Revolution in the Valley: The Insanely Great Story of How the Mac Was Made (28 page)

When he arrived at the studio, Mike Murray went looking for Jay Chiat, who was supposed to already be there. He found him lurking off to one side, seemingly hiding behind some scenery. Apparently, some of the skinheads were in a nasty mood, and they were looking for trouble during breaks in the filming, so Jay thought it was prudent to make sure he stayed out of their way.

While the filming was taking place in London, I got a call from someone at Chiat-Day asking if I could write an Apple II Basic program to flash impressive looking numbers and graphs on the screen, to be overlayed on the image of Big Brother. I spent an afternoon cooking something up, and I sent it off to them, although I was never sure if it was used or not.

Big Brother on the big screen

Lee Clow and Steve Hayden presented a rough cut of the commercial to the Apple team a few weeks later, and everyone was ecstatic. The commercial was classy, suspenseful and enigmatic, and seemed certain to garner lots of attention. It was shown for the first time at Apple's 1983 annual sales conference in Honolulu in October, with Steve preceding it with a clever rap positioning Apple as the industry's last alternative to IBM (see
the times they are a-changin'
), to a rapturous reception, almost as apocalyptic as the commercial itself. The response was so great that Apple booked two expensive slots, for sixty seconds and thirty seconds, costing over a million dollars, to show it during Super Bowl XVIII, which was just two days before the Mac introduction.

Mike Murray and Steve Jobs screened the commercial for Apple's board of directors in December, to get final approval for the huge Superbowl expenditure. To their surprise, every outside board member seemed to despise the commercial, with Mike Markkula suggesting that Apple begin a hunt for a new ad agency. One of the board members remarked that it was the worst commercial that he had ever seen. Steve and Mike were devastated.

The chilling reception from the board compelled John Sculley to ask Chiat-Day to sell back both time slots that they had purchased. But Jay Chiat was true to form, and only sold off the thirty second slot, telling Apple that he wasn't able to get rid of the longer one at so late a date. Apple considered using the slot for a more conventional commercial, but in the end decided to take a chance on the 1984 spot.

The Mac team was told that the commercial would air early in the third quarter, at the first commercial break after the second half kick-off. Burrell and I wanted to see a real audience's reaction to the commercial more than the commercial itself (since we had already seen it plenty of times), so we watched the Superbowl at a sports bar near Stanford called the Oasis, with some other Mac team friends. The game was boring, but the bar was packed, and the commercial looked great when it aired at the designated time. We thought we heard a small murmur in the bar after the commercial, but it was hard to tell if there was any significant reaction.

That evening, we were surprised to see the commercial run again on the evening news shows. Apparently, it made such a big impression on lots of viewers that, coupled with the fact that it only was supposed to run once, it became a news item itself, as well as increasing expectations for the upcoming launch. It ran dozens of times on news shows in the next couple of days, gathering Apple over five million dollars worth of free publicity.

A week after the Macintosh launch, Apple held its January board meeting. The Macintosh executive staff was invited to attend, not knowing what to expect. When the Mac people entered the room, everyone on the board rose and gave them a standing ovation, acknowledging that they were wrong about the commercial and congratulating the team for pulling off a fantastic launch.

Chiat-Day wanted the commercial to qualify for upcoming advertising awards, so they ran it once at 1 AM at a small television station in Twin Falls, Idaho, KMVT, on December 15, 1983. And sure enough it won just about every possible award, including best commercial of the decade. Twenty years later it's considered one of the most memorable television commercials ever made.

How to Hire Insanely Great Employees

by Tom Zito in September 1983

I first met Steve Jobs in 1978 when, as a reporter for The Washington Post, I had come to the Valley to cover the technology business. Steve not only charmed me into writing a profile about him (and a year later, a cover story for Newsweek), but also charmed me into an Apple II and out of a $2,500 check to pay for it -- which at the time was more than a month's salary for me. I found the thing fairly useless, other than as an expression of how great Steve was as a salesman. A decent word processing program (not to mention VisiCalc) had yet to be written, and I wound up justifying the investment by teaching myself Basic.

By 1983 I was working on a book about the birth of the personal computer industry, and Steve had granted me carte blanche to wander around Bandley 3 and stay current on the Mac's development. One day in September, in a conference room populated with about 25 members of the Mac team, Steve was lecturing on how to hire.

"A players hire A players," he said. "B players hire C players. Do you get it?"

Apparently not. Somebody in the back of the room raised his hand and asked, "so how do you hire more B players?"

Steve Wozniak University

by Andy Hertzfeld in September 1983

The launch of the Macintosh was finally scheduled for January 24, 1984, so we had to start preparing for it in the fall of 1983. Steve decided to anoint some of the engineers plus a few others as the official "Macintosh Design Team", and we had to be prepared to be interviewed by the press. Some magazines had lead times of more than three months, so interviews were scheduled as early as October.

As part of the preparations, the Regis McKenna press liasons (known as the Rejettes) asked each of us to fill out a questionnaire that included the standard questions like date and place of birth, degrees, etc. They were going to be used as the basis for a fact sheet that would be handed out to the press.

