Revolution in the Valley: The Insanely Great Story of How the Mac Was Made (37 page)

I watched as Steve stood up in front of the assembled Lisa team and announced the merger and layoffs, telling them that they had screwed up and were B or C players. "So, today we are releasing some of your fellow employees to give them the opportunity to work at our sister companies here in the valley," he declared in classic Steve Jobs style.

Someone suggested the alternative of going on a "leave of absence", instead of quitting entirely, which sounded better to me, since I would retain my badge and the prerogatives of an employee when I visited Apple and could more easily return if things seemed better after they settled down. I decided to take a six month leave of absence, starting on March 1st, 1984.

I told Steve Jobs about my leave of absence plans, which he said he regretted, but he didn't offer me any alternative that was acceptable to me. I proposed that we spin off another small team that could work directly for him, now that the division had over 300 people, but he wasn't interested. With the Macintosh finally shipping and the divisions combined, Steve felt he needed managers like Bob Belleville to manage the huge battalion of employees, much more than creative types like myself. Also, he told me that he was sure that I'd be so bored in a month or two that I'd come back from my leave early.

A couple of days before my leave commenced, Steve came into the software area escorting a surprise guest. They came over to my cubicle and Steve introduced me to Apple's newest employee, Alan Kay (see
creative think
), who had recently departed from Atari and had just signed on as an Apple Fellow. Alan Kay was one of my heros, and it made me even more depressed than I already was to know that leaving would mean that I wouldn't get to work with him.

At the end of my last day of work, the software team held a farewell dinner for me, at a small, fancy continental restaurant called Maddalena's on Emerson street, which was around five blocks from my house in Palo Alto. Now that my last day had actually arrived, I was really sad about leaving all my friends at Apple. I walked over to the restaurant with Burrell Smith, who lived in the house next door to me, wondering if I would be able to survive the dinner without bursting into tears.

Most of the software team came to the dinner, as well as Steve Jobs. I was in a sort of daze as the elaborate dinner was served, followed by some toasts, where people said how much they liked working with me, while I only had sporadic success at holding back tears. Bill Atkinson said that he had no idea of what I would work on next, but he knew that he would be amazed by it. Steve Jobs said that he would miss me, and that he hoped that I would hurry back from my leave. But then he said something strange, apparently commenting on my emotional state: "The thing I like best about Andy is that it's so easy to make him cry".

Finally, the dinner was over and I walked back home with Burrell, still feeling numb, as if I didn't want to think about my conflicted feelings just yet. When I awoke at my usual time the next morning, I had to fight the urge to drive down to Apple as usual. It took a week or two before it stopped feeling strange to not go into work.

First Day in the Mac Group

by Scott Knaster in April 1984

In March of 1983, I moved to California to work at Apple. My first job was answering the Lisa Hotline, helping Lisa customers work through their application questions and problems. Although the Lisa was very cool technology in 1983, and I was happy to be working on it, the applications weren't deep, and sadly, there weren't many customers. This left plenty of time to learn about other things, like the Lisa's development system, which was also used to program the Macintosh, due to ship in 1984.

I had a friend, Cary Clark, who worked in the group that helped third-party developers write Macintosh software. Late in 1983, Cary gave me an amazing stack of documentation: an early version of Inside Macintosh (see
inside macintosh
). It was thrilling to learn how, with simple Pascal procedure calls, any programmer could create windows, track buttons and scroll bars, work with pull-down menus, and draw sophisticated graphics. So when Cary told me there was a job opening in his group, I jumped at the chance to work there.

My first day in the Macintosh group was in April 1984. Cary set me up with the standard set of hardware for developing software: in addition to a Mac (128K, of course), I got a Lisa, used for editing and compiling code, and an Apple III, which acted as a terminal to the Mac for debugging purposes. I also received a most precious accessory: an external floppy disk drive for the Mac. This caseless prototype was such a hot item that I was advised to lock it in a desk drawer at night.

After setting up my hardware, Cary showed me around the Mac building, Bandley 3. We visited the software team's "fishbowl" near the back of the building, the hardware group's space, and the areas for marketing, finance, and other teams. The director of finance, Debi Coleman, often yelled questions loudly to other people across the smallish building, a habit I witnessed on that first day.

The building's atrium featured a couple of stand-up video games, a fancy stereo system with the first CD player I ever saw, and, incongruously, a grand piano and a motorcycle, placed there by Steve Jobs as examples of great product design.

As Cary and I neared the end of our little tour, we came to one of the few closed, non-cubicle offices in the building. It belonged to Steve Jobs. As we walked past, I peeked in and noticed an Apple logo woven into the carpet. Steve was having a conversation with a couple of guys from the Accessory Products Group, the division that made printers, keyboards, modems, and so on.

Steve was concerned about a shortage of ImageWriter dot matrix printers. Apple had forecast that about 70% of Mac buyers would also want an ImageWriter, but the actual figure was over 90%, which led to the shortage. To make things worse, the ImageWriter used a part called a microcontroller that was also in short supply. The printer guys in Steve's office were in charge of a new product called the Wide Carriage ImageWriter, a special edition of the printer that was bought mainly by big accounting firms, and usually with an Apple II, not a Mac. The Wide Carriage ImageWriter used the same scarce microcontroller, which further reduced the number of regular ImageWriters. Steve was agitated about that, because some customers were refusing to buy a Mac if they couldn't get an ImageWriter at the same time.

