Revolution in The Valley [Paperback] Read online

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  The following screenshot is a very early version of MacPaint, probably from March 1983, after Bill had been working on it for around one month. Notice that it wasn’t called “MacPaint” yet; it still bore its original name, “MacSketch,” inherited from its predecessor, LisaSketch.

  This early version uses icons designed by Bill himself. Susan Kare tweaked them later. Some of the most important MacPaint tools like the paint bucket and the lasso were still months away from being implemented.

  An early screenshot of a half-implemented MacPaint

  MacPaint contained a menu of miscellaneous tools, like Fat Bits, originally called the “Aids” menu, as you can see in the screenshot. But in the summer of 1983, with public awareness of the AIDS epidemic beginning to swell, Bill rechristened it the “Goodies” menu.

  It’s interesting to note the window-highlighting decorations, which are quite different than what we ended up with. We must have tried dozens of different ways to highlight windows before arriving at the horizontal lines in August 1983.

  The featured MacPaint document was drawn late one night by Steve Capps to celebrate one of our ROM releases; he also saved and scanned the document for inclusion here.

  • • • • • • • • • • • •

  In early 1983, I wrote an icon editor based on Bill Atkinson’s Fat Bits pixel-editing techniques that Susan Kare used to craft most of the early Mac icons. The icon editor displayed both a large and actual size representation of the icon, and allowed editing of multiple icons at once (See “Steve Icon” on page 147). I needed a way to incorporate the icons into the ROM, so I added a feature called the “Hex Window,” which displayed the representation of the current icon in hexadecimal. That allowed me to add the icons to the Mac ROM source code. The screen dumps on the right are the actual ones used to enter some famous Mac icons into ROM, such as the bomb and the happy Mac.

  Note that the name on the window containing the bomb icon is “Deep.” That’s the first word of the original, and obscene, name of the code that displayed the dreaded bomb icon on the screen. The system calls that displayed the bomb icon were all prefixed with “DS,” the initials of the obscene name, which Apple understandably didn’t want to use. Jerome came up with various euphemisms, such as the “Deep Sauce” manager, which evolved into the “Dire Straights” manager. We eventually settled on the more prosaic “System Error” manager.

  Quick, Hide in This Closet!

  August 1983

  Steve forbids us from working with Sony

  In 1980, Apple reorganized yet again, splitting off a new “Disk Division” headed by John Vennard, who was responsible for developing a hard disk codenamed “Pippin,” as well as for a next-generation floppy disk codenamed “Twiggy.” Both were to be used first by the Lisa project, and then across Apple’s entire product line. At Rod Holt’s request, I had written some early diagnostics for Twiggy using an Apple II, but I was happy when they asked Rich Williams to transfer to the disk division as their software guy, since focusing exclusively on disks seemed pretty limiting to me.

  Woz’s Apple II floppy disk design was way ahead of the rest of the industry, and Apple felt confident it could continue to innovate to extend its lead. Twiggy was a fairly ambitious project that strove to more than quadruple the capacity of standard floppy disks by doubling the data rate (which required higher density media) and employing other innovative tricks like motor speed control, which slowed down the disk rotation speed on the outer tracks to cram more data on them.

  The Lisa was designed to include two built-in Twiggy drives, so it made sense for the Macintosh to use Twiggy as well. But the Lisa team began to encounter unexpected difficulties in getting the drive to work properly. Soon, the optional external hard drive became mandatory, increasing the minimum price of a Lisa by more than $1,000.

  Lisa was announced with great fanfare in January of 1983, but it still wasn’t ready to ship. There were problems in a number of areas, but the biggest one was the low yield of the Twiggy drives, whose high error rate greatly limited production. Finally, Lisas were shipped to customers in June 1983, even though production and reliability problems with the disk drives continued.

