Revolution in the Valley: The Insanely Great Story of How the Mac Was Made (50 page)

The original Macintosh was designed by a small team that worked long hours with a passionate, almost messianic fervor, inculcated by our leader, Steve Jobs, and the excitement that we felt during its creation shines through in the finished product. The attitudes, values and personalities of the designers are reflected in the thousands of subtle choices that they make in the course of their design, coalescing into a spirit or feeling imparted to its users.

We were excited because we thought we had a chance to do something extraordinary. Most technology development is incremental, but every once in a while there's an opportunity to make a quantum leap to a whole new level. A few years earlier, the Apple II and other pioneering systems made computing affordable to individuals, but they were still much too hard for most people to use. We felt that the Mac's graphical user interface had the potential to make computing enjoyable to non-technical users for the very first time, potentially improving the lives of millions of users.

As soon as he seized the reins from Jef Raskin in January 1981, Steve Jobs galvanized the Macintosh team with an extreme sense of urgency. One of his first acts as head of the project was to bet John Couch, the executive in charge of the Lisa Division, $5000 that the Macintosh would beat the Lisa to market, despite the fact that Lisa had more than a two year head start, and we had barely begun. The Mac team always had incredibly optimistic schedules, because Steve would never be satisfied with more realistic estimates (see
reality distortion field
), as if he could make it happen faster through sheer force of will.

But the desire to ship quickly was counterbalanced by a demanding, comprehensive perfectionism. Most commercial projects are driven by commercial values, where the goal is to maximize profits by outperforming your competition. In contrast, the Macintosh was driven more by artistic values, oblivious to competition, where the goal was to be transcendently brilliant and insanely great. We wanted the Macintosh to be a technical and artistic tour-de-force that pushed the state of the art in every conceivable dimension. No detail was too small to matter (see
pc board esthetics
), and good enough wasn't good enough - if Steve could perceive it, it had to be great.

Steve encouraged the Mac designers to think of ourselves as artists. In the spring of 1982, he took the entire Mac team on a field trip to a Louis Comfort Tiffany exhibition in San Francisco, because Tiffany was an artist who was able to mass produce his work, as we aspired to do. Steve even had us individually sign the interior of the Macintosh case, like artists signing their work (see
signing party
), encouraging each one of us to feel personally responsible for the quality of the product.

Other groups at Apple had an elaborate formal product development process, mandating lengthy product requirement documents and engineering specifications before implementation commenced. In contrast, the Mac team favored a more creative, flexible, incremental approach of successively refining prototypes. Burrell Smith developed a unique hardware design style based on programmable array logic chips (PAL chips), which enabled him to make changes much faster than traditional techniques allowed, almost with the fluidity of software. Instead of arguing about new software ideas, we actually tried them out by writing quick prototypes, keeping the ideas that worked best and discarding the others (see
busy being born
). We always had something running that represented our best thinking at the time.

You might think that impossible schedules and uncompromising perfectionism would lead to an oppressive work environment, but most of the time, the ambiance of the Mac team was spontaneous, enthusiastic and irreverent. Jef Raskin had a playful management style, encouraging a workplace teeming with toys and semi-organized games (see
good earth
), which carried over to the Jobs era. Most of the early team members were around the same age, in our mid-twenties, and we enjoyed each other's company. We increasingly hung out together as the project demanded ever greater chunks of our time, abandoning the distinction between work and play. Despite the incessant pressure, we loved what we were doing.

Given Steve's autocratic tendencies, the Mac team was surprisingly egalitarian. Unlike other parts of Apple, which were becoming more conservative and bureaucratic as the company grew, the early Mac team was organized more like a start-up company. We eschewed formal structure and hierarchy, in favor of a flat meritocracy with minimal managerial oversight, like the band of revolutionaries we aspired to be. Steve Jobs would sometimes issue an unreasonable edict or veto something that everyone else wanted, but at least he would relent when he saw he was wrong (see
quick, hide in this closet!
). At our third retreat in January 1983, Steve reinforced our rebel spirit, which was waning as the team grew larger, by telling us "it's better to be a pirate than join the navy" (see
pirate flag
).

Enthusiasm is contagious, and a product that is fun to create is much more likely to be fun to use. The urgency, ambition, passion for excellence, artistic pride and irreverent humor of the original Macintosh team infused the product and energized a generation of developers and customers with the Macintosh spirit, which continues to inspire more than twenty years later.

The Apple Spirit

by Andy Hertzfeld

Toward the end of 1988, I wrote an essay that was published in MacWeek entitled "The Apple Spirit". It was about the creative magic that I found in the Apple II, and how we were able to transplant it into the Macintosh. The essay articulates the values behind lots of the stories collected here, so I thought it was worth including.

The Apple Spirit

November 29, 1988

The best purchase of my life occurred in January 1978 when I spent $1295 plus tax (most of my life savings at the time) on an Apple II microcomputer (serial number 1703) with 16K bytes of RAM. I was instantly delighted with it, and the deeper I dug into it, the more excited I became. Not only could I finally afford to have my own computer, but the one I got turned out to be magic; it was better than I ever thought it possibly could be!

I started spending most of my free time with my Apple, and then most of my not-so-free time, exploring the various technical aspects of the system. As I taught myself 6502 assembly language from the monitor listing that came with the machine, it became clear to me that this was no ordinary product; the coding style was crazy, whimsical and outrageous, like every other part of the design, especially the hi-res graphic screen; it was clearly the work of a passionate artist. Eventually, I became so obsessed with the Apple II that I had to go to work at the place that created it. I abandoned graduate school and started work as a systems programmer at Apple in August 1979.

