Interview With Mac Co-Creator Andy Hertzfeld 165
jeblucas writes "MacDevCenter interviews Andy Hertzfeld: formerly of Radius, Eazel, General Magic, and most famously, Apple. He discusses his recent book, Revolution in the Valley as well as sharing some anecdotes about his time at Apple developing the Macintosh personal computer. Check out this notebook page from the first cut of the memory layout. The book was reviewed here earlier."
Re:The heap diagram (Score:2, Informative)
I took a look at an old magazine... (Score:3, Informative)
64KB of RAM for a commodore VC20 for 265DM, that should have been around 100$ back then.
So 1MB would have been 1000$+.
OK, I looked it up (Score:5, Informative)
In 1984, 1 MB of RAM cost about 350$.
And that was when you could buy a house for 500$. Ah, well, not quite. But the price is correct (more or less).
Folklore.org (Score:3, Informative)
Re:The heap diagram (Score:2, Informative)
Also, I spoke with Andy (a great a guy personally as he is professionally -- he is the engineering team member you wish you could have) and he admitted that he might have done things differently if it weren't for the insane rush job in producing a real product. After the Lisa marketing and Apple /// "molex" and "National Semi clock chip" debacles, Steve (Jobs) was a more driven than those he drove.
(After all I heard from others in Bandley III, Steve told Wendell where to put the clock chip on the motherboard...oops.) But look at the big picture. Regardless of how anyone might have done anything differently, the Apple II and Macintosh put the billions in the bank so Apple could do things like, say, the iPod.
A lot of perfectly engineered things are still in the closet because they missed a competitive opportunity window.
Re:About that notebook... (Score:1, Informative)
That has nothing to do with the memory . It's a sad mac error code you get when trying to load a newer disk (HFS format) using a Mac with the old (64k) ROMs which didn't recognize HFS. (Actually, it may be an error for not recognizing the format, period, but I'm not too sure about that.)
Goddamit I feel like a complete dork for knowing the answer to that....
More stuff written by Andy (Score:4, Informative)
You might enjoy this site [folklore.org] which has lots of material written by Andy about the early years at Apple.
I remember the (Feb?) 1984 Byte Magazine/Interview (Score:4, Informative)
There was of course hype of the Mac and put-downs of the IBM PC line, I recall a line about the Mac having three crystals (for main processor, clock, and is there a third? Maybe I can spent $2 at the thrift store to buy one and find out), and the PC color card by itself having three crystals. There's lots more, partly about the social aspects of being on the team and being "paid like baseball players", and partly technical, programming the 68000 and 'keeping the registers full'.
The '84 Byte would be a great thing to (re)read along with Hertzfeld's book, to put this in historical perspective.
"It was Twenty Years Ago Today..." (Oh, it was LAST year - my, how time flies)
Re:4 digit years (Score:2, Informative)
--
It was a bug, Dave.
Re:I remember the (Feb?) 1984 Byte Magazine/Interv (Score:2, Informative)
Re:More stuff written by Andy (Score:3, Informative)
The folklore.org site is mentioned in the interview...
There's another site with a lot of excellent content on the making of the Macintosh:
http://library.stanford.edu/mac/ [stanford.edu]
I think the "Technical Writing" part on that site is extremely valuable. It explains how the Inside Macintosh books were written and how that process affected the development of the MacOS APIs.
As far as technical documentation is concerned, the original Inside Macintosh books are still some of the best that I have ever read.
Re:Enlightenment for the children... (Score:2, Informative)
On the Apple ][ and Mac, you didn't have space to store the date in human readable format most of the time, so you used packed binary notation. Typically you would reuse several bits for other purposes as well.
For example, byte 1 would be year, byte 2 would be month, byte 3 would be day. This lets you store a 256 year period (not a 100 year period) in the program. It lets you sort the records without having to process text, etc. If you were working with the dates, you almost certainly used a pattern like this.
It takes a minimum of six bytes to store a date in ASCII format, and most of the bits aren't used. Nobody would want to use that format if they could avoid it, because of that. You have maybe 8k total for your data, maybe 143k if you swap out onto the second floppy drive (286k if you're willing to make the user flip the disk).
I don't think that people understand this anymore, or how hard it was to get anything to run on these, but the Y2K problem was almost exclusively about data entry.
You take your three bytes, and you parse them to 19__-__-__ on some report, and so you have a problem when the date rolls over because the 19 is hard coded. It doesn't cause any operational problems, just display problems.
Similarly, you might do data entry that same way (only make the user enter two digits), because users don't like to type. The storage still would be OK, but entering the data would break at 2000.
But it was never about the memory taken up by the extra two digits. ASCII and Unicode are inherently inefficient, and were rarely used in data structures.
Re:Those were the days (Score:2, Informative)
So this was indeed huge for the day, you were talking about a huge increase. And things like fonts were single or maybe a pair of control codes, in a non-extensible binary format custom to the specific word processing application.
And you want to know what is really scarey is we did word processing on machines that ran 1Mhz, and some that even ran SLOWER than that.