Revolution in the Valley: The Insanely Great Story of How the Mac Was Made (34 page)

I recall at the end of MacCollege signing a large piece of cardboard paper which had around a hundred names of all the MacCollege graduates (I wonder where this is today?).

REFERENCES

Here is a list of the key materials that I used during the early Macintosh development days. I still have all these materials including The Investor source code listing and internal architecture manual.

Lisa Workshop manuals (3 volumes, dated 1983 and 1984)

Inside Macintosh manuals (3 volumes for the early days)

MacCollege class notes (around 200 pages)

BYTE magazine and its Macintosh articles (February 1984)

MacWorld magazine premier issue (February 1984)

A Mac For Mick

by Andy Hertzfeld in January 1984

Mick Jagger

The last couple of weeks before the Macintosh unveiling on January 24th were extremely hectic. The software still wasn't finished, and it wasn't clear if there was enough time left to get it into adequate shape. Meanwhile, the Apple PR machine was revved up to full speed, so there were also plenty of unusual diversions, like being interviewed and photographed for the national press.

The absolute deadline for finishing the software was when the factory opened at 6am Monday morning, on January 16th, eight days before the introduction. When I came into work on Friday, January 13th, I knew that I would probably stay there all weekend, along with the rest of the team, working as hard as possible to shake out the remaining bugs before Monday. Steve Jobs, Mike Murray, Bob Belleville and others were in New York city doing a press tour, so I thought we would be relatively free of distractions, and would be able to focus on bug fixing.

I came into work later than usual, around noon, since I had been at Apple until 3am the previous evening, and I wanted to get one decent night's sleep before the final push. As I went to sit down, I noticed that a handwritten note had been placed on my chair. It was from our software librarian, Patti King, who had taken a message from Steve Jobs' secretary, Lynn Takahashi.

actual note
(click to enlarge)

"Andy - Steve J. called - we can deliver a Mac to Mick Jagger tomorrow. You can fly out to meet them by tomorrow noon and bring lots of neat software. If you can come, make arrangements for the trip through Lynn. Steve will call back in a couple of hours, also, he'll be at the Carlyle Hotel tomorrow."

Wow! A chance to meet Mick Jagger was a once in a lifetime opportunity. But we still had three more days before the deadline, and I would be absent for at least 30 hours if I tried to go to New York, plus I would be relatively useless when I returned from all the flying. I called back Lynn to tell her to tell Steve that I couldn't make it. But I was curious to find out about Mick's reaction.

I found out from Bill Atkinson when he returned from the East Coast on Sunday afternoon, and I got more details from Steve and Mike Murray a bit later. Steve had apparently gone to a party on Thursday evening, where he was introduced to Andy Warhol. Andy got really excited about the Macintosh when Steve demoed it to him. "You must show it to Mick,", he proclaimed, and arranged for Steve and the Apple crew to go to Mick Jagger's townhouse on Saturday afternoon to present him with a Macintosh.

Steve Jobs, Mike Murray and Bill Atkinson got out of the cab in front of Mick's two-story brownstone townhouse, hauling along a Macintosh in its canvas carrying case. They knocked on the door at the address they were given, but there was no response for several minutes. Finally, the door was opened by two huge guys who were obviously bodyguards, who didn't seem all that impressed to be talking to the co-founder of Apple Computer and his entourage.

The Apple folk were led upstairs into an elegantly furnished room to wait for Mick. Bill set up the Mac and launched MacPaint, and started to fool around with it. Then, abruptly, Mick Jagger strode into the room, dressed casually in a T-shirt and blue jeans.

Mick was polite, but he didn't seem to have heard of Apple Computer, Steve Jobs or the Macintosh. Steve tried to strike up a conversation, but he wasn't very successful. Steve told me that Mick couldn't seem to put together a coherent sentence. "His speech was slurred and very slow", Steve described it later, "in fact I think he was on drugs. Either that or he's brain-damaged." After a few minutes, it was clear that Mick had absolutely no interest whatsoever in Apple or the Macintosh, and an awkward silence ensued.

Fortunately, Mick's twelve year old daughter Jade had followed Mick into the room, and her eyes lit up when she saw MacPaint. Bill began to teach her how to use it, and pretty soon she was happily mousing away, fascinated by what she could do with MacPaint. Even though Mick drifted off to another room, the Apple contingent stayed with Jade for another half hour or so, showing off the Macintosh and answering her questions, and ended up leaving the machine with her, since she couldn't seem to part with it.

It Sure Is Great To Get Out Of That Bag!

by Andy Hertzfeld in January 1984

Cover of Intro Brochure

It took a monumental effort, fueled by inordinate amounts of chocolate covered espresso beans (see
real artists ship
), to finally finish the first release of the Macintosh software in time for the introduction. We finished with literally no time to spare, shipping the "golden master" of the "Write/Paint" disk to the factory at 6am on Monday morning January 16th, a week before the introduction. By that point, most of the software team hadn't slept for days, so we all went home to collapse.

