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  The boot ROM allowed us to download other programs from the Lisa to the Mac over a serial line in order to try out new code and test or demo the prototype. There was a ton of work still to do before launch. We had to write an operating system, hook up peripherals like the keyboard and mouse, and get Bill Atkinson’s graphics and user interface routines, running, for example. But we also sometimes wrote demo programs just for the fun of it.

  In early March of 1981, for example, I wrote a fast, disk-based slideshow for the Mac the same night that I got the disk routines going. It was exciting to see detailed, relatively high-resolution images parading across the display so quickly.

  Assembly language code for bouncing balls

  By April, I was experimenting with writing custom graphics routines to show off the raw graphical horsepower of the system. I had written a few ball-bouncing routines on the Apple II, and I thought it would be interesting to see how many balls the Mac could animate smoothly. I wrote some 68000 code to draw 16 × 16 images very quickly, and I found that I could keep more than 100 balls animating smoothly, which seemed pretty impressive. I also wrote a small sketch program with a seed fill using Bill Atkinson’s 8 × 8 pattern bitmaps, as well as an entertaining Breakout game in which I implemented Bud’s idea of dodging the bricks when they fell down after you hit them.

  Bob Bishop had experimented with a variety of graphical special effects on the Apple II, and I thought I’d try some of them out on the Mac. The idea was to transfer an image onto the screen in an entertaining way. The one I liked best was a kind of waterfall effect that was achieved by copying an image onto the screen using a varying number of multiple copies of successive scan lines, and then stretching the image vertically. The image looked like it poured onto the screen like water going over a waterfall; it was rather hypnotic. I often used it with an image of the Muppets I converted from the Apple II, and the “Stretching Muppets” demo became pretty well known.

  Early Finder prototype

  In May 1981, Bud pulled an all-nighter and ported QuickDraw and some pull-down menu code from the Lisa to the Mac (see “Busy Being Born, Part 2” on page 153). For the first time, we were running mouse-based software with real pull-down menus. The best part of the demo was the pattern menu that showed off the extensibility of the menu routines to draw an entirely graphical menu.

  In June 1981, we realized it would be worthwhile to create a standalone demo environment in which the Macintosh booted and ran programs from its own disk, even though we’d only use it temporarily. Our own operating system wasn’t close to usable yet, but Rich Page had written a simple operating system called the “Lisa Monitor” that was based on UCSD Pascal and was pretty easy to port; all we had to do was integrate our I/O drivers. At last, using the Monitor, a Mac could boot up and run demos without help from a Lisa.

  It was easy for us to run QuickDraw-based programs in the Lisa Monitor environment. Soon, we had a Window Manager demo that featured balls bouncing in multiple windows (see “Bouncing Pepsis” on page 149), as well as a nice icon editor and MacSketch (an early ancestor of MacPaint) running.

  I think the most interesting demo was an early prototype for the Finder, written by Bruce Horn and myself in the spring of 1982, and pictured here. Its window was filled with an image of a floppy disc over which the files were represented as draggable tabs. You could select files and perform operations on them by selecting them and then clicking on a command button. Bruce also made a second mock-up with folder icons that influenced Bill’s design for Lisa’s Filer (see “Rosing’s Rascals” on page 74), which we eventually adopted instead. The prototype provides an interesting glimpse of possibilities that we might have chosen instead of what seems so familiar today.

  Bicycle

  April 1981

  Rod wants to change the name of the project

  Jef Raskin chose the name Macintosh, after his favorite kind of apple. When Jef was forced to go on an extended leave of absence in February 1981, Steve Jobs and Rod Holt decided to change the name of the project, partially to distance it from Jef. They considered Macintosh to be a code name anyway and didn’t want us to get too attached to it.

  Apple had recently taken out a two-page ad in Scientific American that featured quotes from Steve Jobs about the wonders of personal computers. The ad explained how humans were not as fast runners as many other species, but a human on a bicycle beat them all. Personal computers were “bicycles for the mind.”

  A month or so after Jef’s departure, Rod Holt announced to the small design team that the new code name for the project was Bicycle and that we should change all references from Macintosh to Bicycle. When we objected, thinking Bicycle was a silly name, Rod responded by saying it shouldn’t matter “since it was only a code name.”

  Rod’s edict was never obeyed. Somehow Macintosh just seemed right. It was already ingrained with the team, and the Bicycle name seemed forced and inappropriate, so no one but Rod ever called it Bicycle. For a few weeks Rod reprimanded anyone who called it Macintosh in his presence, but the new name never acquired any momentum. Finally, about a month after his original order, after someone called it Macintosh again, he threw up his hands in exasperation and told us, “I give up! You can call it Macintosh if you want. It’s only a code name, anyway.”