  Meanwhile, the Mac team was beginning to panic. We were using a single Twiggy drive as our floppy disk, and we didn’t have a hard disk to fall back on. It looked as though the Twiggy drive was never going to be reliable enough or cost effective for the Macintosh, but we were stuck without an alternative. If we couldn’t find a suitable replacement quickly enough, we’d have to slip the entire project indefinitely.

  Fortunately, we were aware of Sony’s new 3.5“ drive that had started shipping in the spring of 1983 through Hewlett-Packard, their development partner. George Crow, the analog engineer who designed the Mac’s analog board, had come from HP prior to working at Apple and was sold on the superiority of the Sony drives. He procured a drive from his friends at HP and proposed to Bob Belleville that we figure out how to interface it to the Mac as soon as possible while negotiating a deal with Sony.

  The Sony drive looked really sweet, especially when compared to the Twiggy. It used the same data rate as Twiggy, but on smaller disks that could fit in a shirt pocket. Best of all, the media was encased in a hard plastic shell, making it much less fragile and more convenient to handle.

  Steve Jobs was finally ready to acknowledge reality and give up on the Twiggy drive. When he saw the Sony drive he loved it, and immediately wanted to adapt it for the Mac. But instead of doing the obvious thing and striking a deal with Sony, Steve decided that Apple should take what we learned from Twiggy and engineer our own version of a 3.5” drive, working with our Japanese manufacturing partner Alps Electronics, who manufactured the Apple II floppy drives at a very low cost.

  This seemed like suicide to George Crow and Bob Belleville. The Mac was supposed to ship in less than seven months, and it was preposterous to think we could get a 3.5“ drive into production by then, given the disk division’s dismal track record. But Steve was convinced we should do our own drive and told Bob to cease all work on the Sony drive. He instructed Rod Holt, Bob, and George to fly to Japan to meet with Alps to initiate a crash project to develop a workable 3.5“ drive.

  Bob and George grudgingly went along with the Alps program, but they were certain the team would discover we couldn’t pull it off in the allotted time frame. They hatched an alternative plan to continue working with Sony surreptitiously, against Steve’s wishes. Larry Kenyon was given a Sony drive to interface to the Mac, but he was told to keep it hidden, especially from Steve. Bob and George also arranged meetings with Sony to discuss the customizations Apple desired and to hammer out the beginnings of a business deal.

  This dual strategy entailed frequent meetings with both Alps and Sony, with the added burden of keeping the Sony meetings secret from Steve. It wasn’t difficult to do in Japan since Steve didn’t attend those meetings, but it got a little awkward when Sony employees visited us in Cupertino. Sony sent a young engineer named Hide Kamoto to work with Larry Kenyon to spec out the modifications we required. He was sitting in Larry’s cubicle with George Crow when we suddenly heard Steve Jobs’s voice as he unexpectedly strode into the software area.

  “...American business practices, they are very strange. Very strange.”

  George knew Steve would wonder who Kamoto-san was if he saw him. Thinking quickly, he immediately tapped Kamoto-san on his shoulder, and spoke hurriedly while pointing at the nearby janitorial closet. “Dozo, quick, hide in this closet. Please! Now!”

  Kamoto-san looked confused but he got up from his seat and hurried into the dark janitorial closet. He had to stay there for five minutes or so until Steve departed and the coast was clear.

  George and Larry apologized to Kamoto-san for their unusual request. “No problem,” he replied. “But American business practices, they are very strange. Very strange.”

  As predicted, a few week
s later the Alps team came back with an 18-month estimate for getting their drive into production, and we had to abandon the project. When Bob Belleville revealed that he and George had kept the Sony alternative alive, Steve swallowed his pride and thanked them for disobeying him and doing the right thing. The Sony drives eventually worked out great, and it’s hard to imagine what the Mac would have been like without them.

  Saving Lives

  August 1983

  Steve wants us to make the Macintosh boot faster

  We always thought of the Macintosh as a fast computer. Its 68000 microprocessor was effectively 10 times faster than an Apple II, but our Achilles heel was the floppy disk. We had limited memory, so it was often necessary to load data from the floppy, but there we were no faster than an Apple II. Once we had some real applications going, it was clear the floppy disk was going to be a significant bottleneck.

