Revolution in The Valley [Paperback] Read online

  But the Steve issue was different. From the earliest days of the project, Steve would usually show up at the Mac building in the late afternoon, or sometimes after dinner, and ask us about the happenings of the day. We would demo the latest stuff to him, or he’d complain about something, or sometimes we’d just exchange the latest gossip. After Bud went back to medical school, Burrell and I were the only ones who would regularly stay late. But after a while more of the team began to hang out with us. It wasn’t unusual for six or eight of us to go out for a late dinner and then return and keep working. By early 1983, most of the software team was staying late, and even some marketing and finance people would join us. But Bob Belleville never did because he had to get home to his wife and two young daughters.

  “I can’t stop Steve from coming around,” I told Bob. “If you don’t want me to talk with Steve, you’re going to have to tell him about it. I like Jerome, and I have no problem working with him, but now it looks as though I have a problem working with you. If you think I’m undermining the team, I’m out of here tomorrow.”

  Bob looked at me intently. “I don’t have the power to fire you,” he said. “You’re going to give me power that I don’t have if you quit. Do you really want to do that?”

  It was completely dark as we approached the Apple parking lot. We stopped in front of Bob’s car.

  “This could be a really expensive conversation for both of us,” Bob muttered cryptically. “It’s entirely up to you.” With that, he got into his car and drove off, and I wandered back into Bandley 4, feeling stunned and drained. I got back to my cubicle, put my head down on the desk, and started crying again.

  By this time it was around 6:30 P.M. and most of the software team was still around. Capps saw that I was upset and asked me what was wrong. He began to get angry when I told him and a few others what had just happened. He made me promise not to overreact until he had a chance to find out what was going on.

  Larry Kenyon was still in his cubicle, and I went over and told him what Bob had said. I asked him to be honest and tell me if he thought I was stifling him in any way.

  “You’ve got to be kidding!” Larry exclaimed. “I think it’s really great working with you. That’s the reason I’m on this team. I think it’s an honor to work with you.” With that, I burst into tears again.

  I was exhausted and confused. I decided to head home to get some sleep and think about what I should do next. When I came in earlier than usual the next morning, there was a message on my desk to call Pat Sharp, Steve’s secretary. When I reached her, she told me to come to Steve’s office right away.

  “I can’t believe Bob gave you that review,” Steve started talking even before I stepped into his office. “He showed it to me a week ago, but I refused to approve it, and I told him to write something more positive. Do you have a copy of it?”

  I told Steve that Bob hadn’t given me a copy; he’d just delivered the news verbally. I then explained that I didn’t feel I could work for someone who felt that way about me and had no alternative but to quit.

  “It’s good that you don’t have a copy, because that review is rescinded. It doesn’t officially exist. I just got done talking with Bob, and after I chewed him out, he also quit because he said that he can’t manage the software team. And Capps came in here and told me the rest of the software team is so upset that they’re thinking about quitting, too. What a mess! You and Bob don’t have to love each other to work together. We’re going to sit down this afternoon and talk this thing out until it’s resolved.”

  So, at 4 P.M. on Friday afternoon, as soon as Steve was available, the entire software team, plus Burrell, filed into one of the conference rooms. We all sat in a semi-circle of chairs on the right side of the room, waiting apprehensively. Steve finally strode in with his characteristic bouncy stride, trailed by a despondent-looking Bob Belleville, who took a seat on the left side of the room facing the software team.

  Steve started talking first. He said that tensions had been building up for a while and it was time to clear the air so we could all pull together down the home stretch. All the while Bob was staring at the floor, unwilling to make eye contact with anyone else, controlling his emotions behind a tight-lipped expression, halfway between grin and grimace.

  “Okay, who’s going to go first? What’s the problem, and how do we fix it?” Steve asked.

  Capps spoke up, explaining how painful and unmotivating it was to see me broken up about an obviously unjustified review. He wanted to know how things could have gotten so screwed up.

  Steve nodded to Bob, encouraging him to speak up. Bob spoke in a monotone. “I didn’t give Andy a bad review. I told him that his work was fine.”

  I was flabbergasted. “You said I was undermining the team and stifling Larry,” I blurted out.

  Bob looked me in the eye for the first time. He spoke in a mild, low emotionless monotone. “I didn’t say any of those things. Why are you claiming that I did?”

  I was utterly shocked. Bob was denying everything he’d said the day before. Furthermore, he genuinely seemed to believe what he was saying. He looked to be in a kind of trance, both depressed and confused. I didn’t know how to proceed. If he wasn’t going to acknowledge what he had said, there was certainly no way to resolve it. I said nothing.

  A few more people spoke up, addressing other grievances, but Bob’s trance-like manner persisted and eventually the meeting broke up without anyone being satisfied. Steve tried to declare victory at the end, but no one was buying it.

  I thought about things over the weekend and realized I cared too much about the Macintosh to quit before it was finished, managerial adversity notwithstanding. The situation that I feared when Bud left had actually occurred, in spades, and I wasn’t confident Steve would live up to his promise to protect me. I wasn’t sure what was going to happen, but I knew that my blissful days at Apple were over. Things were clearly going to be different from now on.