Even though the Apple II was overflowing with both technical and marketing genius, the best thing about it was the spirit of its creation. It was not conceived or designed as a product in the usual sense; it was just Steve Wozniak trying to impress himself and his friends. Most of the early Apple employees were their own ideal customers. The Apple II was simultaneously a work of art and the fulfillment of a dream, shared by Apple's employees and customers. Its unique spirit was picked up and echoed back by third party developers, who sprung out of nowhere with innovative applications.

The personal computer industry began to grow and evolve very rapidly when larger companies realized the extraordinary potential of personal computers. Apple's sales took off like a skyrocket as the Apple II became accepted as an established industry standard. By the time the early 1980s rolled around, many opportunists had come to both Apple and the personal computer industry, people whose only concern was to make as much money as possible. I started to become disillusioned when Apple hired many professional managers who didn't appreciate the magic of the Apple II; many of them would have been just as happy selling refrigerators. I probably would have left Apple sometime in 1981 if I hadn't run across a tiny, sloppily wire-wrapped digital board created by Burrell Smith, a young technician who worked in the service department.

Burrell worshipped Woz's Apple II design and had forged an idiosyncratic design style that was even crazier than Woz's, using many clever tricks to coax enormous functionality out of the minimum number of chips. Somehow, Burrell's embryonic Macintosh board reeked of the same creative spirit so prevalent in the Apple II; as soon as I saw it, I knew that I had to work on the project.

Steve Jobs also became enamored with Burrell's circuit board and quickly took over the tiny design group, moving it to a remote part of the company and inspiring us with a grand vision. The Apple II had broken through an important price barrier, making a useful personal computer affordable to ordinary individuals, but it was still much to hard for most non-technical people to master. The Macintosh would harness the potential of Motorola's 68000 microprocessor to become the first personal computer that was both easy to use and affordable. We thought that we had a chance to create a product that could make computers useful to ordinary people and thereby truly change the world.

The Macintosh design team was inspired by Woz's original design and tried to recapitulate its innovative spirit. Again, we were our own ideal customers, designing something that we wanted for ourselves more than anything else. Although Apple was already a large company by then, Steve's unique position in the organization enabled him to maintain the Macintosh group as a little island where Apple's original values could flourish and grow. The Macintosh was released in January 1984 and eventually became a very successful product.

The personal computer industry has continued to grow and change since the introduction of the original Macintosh. Apple has become [in 1988] a four billion dollar enterprise, and I often fear that they have lost touch with their original values. Yet I remember having similar worries right before starting work on the Mac. I'm sure that there are little groups at Apple right now, inspired by the Macintosh in exactly the same way that we were inspired by the Apple II. The great challenge facing Apple's management is to allow those groups to follow their hearts and imaginations, uncompromised by the inevitable politics of large organizations. I hope that I will be able to buy a new Apple computer in 1991 that is not a Macintosh or an Apple II, but rather an entirely new system that once again shares the maverick spirit of its illustrious ancestors.

The Father Of The Macintosh

by Andy Hertzfeld

In the early days of the personal computer industry, breakthrough products could still be created single-handedly, or by very small teams. Steve Wozniak is indisputably the father of the Apple II, having designed the entire digital board himself as well as writing all of the system software, including a BASIC interpreter, most of it before Apple was even incorporated. But even Woz required help from Rod Holt for the analog electronics (the Apple II's switching power supply was almost as innovative as the digital board) and Steve Jobs and Jerry Manock for the industrial design (ditto for the plastic case).

By the 1980s, things had gotten more complicated. The Macintosh was more of a team effort, with at least a half dozen people making significant, invaluable contributions. For the launch publicity, Steve Jobs anointed seven of us (not counting himself) as the official "design team", but it could just as easily have been five or fifteen. Some people felt bad that they weren't included, and it was obvious that there was no good way to draw the line.

But if you look up the phrase "Father of the Macintosh" on Google, you get lots of links mentioning the initiator of the project, Jef Raskin. Jef was a former professor at UCSD (of both computer science and music) who started at Apple in January 1978 as Apple employee #31, after contracting to write Apple's manual for Basic with his friend Brian Howard, at their consulting firm named Bannister and Crun (a playful name appropriated from the Goon Show). Apple liked the Basic manual so much that they hired Jef and Brian to be founders of their internal publications group.

Jef Raskin

In early 1979, after successfully building an outstanding pubs department, Jef turned the reins over to Phyllis Cole and started thinking about what it would take for personal computers to expand beyond the current hobbyist market, writing up his ideas in a series of short papers. He presented his idea for an ultra low cost, easy to use appliance computer to Mike Markkula in March 1979, and got the go-ahead to hire a few people and form an official research project later in September 1979, naming it Macintosh, after his favorite kind of eating apple. Most of his ideas for the new machine were collected in a set of papers he called "The Book of Macintosh".

There's no doubt that Jef was the creator of the Macintosh project at Apple, and that his articulate vision of an exceptionally easy to use, low cost, high volume appliance computer got the ball rolling, and remained near the heart of the project long after Jef left the company. He also deserves ample credit for putting together the extraordinary initial team that created the computer, recruiting former student Bill Atkinson to Apple and then hiring amazing individuals like Burrell Smith, Bud Tribble, Joanna Hoffman and Brian Howard for the Macintosh team. But there is also no escaping the fact that the Macintosh that we know and love is very different than the computer that Jef wanted to build, so much so that he is much more like an eccentric great uncle than the Macintosh's father.