Revolution in the Valley: The Insanely Great Story of How the Mac Was Made (9 page)

A wire-wrapped Macintosh prototype

The first Mac prototypes were hand-made using a technique called "wire-wrapping", where each individual signal is routed by wrapping an individual wire around two pins. Burrell wire-wrapped the first prototype himself, and then others were done by Brian Howard and Dan Kottke. But wire-wrapping is time consuming and error prone.

By the spring of 1981, the Mac's hardware design was stable enough for us to make a printed circuit board, which would allow us to make prototypes much more quickly. We recruited Collete Askeland from the Apple II group to lay out the board, and after working with Burrell and Brian for a couple of weeks, she taped out the design and sent it off for a limited production run of a few dozen boards.

We started having weekly management meetings in June 1981, which were attended by most of the team, where we discussed the issues of the week. At the second or third meeting, Burrell presented an intricate blueprint of the PC board layout, which had already been used to build a few working prototypes, blown up to four times the actual size.

Steve started critiquing the layout on a purely esthetic basis. "That part's really pretty", he proclaimed. "But look at the memory chips. That's ugly. The lines are too close together".

George Crow, our recently hired analog engineer, interrupted Steve. "Who cares what the PC board looks like? The only thing that's important is how well that it works. Nobody is going to see the PC board."

Steve responded strongly. "I'm gonna see it! I want it to be as beautiful as possible, even if it's inside the box. A great carpenter isn't going to use lousy wood for the back of a cabinet, even though nobody's going to see it."

George started to argue with Steve, since he wasn't on the team long enough to know that it was a losing battle. Fortunately, Burrell interrupted him.

"Well, that was a difficult part to layout because of the memory bus.", Burrell responded. "If we change it, it might not work as well electrically".

"OK, I'll tell you what," said Steve. "Let's do another layout to make the board prettier, but if it doesn't work as well, we'll change it back."

So we invested another $5,000 or so to make a few boards with a new layout that routed the memory bus in a Steve-approved fashion. But sure enough, the new boards didn't work properly, as Burrell had predicted, so we switched back to the old design for the next run of prototypes.

First day with the Macintosh team

by Brian Robertson in August 1981

Being the first "manufacturing" type person on the team, I showed up at Texaco Towers on my first day (August 17, 1981) at 7:30am. Rod showed up about 8:30 and said "who are you". After talking a while he showed me across the hall to my work space, pointed to a bean bag chair, and said "how's that?". Then the desk arrived.

Then George Crow, Burrell Smith and Dan Kotke found out I was there to help and the requests for sourcing started and didn't stop for the next 3 years.

Donkey

by Andy Hertzfeld in August 1981

the original IBM PC

The first version of the IBM PC was introduced in August 1981. Apple responded by running an ad in the Wall Street Journal with the headline "Welcome, IBM. Seriously." Even though he was usually tight with money, Steve Jobs allowed the Mac team to buy an early unit to dissect and evaluate. The day it became available, we ran to the store and purchased one to take back to the lab.

Needless to say, we were not very impressed with it. From the perspective of the Macintosh that we were already in the midst of bringing to life, it seemed like ancient history the day it came out. There was little, if any, Woz-like cleverness in the hardware design, using dozens of extraneous chips without having any cool features. The 8088 was a decent processor compared to the 6502, but it paled next to the 68000 we were using in the Mac.

But the most clunky part of the system was the software. MS-DOS seemed like a clone of an earlier system, CP/M, and even the demo programs lacked flair. It came with some games written in BASIC that were especially embarrassing.

The most embarrassing game was a lo-res graphics driving game called "Donkey". The player was supposed to be driving a car down a slowly scrolling, poorly rendered "road", and could hit the space bar to toggle the jerky motion. Every once in a while, a brown blob would fill the screen, which was supposed to be a donkey manifesting in the middle of the road. If you didn't hit the space bar in time, you would crash into the donkey and lose the game.

We thought the concept of the game was as bad the crude graphics that it used. Since the game was written in BASIC, you could list it out and see how it was written. We were surprised to see that the comments at the top of the game proudly proclaimed the authors: Bill Gates and Neil Konzen. Neil was a bright teenage hacker who I knew from his work on the Apple II (who would later become Microsoft's technical lead on the Mac project) but we were amazed that such a thoroughly bad game could be co-authored by Microsoft's co-founder, and that he would actually want to take credit for it in the comments.

Joining the Mac Group

by Bruce Horn in September 1981

In the spring of 1981, I was 21, and just about to graduate from Stanford. I had been working at least part-time (and often fulltime during the summers) at Xerox PARC in the Learning Research Group for the last eight years. The people at PARC were legendary, and I felt extraordinarily lucky to be able to work with many of them. It was a tremendous learning experience, and I had had the chance to work on a variety of exciting projects through the years.

My most recent project had been the NoteTaker, a portable Smalltalk machine with a bitmap touchscreen display, mouse and keyboard, stereo sound, and dual 8086 processors: one I/O processor which also ran BitBLT (Bitwise BLock Transfer) to draw the graphics, and one emulator processor dedicated to running the Smalltalk bytecode interpreter. My job was to help out on the bytecode interpreter, to write the I/O processor routines, and to basically keep enough of the NoteTaker prototypes running so that they could be used for demos to management. The NoteTaker hardware had been created by Doug Fairbairn, a gifted hardware and chip designer who had recently left to start a new company, VLSI Technology, Inc., or VTI.

