Revolution in the valley

07 Jan 2025

This book is a collection of anecdotes about the creation of the first Macintosh at Apple, mostly by Andy Hertzfeld but also some other key figures. It gives a really good and easily digested glimpse into the inception of what would become a great lineage of Apple computers.

A lot of fun pictures as well. I especially liked a lot of the internal art by graphics designer Susan Kare (by whom I’ve got a few artworks on my walls at home).

There’s something really magical about retro computing. I’m not an enthusiast of using them but reading about them and that era is very interesting.

Quotes

He dialed the number and a secretary answered. “Hi, this is Steve Jobs. I’d like to speak with Adam Osborne.” The secretary informed Steve that Mr. Osborne would not be back in the office until the following morning. She asked Steve if he would like to leave a message. “Yes”, Steve replied. He paused for a second. “Here’s my message: tell Adam he’s an asshole.”

He realized he could easily support 256 Kbit RAM chips by routing a few extra lines on the PC board, allowing adventurous people who knew how to wield a soldering gun to replace their RAM chips with the newer generation. The extra lines would only cost pennies to add. But once again Steve Jobs objected because he didn’t like the idea of customers mucking with the innards of their computer. He also wanted them buy a new 512K Mac instead of buying more RAM from a third party. But this time Burrell prevailed because the change was so minimal. He just left it in and no one bothered to mention it to Steve, much to the eventual benefit of customers who didn’t have to buy a whole new Mac to expand their memory.

“The Mac team had to grow up, and so do you,” Steve shot back. “I want you to come back, but if you don’t want to, that’s up to you. You don’t matter as much as you think you do, anyway.” […] I had thought it would feel devastating to finally resign, but instead I actually felt relieved the situation was resolved, as well as optimistic about writing Macintosh software on my own.

Steve Jobs had recently bragged to the press that the Macintosh team was working “90 hours a week”. They decided that the tag line for the sweatshirt should be “90 Hours A Week And Loving It”, in honor of Steve’s exaggerated assertion. […] When Burrell finally quit Apple in February 1985, he continued to wear the sweatshirt almost every day, but, as soon as he returned home following his resignation, he took some masking tape and made a big ‘X’ across the leading ‘9’ character, virtually obliterating it from view. He proudly displayed the updated motto, reflecting exactly how he felt. It now read “0 Hours A Week And Loving It”.