  Steve Icon

  February 1983

  Having your own icon becomes a status symbol

  In February 1983, I started working on an icon editor that Susan Kare could use to create icons for the Finder. Inspired by the “Fat Bits” pixel editing mode that Bill Atkinson had recently added to MacPaint, it had a large window with a 32 × 32 grid, displaying each pixel at 8 times its natural size, as well as a small window that showed the icon at its actual size. Clicking on a pixel inverted it, and subsequent dragging propagated the change to the dragged over pixels.

  Susan started working on icons for the Finder, but she also used my editor to draw many other practice images and to create fun icons that often reflected her whimsical sense of humor. One day, I went by her cubicle and was surprised to see her laboring over a tiny icon portrait of Steve Jobs.

  Icons were only 32 × 32 black or white pixels, 1024 dots in total, and I didn’t think it was possible to do a very good portrait in such a tiny space. But somehow, Susan had succeeded in crafting an instantly recognizable likeness with a mischievous grin that captured a lot of Steve’s personality. Everyone she showed it to liked it, even Steve himself.

  Bill Atkinson was so impressed with the Steve icon that he asked Susan to draw one of him so he could use it in the MacPaint About box. He sat in Susan’s cubicle for an hour or so, chatting with her while she crafted his icon. I don’t think it turned out quite as nice as the Steve icon, but it certainly was an unmistakable likeness, and it did become part of MacPaint.

  Susan Kare’s Steve Jobs icon

  At that point, it became something of a Mac team status symbol to be iconified by Susan. As soon as he saw Bill’s icon, Burrell Smith started begging Susan for one, even though he had no specific use for it. He lobbied Susan for a few days, making his standard offer of best friendship (see “I’ll Be Your Best Friend” on page 5), before she gave in and had him pose.

  Susan did a few more portraits for various members of the team who desired to be immortalized in a thousand dots. Sh
e usually worked on them in the late afternoon, chatting with the subjects as they posed, while other team members listened in. I got to know a few of my teammates a lot better from these sessions.

  Bouncing Pepsis

  March 1983

  We cook up a special demo for John Sculley

  The Window Manager was the one of the most important parts of the User Interface Toolbox. Its job was to calculate various regions for windows as they were created, moved, and resized, so the graphics drawn inside could be automatically clipped as necessary. It was the ultimate showcase for QuickDraw’s “region clipping” technology.

  The Macintosh Window Manager was based on a design Bill Atkinson wrote in Pascal for the Lisa; my job was to rewrite it in 68000 assembly language and adapt it to the Macintosh environment. The first step was to port Bill’s Pascal version. I wrote a little program to test the port, which I called “Window Manager Demo,” to generate some windows and put the window manager through its paces. A year earlier, I had written a fast “ball bouncing” routine using custom, 16 × 16 pixel graphics routines, that could animate hundreds of balls simultaneously. It was a fun way to show off the Mac’s raw graphical horsepower (see “Early Demos” on page 34). Using QuickDraw, I decided to animate a few dozen balls in each window of the Window Manager demo because their continuous movement would eventually cover all the bases inside a window and expose any flaws in the underlying clipping. After Susan Kare joined the Mac team in January 1983, I asked her to draw some tiny 16 × 16 bitmaps to use in the Window Manager demo instead of the by now monotonous ball shapes. We soon had a variety of little objects bouncing around the various windows, including tiny little Macintoshes, apples, insects, and alligators. At this point, I thought the Window Manager Demo was finished—but I was wrong.

  Bouncing Pepsi caps in the Window Manager demo

  Steve Jobs came by the software area one evening a couple of months later, excited about someone he had recently met in New York City. “Hey, I want you to do a demo next week for this guy I met yesterday, John Sculley. He’s the president of Pepsi,” he said. “You wouldn’t believe how smart he is. If we impress him, we can get Pepsi to buy thousands of Macs. Maybe even five thousand. Why don’t you try to come up with something special to show him?”

  Steve Jobs, John Sculley, and Steve Wozniak at the Apple IIc introduction in April 1984

  It sounded a little bit fishy to me; we hardly ever demoed to potential customers at that point. But I asked Susan to draw some Pepsi imagery, and she came up with tiny little Pepsi caps, as well as Pepsi cans, in John’s honor, and I put them into the Window Manager demo.

  The next week, Mike Murray led John Sculley around the engineering area since Steve was out of town. He brought him by my cubicle to see the modified Window Manager demo. I opened the windows one at a time, saving the Pepsi caps and cans for last. He seemed genuinely excited to see the Pepsi stuff, but oddly cold for most of the demo. He asked a few questions, but he didn’t seem all that interested in the answers.

  A few weeks later, we found out the real story. The purpose of John’s visit was to interview for CEO of Apple, and he took the job after being convinced by Steve’s famous line, “Would you rather sell sugar water to kids for the rest of your life, or would you like a chance to change the world?”