  One of the things that bothered Steve Jobs the most was the time that it took to boot up when the Mac was first powered on. It could take a couple of minutes or more, to test memory, initialize the operating system, and load the Finder. One afternoon, Steve came up with an original way to motivate us to make it faster. Larry Kenyon was the engineer working on the disk driver and filesystem, and one day Steve went into his cubicle and started to exhort him. “The Macintosh boots too slowly. You’ve got to make it faster!”

  Larry started to explain about some of the places where he thought he could improve things, but Steve wasn’t interested. He continued, “You know, I’ve been thinking about it. How many people are going to be using the Macintosh? A million? No, more than that. In a few years, I bet 5 million people will be booting up their Macintoshes at least once a day.

  “Well, let’s say you can shave 10 seconds off the boot time. Multiply that by 5 million users and that’s 50 million seconds every single day. Over a year, that’s probably dozens of lifetimes. Just think about it. If you could make it boot 10 seconds faster, you’ll save a dozen lives. That’s really worth it, don’t you think?”

  We were already pretty motivated to make the software go as fast as we could, so I don’t think his pitch had much effect, but we all thought it was pretty humorous. And while I’m not sure we saved any lives, we did manage to shave more than 10 seconds off the boot time over the next couple of months.

  Stolen from Apple

  August 1983

  We put a hidden icon in the ROM

  In 1980, a company called Franklin Computer produced a clone of the Apple II called the Franklin Ace, designed to run the same software. They copied almost every detail of the Apple II, including all of its ROM-based software and all the documentation, and sold it at a lower price than Apple. We even found a place in the manual where they forgot to change “Apple” to “Ace.” Apple was infuriated and sued Franklin. They eventually won and forced Franklin to withdraw the Ace from the market, but that victory certainly wasn’t a foregone conclusion.

  Franklin argued they had a right to copy the Apple II ROMs because it was just a “functional mechanism” necessary for software compatibility. We anticipated someone might try a similar trick with the Macintosh someday. If they were clever enough (which Franklin wasn’t), they could disguise the code so it wouldn’t look that similar at the binary level. We thought we’d better take some precautions.

  Steve Jobs had the idea that a large “Stolen from Apple” icon should be embedded in the ROM and somehow be triggered to appear on the screen of any infringing machine. The routines and data required to accomplish this would have to be incorporated into our ROM in a stealthy fashion, so the cloners wouldn’t know how to find or remove it.

  It was tricky enough to be a fun project. Susan designed a nice “Stolen from Apple” icon that featured prison bars. Steve Capps had recently come up with a simple scheme for compressing ROM-based icons to save space, so we compressed the icon using his technique. This not only reduced the overhead but also made it much harder to detect the icon. Finally, we wrote a tiny routine to decompress the icon, scale it up, and display it on the screen. We hid it in the middle of some data tables so it would be hard to spot when disassembling the ROM.

  All you had to do to invoke it is enter the debugger and type a 6-digit hexadecimal address followed by a “G,” which meant execute the routine at that address. We demoed it for Steve and he liked it. We were kind of hoping someone would copy the ROM just so we could show off our foresight, but as far as I know, no one ever did. We let it slip that there was a “Stolen from Apple” icon hidden in there somewhere, partially to deter people from copying the ROM. At least one hacker became moderately obsessed with trying to find it.

  Steve Jasik was the author of the MacNosy disassembler/debugger, which could be used to create pseudo-source for the ROM. He found out about the “Stolen from Apple” icon pretty early on, and he became determined to isolate it. Because he lived in Palo Alto, I would occasionally bump into him and he’d ask me for hints or tell me his latest theory about how it was concealed. He was invariably wrong.

  After two or three years of this he finally cracked it. I ran into him and he told me about the compressed icon and the address of the display routine. I congratulated him, but I was never sure if he figured it out himself or if someone with access to the source code told him where the icon was tucked away.