As Cary and I walked past Steve's office, we heard him yelling at the printer guys, reminding them that every Wide Carriage ImageWriter built with the hard-to-get microcontroller would likely cost the company a Mac sale. "If you build even one of those Wide ImageWriters…", and then he told them about a certain part of their anatomy that would be "cut off" if that happened. The printer guys looked like they would rather be anywhere else than right where they were. Before too much longer, Apple did ship the Wide Carriage ImageWriter, the microcontroller shortage cleared up, and I always felt privileged to have experienced so much about the Mac division on my first day.

Thunderscan

by Andy Hertzfeld in June 1984

brochure for Thunderscan

The first project that I worked on for Apple after starting in August 1979 was writing low level software for the Silentype printer, a cute, inexpensive thermal printer for the Apple II, that was based on technology licensed from a local company named Trendcom. In typical Apple fashion, we improved on Trendcom's design by replacing their relatively expensive controller board with a much simpler one that relied on the microprocessor in the Apple II to do most of the dirty work.

The only other engineer working on the project was Victor Bull, who was the hardware designer and also the project leader. Vic was smart, taciturn and easy to work with, and I learned a lot from him about how thermal printers worked, as well as how things worked at Apple. We finished the project quickly, and the Silentype shipped in November 1979, less than four months after I began working on it.

In May 1984, during my leave of absence from Apple (see
leave of absence
), I received a phone call from Victor Bull, who I hadn't heard from in a couple of years. He had left Apple more than a year ago to work with his friend Tom Petrie at a tiny company based in Orinda named Thunderware, that sold a single product called Thunderclock, an inexpensive calendar/clock card for the Apple II. Victor said that he thought that I might be interested in writing software for an exciting, clever new product that Thunderware was developing for the Macintosh, which he refused to describe over the phone. He invited me to come visit them to check it out.

In early June, I drove up to Thunderware's office in Orinda, which was about an hour's drive from my house in Palo Alto. After I arrived at their modest headquarters, Vic introduced me to his partner, Tom Petrie, and I signed a non-disclosure agreement before they ushered me into a back room to see their demo.

The most popular printer for both the Apple II and the Macintosh was the ImageWriter, a $500 dot-matrix printer capable of rendering bitmapped graphics, that was designed and manufactured by Japanese company named C.Itoh Electronics and marketed by Apple. Virtually every Macintosh owner purchased an ImageWriter, since it was the only printer that was supported by Apple. Tom's demo consisted of an ImageWriter printer hooked up to an Apple II, that at first glance appeared to be busily printing away. But when I looked closer, I noticed that instead of blank paper, there was a glossy photograph of a cat threaded through the printer's platen, and the printer's black plastic ribbon cartridge was missing, replaced by a makeshift contraption containing an optical sensing device that trailed an umbilical cord back to the Apple II.

Their potential new product, Thunderscan, was a low cost way to temporarily turn an ImageWriter printer into a high resolution scanner, by replacing the ribbon cartridge with an optical sensor and writing some clever software. Since the resolution was determined by the precision of the printer's stepper motors, which had to be very accurate in order to print detailed graphics, Thunderscan, priced at under $200, had better resolution than flat bed scanners costing more than ten times as much. I loved the cleverness of the ingenious concept, and the Woz-like elegance of saving money and adding flexibility by doing everything in software, but there were also a few problems.

The biggest problem was that Thunderscan could only capture one scan line's worth of data on each pass of the print head, which made it nine times slower than regular printing, since the print head could deposit nine dots at a time. This made for frustratingly slow scanning, often taking over an hour to scan a full page at the highest resolution. Thunderscan was never going to win any races.

Another apparent problem was the disappointingly low quality of the image being captured and displayed by Tom Petrie's Apple II application. Tom and Vic said their scanner was capable of capturing up to 32 different levels of light intensity, but both the Apple II (in hi-res mode) and the Macintosh only had one bit per pixel to display, so the software had to simulate gray scales using patterns of black and white dots. It looked like Tom was using a simple threshold algorithm to do the rendering, which threw away most of the gray scale information and made the resulting image look unacceptably blotchy. It was hard to tell if the quality promised by Tom and Vic was there or not.

Tom and Vic proposed to hire me to write Macintosh software for Thunderscan. I knew that a low cost scanner would be a great product for the image hungry Macintosh, but only if it had sufficient quality, and I wasn't sure about that. I told them that I'd think it over during the next few days, and, as I did, I became more excited about the potential of Thunderscan for the Macintosh, realizing that the slow speed wouldn't be that much of an impediment if the quality and resolution was good enough. The low image quality in Tom's prototype was probably caused more by the Apple II software than by anything inherent in the scanner. The Macintosh was almost ten times faster than the Apple II, so it should be able to sample the incoming data better to obtain more horizontal resolution. Plus, I knew a much better algorithm for gray scale rendering that would be fun to try out in practice.

My friend and colleague Bill Atkinson was a talented photographer, and one of his hobbies was playing around with digitized pictures, periodically experimenting to find the best algorithms for rendering them. Bill loved to explain his current work to whoever would listen to him, so I learned a lot about rendering gray scale images over the years simply by being around him. Bill had progressed over the years from using an "ordered dither" algorithm, where varying threshold values are specified in a sliding matrix, to his current favorite, which was a modified version of what was known as the "Floyd-Steinberg" algorithm, where an error term is maintained and distributed proportionally to neighboring pixels.

I called Thunderware and told them I was interested in working on Macintosh software for Thunderscan, in exchange for a per-unit royalty. I drove back up to Orinda, where Tom and Vic gave me lots of documentation about the scanner, and the sample code that Tom had written for the Apple II. For the next couple of months, I drove up to Orinda once a week, usually on Thursday, to meet with Tom and Vic show them my progress, prioritize development issues and discussion various complications as they arose. We would also discuss business terms, but we didn't sign a formal contract until the software was almost finished, when we settled on a royalty of $7.50 per unit.