  But it was a code name that proved to be sturdy and resilient. In the fall of 1982, Apple paid tens of thousands of dollars to a marketing consulting firm to come up with a themed set of names for Lisa and Macintosh. They came up with lots of ideas, including calling the Mac the “Apple 40” or the “Apple Allegro.” After hearing all the suggestions, Steve and the marketing team decided to go with Lisa and Macintosh as the official names. They did manage to reverse engineer an acronym for Lisa, “Local Integrated Systems Architecture,” but internally we preferred the recursive “Lisa: Invented Stupid Acronym,” or something like it. Macintosh seemed to be acronym-proof.

  But there was still a final hurdle to clear; the name was too close to a trademark from the McIntosh stereo company. I’m not sure how the situation was resolved (I suspect that Apple paid them a modest amount), but toward the end of our big off-site meeting held in Carmel in January of 1983, Steve announced to the team we had gotten rights to use the name. He dashed a champagne bottle against one of the prototypes and declared, “I christen thee Macintosh!”

  The tree-grown apple is spelled “McIntosh,” but that’s harder to type and was also the name of a maker of audio equipment. I had hoped the change of spelling would avoid trademark infringement as both the spelling and the field of commerce were different. The ploy didn’t work: I was later told that Apple had to not only make a deal with McIntosh, but also with the Macintosh people who make the famous overcoats of that name.

  Jef Raskin

  Steve Jobs described personal computers as “bicycles for the mind.” This image was used to promote the Apple University consortium.

  Adam Osborne with his creation, the Osborne I

  A Message for Adam

  April 1981

  We encounter Adam Osborne at the West Coast Computer Faire

  The Apple II was officially introduced at the First West Coast Computer Faire in April 1977, which was one of the very first trade shows dedicated to the newly emerging microcomputing industry. I loved the Computer Faires because passionate hobbyists attended them in the days before commercial forces completely dominated.

  In April 1981, a few members of the Mac team took the afternoon off and drove up to San Francisco to visit the seventh West Coast Computer Faire at Brooks Hall. The biggest splash at the show was the unveiling of the Osborne I, from a brand new company named Osborne Computer, which was touted as the world’s first portable computer.

  The Osborne I was the brainchild of Adam Osborne, a well-known figure in the world of early microcomputers. Adam was a technical writer who founded a publishing company to publish crucial information about microprocessors and software that was sorely lacking at the time. The company was
eventually sold to McGraw-Hill and Adam became a controversial columnist for opining on the industry from his pulpit in InfoWorld and other publications. He had a populist vision of computing that touted a no-frills, low-cost, high-volume approach to the business.

  In 1980, he decided to put his theories into practice and founded the Osborne Computer Company to design, manufacture, and market the Osborne 1, a low-cost, one-piece, portable computer complete with a suite of bundled applications. He recruited Lee Felsenstein, already a microcomputing legend as the master of ceremonies for the Home Brew Computer Club, to design the hardware. Now they were introducing the fruits of their labor at the West Coast Computer Faire, just as Apple had done four years earlier.

  The Osborne 1 was on display at their crowded booth near the center of Brooks Hall. It looked a lot like an oversized lunch box with a keyboard on the back of the lid. It was crammed full with two floppy drives and a tiny, 5″ monitor in its center. We were a little surprised because it looked uncannily like some of Jef Raskin’s early sketches for the Macintosh, which Steve had recently abandoned for a vertically oriented design. Portable was sort of a euphemism because the Osborne I weighed around 25 pounds; but at least it fit under an airline seat...barely. As Macintosh elitists, we were suitably grossed out by the character-based CP/M applications, which seemed especially clumsy on the tiny, scrolling screen.

  We worked our way up to the front of the crowd to get a good look at the units on display. We started to ask one of the presenters a technical question and were surprised to see Adam Osborne himself standing a few feet from us, looking at our show badges, preempting the response.

  “Oh, some Apple folks,” he addressed us in a condescending tone. “What do you think? The Osborne 1 is going to outsell the Apple II by a factor of 10, don’t you think so? What part of Apple do you work in?”

  When we told him we were on the Mac team, he started to chuckle. “The Macintosh; I heard about that. When are we going to get to see it? Well, go back and tell Steve Jobs that the Osborne 1 is going to outsell the Apple II and the Macintosh combined!”

  So, after returning to Cupertino later that afternoon, we told Steve about our encounter with Adam Osborne. He grinned with a sort of mock anger, grabbed the telephone on the spare desk in Bud’s office, and called information for the number of the Osborne Computer Corporation. 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.”