I thought I would need to sleep for at least 24 hours, but I woke up after 6 hours with a desire to go back to Apple to see if the release held up, and to see how everyone else was feeling. By 5pm, most of the software team had dragged themselves back for the same reason, and we were lounging around in a tired daze, happy that we finally shipped, but still not quite believing it, when Steve Jobs strode into the software area.

"Hey, pick yourselves up off the floor, you're not done yet!"

Uh-oh, I thought, someone must have found a show-stopper in the release and we're going to have to track it down. But that's not what he meant.

"We need a demo for the intro! The Mac deserves to have a great demo for its first public showing. I want the Mac to play the theme from "Chariots of Fire" while it's showing a slide show of the apps. Plus lots of other cool stuff, whatever you can come up with. And it needs to be done by the weekend, to be ready for the rehearsals."

We moaned and groaned about being tired, but as we talked we realized that it would be fun to cook up something impressive. We were too tired to think about it right away, but when we came back the next day, a plan started to emerge.

Capps had an idea to use a gigantic font to scroll "Macintosh" across the screen, one letter at a time, to start the demo, so he worked on that, as well as the slideshow. Bruce Horn wanted to do a starry night with twinkling stars, and a skywriter writing "Macintosh" in cursive across the night sky. Susan worked on an intro graphic of the Mac sitting in its canvas carrying bag, and well as some of the other graphics for the slideshow part. I integrated all the pieces and also signed up for the "Chariots of Fire" music part, since no one else wanted to do that.

It's hard to write a music editor/player in two days, but I managed to put something together that could actually play the "Chariots of Fire" theme, but it didn't sound very good, since it used simple sine waves without any envelope shaping. Steve immediately rejected it as lousy, which it was, and opted for using a CD of the "Chariots of Fire" theme to play in the background instead.

Meanwhile, as we were working on the demo, Mike Boich came by with Mark Barton, a third party developer who we seeded with an early Mac, because he had written an impressive program for the Apple II called S.A.M. (the Software Automatic Mouth). SAM was a speech generator, which converted text to speech, with a distinctive, winning personality. I had helped Mark with sound driver issues as he developed it, and now it finally made it to fruition. SAM sounded even better on the Mac, because we had 8 bits per sample and a higher sampling rate.

When Steve heard SAM talk, he immediately decreed that we had to incorporate SAM in the intro demo. "I want the Macintosh to be the first computer to introduce itself!", he insisted. He told Mike Boich to quickly cut a deal with Mark so Apple could bundle the speech generator (rechristened Macintalk) and use it in the intro.

Since my music generator fell through, I got to do the speech part, using Mark Barton's libraries. I knew that I wasn't clever enough to be the Mac's speechwriter. I think Susan had the idea of asking Steve Hayden, Chiat-Day's head writer, to do it. Steve was the guy who conceived the 1984 commercial (see
1984
) and was as clever as they come. He was excited about helping out and got it done overnight.

Once we integrated all the pieces together, the demo didn't come close to be able to run on a standard Macintosh. Fortunately, we had a prototype of a 512K Mac in the lab, so we decided to cheat a little (there were only two in existence at the time) and use that for the demo, which made things fit.

The demo starts out with Susan's graphic of the Mac hidden in its carrying bag, on a curtained stage, displayed while the program prepared Capp's big letters. Suddenly, the music swells (from a CD, not generated by the Mac) and Capp's big letters scroll nimbly across the screen, spelling out "Macintosh". Then we transition to Bruce's skywriter, and then to various screen shots of applications, including third party applications like Microsoft's Multiplan and Chart. Finally, the music stops, the screen goes blank, and waits for Steve to press the mouse button. When he does, the Mac starts to speak, in strange but somehow endearing tones:

Hello, I am Macintosh. It sure is great to get out of that bag!

Unaccustomed as I am to public speaking, I'd like to share with you a maxim I thought of the first time I met an IBM mainframe: Never trust a computer that you can't lift!

Obviously, I can talk, but right now I'd like to sit back and listen. So it is with considerable pride that I introduce a man who has been like a father to me... Steve Jobs!

A Floppy named lsadkfjalhkjh

by Bruce Horn in January 1984

After the Mac was introduced in January, 1984, we were all excited to go out to computer dealers and see people's first reactions to our pride and joy. Up to this point, computer users were used to the IBM PC's command-line interface, and we were more than curious as to how people would react to our point-and-click, drag-and-drop graphical user interface. I especially was interested in seeing how people liked using the Finder, and what they found particularly compelling, or difficult.

We went to quite a few stores in the week or so after the introduction, and found that, without exception, every Mac's floppy disk had a garbage name! They were all named something like ";lkakl;rt;klgjh", as if someone had just randomly typed characters to see what would happen. Which is exactly what they did.