Burrell, who didn't have a college degree, didn't know how to answer the "College Attended" question. He thought about it for a moment and then came up with the perfect answer: "Steve Wozniak University". In some fashion, we were all graduates of Steve Wozniak University.

We're Not Hackers!

by Andy Hertzfeld in September 1983

Capps drew this with an early
version of MacPaint, to
celebrate a ROM release

From the beginning, the Macintosh was conceived to be a very low cost, high volume personal computer. It was important for the design team to keep manufacturing costs as low as possible. Since memory was relatively expensive, we were always dealing with memory limitations.

One of the most clever parts of Burrell Smith's original, 68000-based digital board was the "bus transformer" logic that multiplexed the data bus, allowing him to hook up the 68000, which demanded a 16 bit data bus, to only 8 memory chips. He also included a single, byte-wide 64kbit ROM chip, so that first Macintosh, circa January 1981, had a total of 64K bytes of RAM and 8K bytes of ROM.

But as we started to get some software going on the prototype, it became increasingly clear that we didn't have enough RAM for the kind of graphic intensive applications that we wanted to build; after all, just the frame buffer for the bit-map display took up almost one third of the available memory. And furthermore, Bill Atkinson's graphics routines alone had recently exceeded the size of the 8K ROM. So, when the digital board was redesigned to incorporate the SCC chip in June 1981, Burrell added another row of 8 memory chips, doubling the RAM size to 128K, and added another ROM chip as well, doubling the ROM size to 16K. We vowed that we would fight hard to keep that the last increase (in contrast with the Lisa, whose memory requirement's were growing considerably faster than Moore's Law)

Even though the ROM size doubled to 16K, that was barely enough to contain our prototype environment if we included the graphics routines. Burrell figured he could add a third ROM chip, for 24K total. Two of the ROM chips were hooked up directly to the 68000's 16-bit bus, so code could run faster, while the third chip shared the "bus transformer" circuit with the RAMs.

We built 50 Mac prototypes in the fall of 1981, each containing 24K of ROM, burned into EPROM. Although the system fit readily in 24K, we were still worried that soon it would be an unbearably tight squeeze. Burrell never liked the inelegance of three different ROMs, either.

One day, in early 1982, Burrell returned from a meeting with a semiconductor company's sales representative really excited, almost running into my office. "OK, you say that you won't be able to fit in 24K, right? Be honest - how much will we really need?"

We always seemed to need just a little more ROM that we had available. "I think we'd definitely make it if we had 32K", I responded.

Burrell laughed. "No you won't. It's clear that won't be enough, since the software isn't close to being finished yet. But I just heard that the 256Kbit ROMs are really close, and they'll be ready if we ship in early 1983. So I can use two 256Kbit chips, connected up to the 16-bit bus, and we'll have 64K bytes of ROM. 64K! ROM is half the price per bit of RAM, so it makes sense to use as much as we can. I know you'll be asking for even more someday, but that should keep you busy for a while."

At first, 64Kbytes seemed boundless. We were already trying to write as tight code as we could, and it seemed like it would be plenty, since we weren't even using 32K yet. But sure enough, as the system came together in the spring of 1983, we were beginning to strain against the size limit.

Fortunately, we had started to use the resource manager to load objects like fonts and drivers, so we had some flexibility about keeping stuff on disk instead of the ROM. Jerome and I designed the "PACK" mechanism, where the resource manager would load code for optional packages, like the floating point routines. But code on floppy disk is much slower to load, and it also would reduce the effective size of each disk.

Even though we tried to make our code as small as possible initially, the lack of space in the ROM made us work even harder to reduce the footprint. We developed a number of unusual space saving techniques, some of which were inspired by tricks Woz used in the Apple II ROM. For example, we'd often push parameters on the stack out of order, sometimes four times in a row, because we had a value in a register that we would need later, and we didn't want to fetch it again. We knew this made the code harder to maintain, but we thought it was worth it.

As ROM freeze time approached, the entire team started to focus on code compression, to get as much code to fit in the ROM as possible. We had a few practice sessions, where everyone explained their favorite space saving techniques, and then we all plowed through the code, saving a dozen bytes here and there. Steve Capps, as usual, came up with a good one by developing a simple way of compressing the four or five icons that were built into the ROM, saving hundreds of precious bytes in the process.

Bill Atkinson didn't participate in the code crunching marathon, and wouldn't allow QuickDraw to be subjected to it, except in a few cases, because he believed that all code should be as simple and clear as possible, and thought, probably correctly, that we'd be better off without the tricks in the long run. Just before the ROM was frozen, in September 1983, he found a bug in the memory manager, that we devised a simple fix for.

I went with Bill to Larry Kenyon's cubicle, where he was maintaining the memory manager sources. Bill looked over our shoulders as we added a little code to correct the bug. But he objected when he noticed that we used one of our coding tricks (I'll explain the exact issue in a comment below) while making the fix, and began to get upset.

"Hey, that's not the right way to code. What are you guys, a bunch of hackers? I'm not sure that I want to work with a bunch of hackers."