  Swedish Campground

  August 1983

  We find an unusual symbol to use for the menu command key

  Early on in the development of the Macintosh, we decided it was important for the user to be able to invoke every menu command directly from the keyboard, like the Mac’s predecessor, Lisa, so we added a special key for this purpose. We called it the “Apple key” and when pressed in combination with another key, it selected the corresponding menu command. We displayed a little Apple logo on the right side of every menu item with a keyboard command to associate the key with the command.

  One day, late in the afternoon, Steve Jobs burst into the software fishbowl area in Bandley III, upset about something. This was not unusual. I think he had just seen MacDraw for the first time, which had longer menus than our other applications.

  “There are too many Apples on the screen! It’s ridiculous! We’re taking the Apple logo in vain! We’ve got to stop doing that!”

  After we told him we had to display the command key symbol with each item that had one, he told us we had better find a new symbol to use instead of the Apple logo, and, because our decision would affect both the manuals and the keyboard hardware, we had only a few days to come up with it.

  It’s difficult to come up with a small icon meaning “command,” and we couldn’t think of anything initially. Our bitmap artist, Susan Kare, had a comprehensive international symbol dictionary and she leafed through it, looking for an appropriate symbol that was distinctive, attractive, and had at least something to do with the concept of a menu command.

  Finally she came across a floral symbol used on Swedish maps to indicate an interesting feature or attraction in a historical site or campground. She rendered a 16 × 16 bitmap of the little symbol and showed it to the rest of the team. Everybody liked it, and 20 years later—even in OS X—the Macintosh still has a little bit of a Swedish campground in it.

  “There are too many Apples on the screen!... We’re taking the Apple logo in vain!”

  busy being born, part 2

  Here are a few seminal Macintosh screenshots, à la the Lisa Polaroids

  Bill Atkinson had the foresight to document the creation of the Lisa User Interface by keeping a Polaroid camera near his computer and taking a snapshot of each significant milestone (see “Busy Being Born” on page 89). Although we didn’t systematically save pictures of key Mac milestones, I’ve managed to cobble together a few seminal Macintosh screenshots to present here in a similar fashion.

  The first Mac-like demo in May 1981

  Bud Tribble had a tendency to work late at night. I usually came to work at Texaco Towers around 10:30 A.M., so if Bud was there when I arrived, it usually meant he had spent all night there. One morning in the middle of May 1981, I arrived at my usual time and found Bud anxious to show me something before I could even take off my backpack.

  I knew Bud had been working on the initial porting of QuickDraw to the Macintosh, but I thought he was at least a week away from getting it running. At this point, we had some cursor routines going. We also had a way to download and execute Pascal programs that were compiled on a Lisa by attaching them to the Mac by a serial cable. But we didn’t have a memory manager yet, or an event manager or a filesystem, so Bud had to build scaffolding in various places to overcome these limitations. He had compiled a bitmap drawing program that Bill wrote in Pascal for the Lisa, however, and he linked it with LisaGraf and other library routines so he could debug it and fix each problem as it manifested.

  Bud had made a huge amount of progress the previous evening and had the demo running pretty well. It was incredibly exciting to see Mac-like software running on the Mac for the very first time. The demo featured working pull-down menus, complete with a nicer style of drop shadow than the Lisa was using, and an elaborate, graphical pattern menu, which is illustrated in the screenshot above.

  Xerox aficionados will note the use of Cream 12 as our first system font, which was the default font used by Smalltalk that Bill had converted to the LisaGraf font format. The window title bar was a folder tab because we were still confused about the difference between folders and documents. The demo already had scroll bars and a grow box that was pretty similar to what we ended up shipping, although you couldn’t interact with them yet. In fact, the only part of the program that actually did something was the Quit command.

  In April, I had written some screen-printing code that dumped whatever was on the display out the serial port to a dot matrix printer. Since the Mac screen was rather small, I added a feature to print it at double size, so it mostly filled a page. I used that to print the display of Bud’s demo, with the impressive graphical pattern men
u pulled down on the same day Bud got it working, and that’s what is reproduced here.

  • • • • • • • • • • • •

  Bruce Horn joined the Mac team in late 1981, with the charter to write a graphical shell we were calling the “Finder,” since it helped the user find applications and documents to launch. We were influenced by ideas from the Architecture Machine group at M.I.T. (a predecessor to the better known Media Lab), as portrayed in a program called “Dataland” that allowed users to manipulate graphical objects in spatial arrangements. Bruce was excited about spatial data management, and his first assignment was to write a prototype to explore how it could work on the Mac.

  Bruce came up with the idea of representing files as small tabs superimposed on an image of a floppy disk. He wrote a prototype he called the “micro-finder,” which is pictured above. I started helping him implement various parts of it, and pretty soon it was actually useful. You could drag the file tabs to position them, and click on the large buttons on the right to launch programs or rename and delete files. We used the micro-finder through most of 1982 for demoing the Mac, until the real Finder started becoming usable around the end of the year.

  An alternate approach to the Finder in March 1982

  After the micro-finder, Bruce also worked on another prototype that included folders in a two-pane view. Meanwhile, Bill Atkinson was crafting an icon-based file manager prototype for Lisa (see “Rosing’s Rascals” on page 74), and we eventually decided to follow that direction for the Macintosh.