Revolution in the Valley: The Insanely Great Story of How the Mac Was Made (44 page)

The day I finally figured out how "regions" in QuickDraw worked was an epiphany, really.

Specs? We don't need no steenking specs!

It seems strange by modern standards, but MacPaint 2.0 never had a product spec. There was no marketing requirements document. There were no design meetings. There wasn't even a product manager until the last few months of work. Many people had opinions and suggestions (and the then-new tear-off menus came directly from HyperCard, courtesy of Bill) but ultimately the product was what
I
wanted it to be.

Of course, I had more leeway than Bill did with the original MacPaint since I didn't have to worry about running on a 128K Mac-- a 512K computer was the minimum. Thus MacPaint gained a sizeable, movable painting window; multiple document support; large clipboards, the "snapshot" capability with the "magic eraser", and so forth.

Some features were pretty subtle: for example, in response to a request from Radius, MacPaint 2.0 would automatically move its window down if the user took advantage of a Radius monitor's capability to enlarge the standard menu bar!

Fun hardware note

Most of MacPaint was developed on a "Big Mac" prototype-- a computer that was a design study for the next Macintosh. Basically it was a 16mHz 68020 version of a Mac Plus. Cases were never made, so it was simply a 1 foot square circuit board mounted on a piece of wood, connected to a 10 megabyte SCSI hard drive.

I used the Big Mac prototype since it was faster and more reliable than the Macintosh II prototypes available. It was never produced, and designer Rich Page left Apple to work at NeXT shortly after his design "lost" to the slotted Mac II.

I still have the Big Mac I used at Apple. I wonder if it still works.

The Zebra Lady

Test versions of MacPaint had different images, generally from comic books, in the "About" box. The last beta version showed the nude upper torso of a zebra-striped woman taken from the Olivia de Berardinis painting "Zebra Lady". With the covert approval of all involved, this version made it into the release: you could show the Zebra Lady image by holding down the tab and space keys while selecting "About MacPaint".

When the artist found out, she took it well. I have a signed copy of the original print framed to this day.

Shelf Life

MacPaint 2.0 was introduced in late 1987 (did it really take me that long to write?) and remained on the market until fall 1998. I think this is a record of some sort for personal computer software.

A Lesson In Diplomacy

by David Ramsey in 1988

While at Apple, I was active online in the Compuserve Macintosh Forums. I was known as an Apple employee there and provided what support I could to people with problems or questions.

One person had a particularly vexing problem. He'd purchased a fully outfitted Macintosh II computer, with two megabytes of dealer-installed RAM and a 40 megabyte hard disk, video card, and Apple color monitor. At the time this configuration cost over $5,000.00.

He claimed the computer had never worked properly-- that it was flakey and crashed frequently. He had returned it to his dealer multiple times and had finally been told that the dealer couldn't do anything else for him and not to come back.

I suggested several things for him to try, none of which worked. I was puzzled since by that time I was using a Mac II as my work machine and knew it to be solid and reliable.

Finally I suggested that he ship the computer to me at Apple, where I promised I would get to the bottom of his problems. When I received his computer, it was indeed flakey and crashed frequently. When I looked inside his computer the reason for the problems became obvious...

Macintosh II computers had 8 slots for SIMM memory modules. To install memory, the SIMM had to be inserted into the socket at an angle and then pivoted into place until a pair of plastic locking pins snapped around it. To remove the SIMM, the plastic locking pins had to be carefully pried apart so the SIMM could be tilted out of the socket.

It was very easy to break the locking pins when removing SIMMs. This resulted in a SIMM that wasn't held securely in its socket.

When I opened the customer's computer, I saw several of the SIMM sockets' locking pins had been broken. Whoever had caused the damage had attempted to hold the SIMMs in place with rubber bands. Since the computer had been purchased new and the memory installed by the dealer, it seemed obvious to me that the dealer had damaged the computer and was trying to duck his responsibility to repair or replace it.

Fortunately I had a friend who worked at the Apple service center in Campbell (the building, at the intersection of Highway 17 and Hamilton, is now a Fry's Electronics). I removed the Mac's logic board and took it over to the service center, where my friend used industrial soldering equipment to remove the damaged sockets and replace them with new ones. I reassembled the computer, reinstalled the memory, and set it running Apple diagnostic software. After a successful 24 hour run I returned the computer to the customer...with a letter noting what the problem was, how it was repaired, and oh, by the way, it was the dealer's fault. It's been a long time but I think I even went so far as to comment that even if the dealer didn't do it, it was pretty hard to explain how he'd never noticed the broken SIMM sockets.

The customer showed the dealer my letter. This landed me in some hot water, as the enraged dealer called Apple demanding my head. He didn't get it (then). Jean-Louis Gassee took me aside to explain that it was great that I'd taken an unhappy Apple customer and made him a happy Apple customer. If all I'd done, he said, was to repair the computer and enclose a letter explaining the problem, nobody could have criticised me. But fingering the dealer (which he personally thought was correct) was the wrong thing to do: he noted that I had only the customer's unsupported word on the events leading to the problem, and that if the customer's account of the matter were accurate, he'd easily figure out it was the dealer himself.

As far as I know, no action was ever taken against the dealer. But Gassee's explanation was of how to handle situations like this was a valuable lesson.

Origins of Spline-Based and Anti-Aliased Fonts

by William Donelson in January 1989

While working on a spring sabatical from high school in April and May of 1971, I worked in the computer department of the National Institutes of Health in Maryland.

I was assigned to work on the PDP-6 and PDP-10 with several people, including Dr Bob Sproull.