On that project I had been working closely with Larry Tesler. Larry was an amazing guy--he had invented the modeless text editing engine for Smalltalk (modeled on his Gypsy editor), and would wear a t-shirt with the slogan "Don't Mode Me In" around the lab. He also was famous for writing a piece of software that would coordinate flash cards at Stanford football games to provide spectators across the stadium with animated bitmap graphics. One evening Larry and I went out for dinner to a local pizza parlor on El Camino in Palo Alto. While we were waiting for the pizza, Larry said, "Bruce, I'm thinking of leaving PARC."

"Really? How can you leave PARC?" I was incredulous. PARC was the Mecca of computer science; we often said (only half-jokingly) that 80 of the 100 best computer scientists in the world were in residence at PARC. I could walk down the hall and wander into the offices of people like Alan Kay (the leader of the Learning Research Group, where many of today's user interface innovations were first created); Chuck Geschke and John Warnock (who later founded Adobe); and Ed McCreight, the inventor of B-Trees. And they all made time to answer my questions, even if they were from a geeky and gangly teenager. LRG and the rest of PARC were full of the brightest and most creative people on the planet. Why would anyone want to leave?

Larry said that he was ready for a new challenge--ready to try to get some of the PARC ideas out into the world. I said, "Well, what about Apple?" We had been talking with Apple recently and had given a demo of Smalltalk to Steve Jobs. Although Larry didn't say anything right away, it turns out he had already been interviewing at Apple, and was soon to join the Lisa team.

When I finally did graduate in mid-1981, I wasn't sure what I wanted to do. Working at PARC was a dream come true, and I had lived that dream for more than a third of my life. But maybe I should get out into the "real world." PARC was so ahead of the rest of the world--we had Alto and Dorado workstations with mice, large portrait bitmapped displays, WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) text editors, graphics editors, interactive object-oriented programming environments with comprehensive class libraries, local area networks, laser printers, email--that taking a "normal" job in industry was guaranteed to be a letdown. But in talks with Adele Goldberg, one of the senior members of LRG, and my good friend Rachel Rutherford, I realized that I really did need to try something new--that I'd regret it if I didn't leave the comfortable and familiar environment of PARC.

I began interviewing at a variety of companies in the valley; most were forgettable. Then I remembered about Larry Tesler at Apple, and about Doug Fairbairn at VTI, so I contacted them both.

Apple was interesting; Larry was working on the Lisa, which was starting to look like a real computer, but for some reason it didn't appeal to me. At one point, though, Larry realized that I'd be a better fit in the Mac group, and introduced me to Andy Hertzfeld. Andy (the "soul" of the Mac software group) showed me some demos that were so amazing that I somehow thought that they didn't really need me--that the software was almost done! But I was impressed and intrigued, and mulled it over...

Meanwhile, I went to interview at VTI. The people there were wonderful. I'd be working with folks I knew and respected, and Doug even offered me a $15K signing bonus, a huge amount of money for a recent college graduate. I'd be working on advanced chip design tools, a new area for me, and it would be an interesting challenge. So I accepted the job. That was Thursday.

On Friday evening, I got a phone call. "Bruce, it's Steve. What do you think about Apple?" It was Steve Jobs. "Well, Steve, Apple's cool, but I accepted a job at VTI."

"You did what? Forget that, you get down here tomorrow morning, we have a lot more things to show you. Be at Apple at 9am." Steve was adamant. I thought I'd go down, go through the motions, and then tell him that I'd made up my mind and was going to VTI.

Steve switched on the Reality Distortion Field full-force. I met with seemingly everyone on the Mac team, from Andy to Rod Holt to Jerry Manock to the other software engineers, and back to Steve. Two full days of demos, drawings of the various designs, marketing presentations--I was overwhelmed.

On Monday I called Doug Fairbairn at VTI and told him I had changed my mind.

I was going to join Apple, where we would change the world with a little computer called the Macintosh.

Desk Ornaments

by Andy Hertzfeld in October 1981

Some original Desk Accessories

One of the first architectural decisions that Bud and I made for the Macintosh system software in the spring of 1981 was that we were only going to try to run one application at a time. We barely had enough RAM or screen space to do even that, and we thought that we'd benefit from the resultant simplifications. Besides, multi-tasking was supposed to be Lisa's forte, and we didn't want to usurp all of the reasons for buying a Lisa.

Bud Tribble was usually on an even keel, but one afternoon in the fall of 1981 he came into my office, unusually excited. "You know, I've been thinking about it. Even if we can only run one major application at a time, there's no reason that we can't also have some little miniature applications running in their own windows at the same time."

That sounded intriguing to me. "What kind of little programs? How are they different?", I wondered.

Bud smiled. "You'd want tiny apps that were good at a specific, limited function that complements the main application. Like a little calculator, for example, that looked like a real calculator. Or maybe an alarm clock, or a notepad for jotting down text. Since the entire screen is supposed to be a metaphorical desktop, the little programs are desk ornaments, adorning the desktop with useful features."