of a hacker, and I wasn't supposed to be involved with his pet project.

It's The Moustache That Matters

by Andy Hertzfeld in September 1980

Burrell was hired into Apple in February 1979 as Apple employee #282, in the lowly position of service technician, one of the lowest paying jobs at the company. Even though he'd been doing genius quality work as a hardware designer on the Macintosh project for a while now (more than nine months), and he was even filling in for Steve Wozniak on the low cost Apple II project, he still wasn't officially promoted to engineer as he requested, which was getting pretty frustrating.

Burrell started thinking about what it would take to get promoted. It obviously wasn't a matter of talent or technical skill, since he was already far more accomplished in that regard than most of the other hardware engineers. It wasn't a matter of working harder, since Burrell already worked harder and was more productive than most of the others. Finally, he noticed something that most of the other engineers had in common that he was lacking: they all had fairly prominent moustaches. And the engineering managers tended to have even bigger moustaches. Tom Whitney, the engineering VP, had the largest moustache of all.

So Burrell immediately started growing his own moustache. It took around a month or so for it to come in fully, but finally he pronounced it complete. And sure enough, that very afternoon, he was called into Tom Whitney's office and told that he was promoted to "member of technical staff" as a full-fledged engineer.

Good Earth

by Andy Hertzfeld in October 1980

Nerf balls were a favorite toy

In 1979 and 1980, Jef Raskin's Macintosh project was a four person research effort with a tenuous existence. It wasn't considered to be very important within Apple, and was almost cancelled a couple of times. When Apple had another major reorganization in the fall of 1980, it was terminated again, but Jef pleaded with Mike Scott and Mike Markkula for more time, and was granted three more months to show that he was really onto something. As part of the re-org, the four person Macintosh team (Jef Raskin, Brian Howard, Burrell Smith, Bud Tribble, soon to be joined by Joanna Hoffman) relocated to a small office building a few blocks from the main Apple campus.

The new office, located at 20863 Stevens Creek Boulevard, was called the "Good Earth" building, because it was adjacent to a Good Earth restaurant. In fact, the office used to be Apple's very first office in Cupertino, after they moved out of Steve Jobs' parents' house, and was later used as the first office of the Lisa project, when the Lisa team had fewer than ten employees. The Mac team moved in, outfitting it with lots of bean bag chairs and all kinds of interesting toys.

Jef was very playful and always encouraged his team to express themselves creatively, so the office quickly began to look more like a day care center than an engineering lab, overflowing with playthings. Periodically, work would cease and the entire team, plus any visitors who might be on the premises, would play some organized game, usually led by Jef and Brian.

The favorite game, which was usually played at least once a day, just after lunch, was a form of tag played with Nerf balls. There were dozens of brightly colored Nerf balls scattered around the office. The rules would be improvised, but usually the person who was "it" had to confer it-hood on someone else by hitting them with a Nerf ball. This inspired everyone to surround their work area with barricades made out of cardboard, to provide cover during the game, making part of the office look like a cardboard maze.

Jef and Brian were both serious musicians, so the office was also littered with a variety of musical instruments, sometimes erupting in spontaneous concerts. Another one of Jef's interests was model airplanes and automobiles, especially radio controlled ones. It wasn't unusual to see a radio controlled car dart underneath your desk, and occasionally everyone would go outside to see the maiden voyage of the latest plane.

Jef was writing his "Book of Macintosh" during much of 1979 and all of 1980, articulating his vision in ever finer detail. Burrell's 6809-based prototype came alive in the early part of 1980, but then he went off to work on the low cost Apple II project. Jef hired Marc Lebrun to write software in early 1980, but Marc was more interested in Lisp machines than a limited memory microcomputer like the Mac, so nothing much happened until he was replaced by Bud Tribble in September 1980.

Bud knew Jef from UCSD, and was also good friends with Bill Atkinson. They had a part time, two person consulting company together in Seattle called Synaptic Systems while they were both graduate students. Bill and Jef convinced Bud to take a one year leave of absence from the M.D/Ph.D. program he was pursuing at University of Washington at Seattle. Bud was in the fifth year of a seven M.D/Ph.D. program. Instead of returning to med school, Bud moved into a spare room at Bill Atkinson's house, and started work on the Mac project at Apple. He quickly began to breathe life into Burrell's languishing prototype, writing some graphics routines for the 6809.

So even though the Mac project had been going for more than a year, the move to Good Earth in October 1980 came at an interesting time, with a new but limited lease on life, and software finally starting to happen. But the Good Earth era was rather short lived.

Around two months after the move, Bud convinced Burrell to consider using the 68000 processor instead of the 6809. Burrell came up with a brilliant design, catching the attention of Steve Jobs. Steve took over the project and quickly recruited most of the early Apple II crew that he trusted, including Steve Wozniak and Rod Holt, and moved the project to larger offices a half mile away, in Texaco Towers (see
texaco towers
).

Texaco Towers

by Andy Hertzfeld in January 1981

The main Apple buildings on Bandley Drive in Cupertino had boring numerical appellations (Bandley 1, Bandley 3, etc.), but from the beginning the Lisa team gave the buildings they inhabited more interesting names. The original office for the Lisa team was adjacent to a Good Earth restaurant (in fact, it was Apple's original office in Cupertino), so it was called the "Good Earth" building. When the team grew larger and took over two nearby office suites, they were designated "Scorched Earth" (because it housed the hardware engineers, who were all smokers) and "Salt of the Earth".

When the Lisa team became a separate division in 1980, they moved to a larger, two-story office building a block or two away from the main building on Bandley Drive. Everyone was so impressed at having two stories (all the other Apple buildings were single story) that the building was dubbed "Taco Towers", although I'm not sure where the "Taco" part came from.

In December 1980, the embryonic Macintosh team was residing in the Good Earth building, which was abandoned by the Lisa team for Taco Towers earlier in the year. When Steve Jobs took over the project, he moved it to a new building that was large enough to hold about fifteen or twenty people, a few blocks away from the main Apple campus at the southeast corner of Stevens Creek Boulevard and Saratoga-Sunnyvale Road.

There was a Texaco gas station at the corner, and a two-story, small, brown, wood paneled office building behind it, the kind that might house some accountants or insurance agents. Apple rented the top floor, which had four little suites split by a corridor, two on a side. Because of the proximity of the gas station and the perch on the second story, as well as the sonic overlap between "Taco" and "Texaco", the building quickly became known as "Texaco Towers".

Burrell Smith and Brian Howard took over the side of the building closest to the gas station and built a hardware lab, while Bud Tribble and Jef Raskin set up shop on the other side, installing desks with prototype Lisas to use for software development. Bud's office had four desks, but he was the only one occupying it at first. Steve didn't have an office there, but he usually came by to visit in the late afternoon.

In the corner of Bud's office, on one of the empty desks, was Burrell's 68000 based Macintosh prototype, wired-wrapped by Burrell himself, the only one currently in existence, although both Brian Howard and Dan Kottke had started wire-wrapping additional ones. Bud had written a boot ROM that filled the screen with the word "hello", rendered in a small bitmap that was thirty two pixels wide for easy drawing, which showed off the prototype's razor sharp video and distinctive black on white text.

When I started on the project in February 1981, I was given Jef's old desk in the office next to Bud's. Desk by desk, Texaco Towers began to fill up, as more team members were recruited, like Collette Askeland to lay out the PC boards, or Ed Riddle to work on the keyboard hardware. When George Crow started, there wasn't an office available for him, so he set up a table in the common foyer and began the analog board design there.