They had a Calcomp Film Plotter which used an electron beam to draw on film, thus allowing high resolution output, e.g. for publishing.

Bob asked me to investigate ways to make zoom-able fonts, which could also be distorted into a sort of italic, etc.

I studied the problem for a week or so, and concluded the best way to do this was a combination of straight lines and splines. I developed a list structure to store fonts. As examples, I did the letters "I" (of course) and "P" (just to prove the point).

This idea worked very well, and I gave a demo on the PDP-6's vector display system, set into raster mode. The characters could be scaled and slanted to "italic" quite easily, and could be shown as outlines or as filled characters.

(I also did a fsimple ighting video game on the display, "Germs" of course)

I then went off to MIT for ten years.

Fast forward to MacWorld, January 1989. I had taken a job at a Silicon Valley company doing Mac storage and video products, and was invited to a breakfast with John Warnock.

During breakfast, I mentioned to him that I was the originator of the spline-based font system. He looked shocked, and distinctly nervous! Apparently, he and Bob Sproull were associates, and he was afraid I was going to make claims or something!

I laughed, and put his mind to rest: "John, don't worry. I had an idea 18 years ago, and you and Adobe did all the real work". He laughed and relaxed a bit, but I'll never forget the expression on his face!

Five Different Macintoshes

by Andy Hertzfeld

The final version of the Mac digital board

The awesomely creative design of the Macintosh digital board was always the seed crystal of brilliance at the core of the project, but there wasn't just one design; Burrell redesigned the digital board four different times as development proceeded, finally arriving at the shipping design in the fall of 1982.

The first Macintosh digital board, designed in late 1979, was based on Jef Raskin's specifications: it had a Motorola 6809E microprocessor, 64K of memory, and a 256x256 black and white, bit-mapped graphics display. Even in this first design, Burrell was using his trademark 'PAL' chips, which were small, programmable logic arrays, to provide all of the system glue, so the system had a very low chip count.

The first Macintosh was a cute little computer, but it was fundamentally limited by the 6809 microprocessor, which only had 16 bits of address space. Bill Atkinson was doing incredible work on the Lisa project using Motorola's 68000 microprocessor, with its capacious 32 bit registers and 24 bit address space. Bud Tribble, the Mac's only software person, was living at Bill's house, and watching the extraordinary progress on Lisa's graphics package. He began to wonder if it was possible for the Macintosh to use the 68000, so it could run Bill's graphics routines.

Bud began asking Burrell if it was feasible to include the 68000 in a low cost design. The 68000 was expensive enough on its own, but its 16 bit memory bus required twice as many RAM chips as the 6809, so the overall cost was significantly more expensive. But Burrell thought about the problem and came up with a characteristically brilliant idea for his second Macintosh design.

The idea was what Burrell called a "bus transformer" circuit, built out of PAL chips, which adapted the 68000 to an 8 bit memory bus by exploiting the fast "page mode" access mode of the RAMs. The new Macintosh, designed over the Christmas break at the end of 1980, featured an 8 megahertz 68000, 64K of RAM, and a 384 by 256 bit mapped display. It was 60% faster than the Lisa (which used a 5 megahertz 68000) but a lot less expensive.

When Steve Jobs caught wind of what Burrell had come up with - an Apple II priced machine that blew away the Lisa, he became really excited, and saw that Burrell's machine could become the future of Apple. Steve's attention was the beginning of the end for Jef, though, who despised parts of Steve's personality and couldn't put up with Steve's courting of Burrell and Bud. Steve took over the project in January 1981, and the Macintosh entered the post-Jef era, on track to becoming a real product.

Burrell's third Macintosh design was done in June 1981. The main reason was that he fell in love with a communications chip called the SCC. The SCC could support a built-in local area network, making AppleTalk possible with no additional hardware, as well as providing nice buffered serial ports with interrupts and other hardware features. At this point it also was becoming obvious that we needed at least 128K of memory to support the user interface, so he also added a second row of RAM chips.

Around the end of 1981, Burrell met some engineers who were doing custom LSI chips, which were very flexible and powerful but very time consuming to design, since the software tools were still in their infancy. Burrell decided that he wanted to take a shot at building the Macintosh around a single custom chip, and convinced Steve that he could pull it off. Instead of sitting around doing nothing while the software team finished the product, he would work with a couple of experienced LSI designers and redesign the Mac around what he called the "Integrated Burrell Machine".

Earlier in the year, Wendell Sander, the designer of the Apple III and one of Apple's best engineers, did a small custom chip that crammed all the functionality of Woz's disk controller into a single chip. It was called the "IWM" chip, which stood for the "Integrated Woz Machine", since Woz's disk controller is really an elaborate state machine, but it also stood for the "Integrated Wendell Machine". So when Burrell envisioned a single custom chip for the Macintosh, he called it the "IBM" chip, for "Integrated Burrell Machine", relishing the potential confusion the name might cause.

In the beginning of 1982, the original 68000 design was more than a year old, and the software was nowhere near finished, so Burrell was afraid some of the trade-offs of the original design were no longer current. He used the expansive canvas of a custom chip, where additional logic was almost free, to update the architecture. The most important decision was admitting that the software would never fit into 64K of memory and going with a full 16-bit memory bus, requiring 16 RAM chips instead of 8. The extra memory bandwidth allowed him to double the display resolution, going to dimensions of 512 by 342 instead of 384 by 256. He also added bells and whistles like a fancy, DMA-fed sound generator with four independent voices. This was the fourth version of the Macintosh design.