  There was a long delay as the secretary tried to figure out how to respond. Steve continued, “One more thing. I hear Adam’s curious about the Macintosh. Tell him the Macintosh is so good that he’s probably going to buy a few for his children even though it put his company out of business!”

  PC Board Esthetics

  July 1981

  Steve is concerned with the esthetics of the PC board

  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 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 allowed us to make prototypes much more quickly. We recruited Collette Askeland from the Apple II group to lay out the board; 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 attended by most of the team in June 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 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. He hadn’t been on the team long enough to know it was a losing battle. Fortunately, Burrell interrupted him.

  “Well, that was a difficult part to lay out 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, Burrell’s prediction came true: the new boards didn’t work properly, and we reverted to the old design for the next run of prototypes.

  Pineapple Pizza

  May 1981

  We stay late to bring up the first printed circuit board

  When I began working on the Mac project in February 1981, there was still only one 68000-based Macintosh prototype in existence, the initial digital board that was wire-wrapped by Burrell himself. It was now sitting in the corner of Bud Tribble’s office on one of the empty desks, attached to a small, seven-inch monitor. When powered up, the code in the boot ROM filled the screen with the word hello in a tiny font, crisply rendered on the distinctive black-on-white display.

  Dan Kottke and Brian Howard were already busy wire-wrapping more prototype boards, carefully following Burrell’s drawings. About a week later I received the second prototype for my office so I could work on the low-level I/O routines, interfacing the disk and keyboard, while Bud worked on the mouse driver and ported Bill’s graphics routines.

  The next big step for the hardware was to lay out a printed circuit board. We recruited Collette Askeland, the best PC board layout technician in the company, from the Apple II group. Burrell spent a week or two working intensely with Collette, who used a specialized CAD machine located in Bandley 3 to input the topology and route the signals and eventually created a tape containing all the information needed to fabricate the boards.

  Burrell and Brian checked and rechecked the layout, which was tediously expressed as thousands of node connections. After a day or two they decided they were ready to send it out for fabrication. We were hoping to get the first sample boards back before the weekend, but it looked as though they weren’t going to make it. However, around 4:30 P.M. on Friday afternoon, they arrived.

  Burrell figured it would take at least two or three hours to assemble a board, and then even longer to troubleshoot the inevitable mistakes, so it was too late to try to get one working that evening. Maybe Burrell and Brian would come in on Saturday to get started, or maybe they’d wait until Monday morning. While they were discussing it, Steve Jobs strolled into the hardware lab, excited as usual.

  “Hey, I heard that the PC boards finally arrived. Are they going to work? When will you have one working?”

  Burrell explained the boards had just arrived and that it would take at least a couple of hours to assemble one, so they were thinking about starting the next morning or waiting until Monday.

  Burrell Smith in downtown Palo Alto, 1986

  “Monday? Are you kidding?” replied Steve. “It’s your PC board, Burrell. Don’t you want to see i
f it works tonight? I’ll tell you what. If you can get it to work this evening, I’ll take you and anyone else who sticks around out for Pineapple Pizza.”

  Steve knew Pineapple Pizzas had recently replaced Bulgarian Beef as Burrell’s latest food obsession (as a staunch vegetarian, he thought this was a positive development), and that Burrell wanted a Pineapple Pizza pretty much every chance he could get it. Burrell looked at Brian Howard and shrugged. “OK. We may as well give it a shot now. But I don’t think we’ll be able to get it working before the restaurants close.”

  So Burrell and Brian got busy. They selected a board, stuffed it with sockets, and carefully soldered them in place, while five or six of us, including Steve, sat around and kibitzed. Burrell was a little tense and impatient because he didn’t like the pressure of bringing up a board in front of so many spectators. Every five minutes or so he referred to the awaiting Pineapple Pizza and speculated about how good it was going to taste.

  Finally, around 8 P.M. or so, the board was assembled enough to try to power it up for the very first time. The prototype was hooked up to an Apple II power supply and a small monitor, and fired up as we held our breath. The screen should have been filled with “hellos,” but instead all it displayed was a checkerboard pattern.

  We were all disappointed, except for Burrell. “That’s not too bad,” he commented. “It means the RAM and the video generation are more or less working. The processor isn’t resetting, but it looks like we’re pretty close.” He turned to look directly at Steve. “But I’m too hungry to keep working. I think it’s time for some Pineapple Pizza.”

  Steve smiled and agreed that it was good enough for the first night and it was time to celebrate. The seven or eight of us who stayed late drove in three cars to Burrell’s favorite Italian restaurant, Frankie, Johnny and Luigi’s in Mountain View, where we ordered three large Pineapple Pizzas (which tasted great).