  World Class Cities

  August 1983

  How we named our fonts

  One memorable job I had as a bitmap graphic designer in the Macintosh group was designing the screen fonts. It was especially enjoyable because the Macintosh was able to display proportional typefaces, leaving behind the tyranny of monospace alphabets with their narrow m’s and wide i’s.

  The first Macintosh font was a bold system font with no jagged diagonals called “Elefont.” There were going to be lots of fonts included with the Mac, so we were looking for a set of attractive, related names. Andy Hertzfeld and I had met in high school in suburban Philadelphia, so we started naming the other fonts after stops on the Paoli Local commuter train: Overbrook, Merion, Ardmore, and Rosemont. (Ransom was the only one that broke this convention; it was a font of mismatched letters intended to evoke messages from kidnapers made from cutout letters.)

  One afternoon Steve Jobs stopped by the software group, as he often did at the end of the day. He frowned as he looked at the font names on a menu. “What are those names?” he asked, and we responded by explaining the Paoli Local.

  “Well,” he said, “Cities are OK, but not little cities that nobody’s ever heard of. They ought to be world class cities!”

  And that is how Chicago (Elefont), New York, Geneva, London, San Francisco (Ransom), Toronto, and Venice (Bill Atkinson’s script font) got their names.

  contributed by Susan Kare

  Pirate Flag

  August 1983

  The Mac Team hoists a pirate flag

  In January 1983, just after the Lisa introduction, the Mac team held another off-site retreat in Carmel (see “Credit Where Due” on page 135). Steve Jobs opened the retreat with three of his now-famous “Sayings from Chairman Jobs.”

  1. Real artists ship.

  2. It’s better to be a pirate than join the navy.

  3. Mac in a book by 1986.

  I think the “pirates” remark addressed the feeling among some of the earlier team members that the Mac group was getting too large and bureaucratic. We had started out as a rebellious skunkworks, much like Apple itself, and Steve wanted us to preserve our original spirit even as we were growing more like the Navy every day.

  In fact, we were growing so fast that we needed to move again. So, in August of 1983, we moved across the street to a larger building that was unimaginatively designated “Bandley 3.” I had worked there before, in 1980, when Apple had initially built it to house the original engineering organization. But now it was to be the new home of the newly christened “Macintosh Division,” over 80 employees strong.

  The building looked pretty much like every other Apple
building, so we wanted to do something to make it look like we belonged there. Steve Capps, the heroic programmer who had switched over from the Lisa team just in time for the January retreat, had a flash of inspiration: if the Mac team was a band of pirates, the building should fly a pirate flag.

  A few days before we moved into the new building, Capps bought some black cloth and sewed it into a flag. He asked Susan Kare to paint a big skull and crossbones in white at the center. The final touch was the requisite eye-patch, rendered by a large, rainbow-colored Apple logo decal. We wanted to have the flag flying over the building early Monday morning, the first day of occupancy, so the plan was to install it late Sunday evening.

  Capps had already made a few exploratory forays onto the roof during the weekend while a few of us looked out for guards on the ground. At first, he thought he could just drape the flag on the roof, but that proved impractical, as it was too hard to see, especially when the wind curled it up. After a bit of searching, he found a thin metal pole among the remaining construction materials still scattered inside the building, which served as a suitable flagpole.

  Finally, on Sunday night around 10 P.M., it was time to hoist the Jolly Roger. Capps climbed onto the roof while we stood guard below. He wasn’t sure how he would attach the flag and didn’t have many tools with him. He scoured the surface of the roof and found three or four long, rusty nails, which he was able to use to secure the flagpole to a groove in the roof, ready to greet the Mac team members as they entered the new building the next morning.

  We weren’t sure how people would react to the flag, especially Steve Jobs, but Steve and almost everyone else loved it, so it stayed. It made me smile whenever I caught a glimpse of it.