Mar 31

Revolution in the Valley

dastels @ 4:18 pm
Review of Revolution in the Valley: The Insanely Great Story of How The Mac Was Made by Andy Hertzfeld

2005 O’Reilly, ISBN 0-596-00719-1

“It’s chilling to recall how this cast of young and inexperienced people who cared more than anything about doing great things created what is perhaps the key technology of our lives.” — Steve Wozniak

So reads the back cover of this new book from O’Reilly, authored by Andy Hertzfeld.

Andy was one of the main authors of the system software of the original Macintosh, including the User Interface Toolbox. After three years at Apple, Anmdy went on to co-found Radius, General Magic, and Eazel.

This book was different than any I’ve read before. It was different than any other history of Apple, Mac or other technical thing (e.g “Soul of a New Machine”, “Fire in the Valley”, “The Journey is the Reward”, etc.). One of the biggest differences was how it was organized: as a series of short (2-3 pages) stories or anecdotes. This made the book highly entertaining, enjoyable, and easy to read.

There were loads of photos, including a chronological photo tour of the evolution of the Lisa’s windowing system. Lots of pics of the mac team, prototype boards, screen shots, even an appearance by Bill Gates. One really cool thing was various scans of Andy’s notes. In all it was an incredible look into what went on in those magical few years.

I have been a fan of Apple since about 1980 when I learned basic on an Apple ][. I fell in love with Macintosh when the earliest information on it was made public. After being introduced to Smalltalk by the Aug ‘81 issue of Byte.. here was a computer that made it all real. I had a couple Macs over the years, and used an early model Newton for several years at one point. I’ve finally (Feb 14, 2005) “switched”.. making a well loaded iBook my core machine. Even so, this book is loaded with details that I hadn’t read before.

It’s interesting to think about.. I’m writing a review of a book about the original Mac… 21 years after the Mac’s introduction, on one of it’s recent descendants… one with several orders of magnitude more power (10240 times as much memory, for example). Woz was right, though… the original Mac changed how people view/use computers.

If you are a Mac fan, or a computer history junkie (I’m both BTW) then get this book. It’s full of trivia, and it’s a fun read. Well done, Andy.