Revolution in The Valley [Paperback] Read online

  After playing around for a while, he came up with a calculator he thought looked pretty good. But the acid test was showing it to Steve Jobs, in his role as our esthetic compass, to see what he thought.

  We all gathered around as Chris showed the calculator to Steve and then held his breath, waiting for Steve’s reaction. “Well, it’s a start,” Steve said. “But, basically, it stinks. The background color is too dark, some lines are the wrong thickness, and the buttons are too big.” Chris told Steve he’d keep working on its until Steve thought he got it right.

  So, for a couple of days, Chris would incorporate Steve’s suggestions from the previous day, but Steve continued to find new faults each time he saw it. Finally, Chris got a flash of inspiration.

  The next afternoon, instead of a new iteration of the calculator, Chris unveiled what he called “The Steve Jobs Roll-Your-Own Calculator Construction Set.” The included pull-down menus offered every possible choice regarding graphical attributes of the calculator. You could select line thickness, button sizes, background patterns, and everything else to design your own calculator.

  Steve took a look at the new program and immediately started fiddling with the parameters. After trying out alternatives for 10 minutes or so, he settled on something that he liked. When I implemented the calculator user interface (Donn Denman did the math semantics) for real a few months later, I used Steve’s design. It remained the standard calculator on the Macintosh for many years, all the way up through OS 9.

  –2000 Lines of Code

  February 1982

  It’s hard to measure progress by lines of code

  In early 1982, the Lisa software team was trying to buckle down for the big push to ship the software within the next six months. Some of the managers decided it would be a good idea to track the progress of each individual engineer in terms of the amount of code they wrote from week to week. They devised a form that each engineer was required to submit every Friday, which included a field for the number of lines of code written that week.

  Bill Atkinson, the author of QuickDraw and the main user interface designer, who was by far the most important Lisa implementer, thought lines of code was a silly measure of software productivity. He thought his goal was to write as small and fast a program as possible, and the lines of code metric only encouraged writing sloppy, bloated, broken code.

  He had recently worked on optimizing QuickDraw’s region calculation machinery, and had completely rewritten the region engine using a simpler, more general algorithm—which, after some tweaking, made region operations almost six times faster. As a byproduct, the rewrite also saved around 2,000 lines of code.

  He was just putting the finishing touches on the optimization when it was time to fill out the management form for the first time. When he got to the lines of code part, he thought about it for a second, and then wrote in the number: –2,000.

  I’m not sure how the managers reacted, but I do know that after a couple more weeks they stopped asking Bill to fill out the form, and he gladly complied.

  Mister Macintosh

  February 1982

  Steve has a unique idea for the software

  Steve Jobs often came by Texaco Towers after dinner to see what was new, and we’d usually show him whatever recent progress we’d made. Sometimes he’d be pissed off about something, but other times he’d be really excited about a new idea.

  I was the only one in the office one evening when he burst in, exclaiming that he’d had a flash of inspiration.

  “Mr. Macintosh! We’ve got to have Mr. Macintosh!”

  “Who is Mr. Macintosh?” I wondered.

  “Mr. Macintosh is a mysterious little man who lives inside each Macintosh. He pops up every once in a while, when you least expect it, and then winks at you and disappears again. It will be so quick that you won’t be sure if you saw him or not. We’ll plant references in the manuals to the legend of Mr. Macintosh, and no one will know if he’s real or not.”

  Engineers like myself always daydream about building surreptitious little hacks into software, but here was the co-founder and chairman of the company suggesting something really wild. I enthusiastically pressed him for details. Where should Mr. Macintosh appear? How often? What should he do when he shows up?

  “One out of every thousand or two thousand times that you pull down a menu, instead of the normal commands, you’ll get Mr. Macintosh, leaning against the wall of the menu. He’ll wave at you, and then quickly disappear. You’ll try to get him to come back, but you won’t be able to.”

  I loved the idea and promised I would implement Mr. Macintosh, but not right away, since there were still so many more important things to get done. Steve told the idea to the marketing team, and eventually recruited the French artist Folon to do some renditions of Mr. Macintosh. I also asked my high school friend Susan Kare, who hadn’t started with Apple yet, to try and draw some Mr. Macintosh animations.

  Most of the Macintosh system software had to be packed into a 64 KByte ROM, and ROM space became scarcer as development proceeded and the system grew. It was eventually clear we’d never be able to fit bitmaps for Mr. Macintosh into the ROM, but I wasn’t willing to give up on him yet.

  I made the software that displayed the menus look at a special low memory location called the “MrMacHook” for an address of a routine. If the routine was present, it was called with parameters that let it draw in the menu box, and it returned a result that told the menu manager if it did anything. Using this, an application or system module could implement Mr. Macintosh (or perhaps his evil twin) if they saw fit.

  I’m not sure if anybody ever actually implemented Mr. Macintosh or used the “MrMacHook” for something worthwhile.

  Signing Party

  February 1982

  The artists sign their work

  The component of the Macintosh hardware that had the longest lead time was the tool that molded its distinctive plastic case. After tweaking the case design for more than six months, we built a small production run of 50 units with a soft-tooled case. The final design had to go out for hard tooling toward the end of February 1982 in order to meet the ship date we were aiming for at the time, which was January 1983.

  The Mac team had a complicated set of motivations, but the most unique ingredient was a strong dose of artistic values. First and foremost, Steve Jobs thought of himself as an artist, and he encouraged the design team to think of themselves that way, too. The goal was never to beat the competition or to make a lot of money; it was to do the greatest thing possible, or even a little greater. Steve often reinforced the artistic theme. For example, he took the entire team on a field trip in the spring of 1982 to the Louis Comfort Tiffany museum because Tiffany was an artist who learned how to mass-produce his work.

  Because the Macintosh team were artists, it was only appropriate that we sign our work. Steve came up with the awesome idea of having each team member’s signature engraved on the hard tool that molded the plastic case so our signatures would appear inside the case of every Mac that rolled off the production line. Though most customers would never see them because a special tool was required to open the case, we would take pride in knowing our names were in there, even if no one else was aware of them.

  We held a special signing party after one of our weekly meetings on February 10, 1982. Jerry Manock, manager of the industrial design team, spread out a large piece of drafting paper on the table to capture our signatures. Steve gave a little speech about artists signing their work, and then cake and champagne were served as he called each team member to step forward and sign their name for posterity. Burrell had the symbolic honor of going first, followed by members of the software team. It took 40 minutes or so for around 35 team members to sign. Steve waited until everyone else had signed before choosing a spot near the upper center and signed his name with a flourish, using all lower case letters as usual.

  We were aware that the team was still growing rapidly, and in a few months there would
be a new crop of key contributors who also deserved to sign the case. We decided to draw the line at the date of the signing party, but knew it would be tough to stick to that. We also wanted to add the signatures of a few major contributors who had left the project, including Steve Wozniak, Jef Raskin, and Bud Tribble. But that was supposed to be it.

  Over the next few months a few more signatures of people who weren’t on the team at the time of the signing party managed to make it into the case. For a while Rod Holt held the line, but eventually Bob Belleville (who was hired in April 1982 as the software manager but soon became the overall engineering manager when Rod Holt retired) decided to add his own name. He also snuck in a few other key people, such as marketing manager Mike Murray and original evangelist Mike Boich.

  And then, over time, names gradually began to disappear as Apple changed the case to make it easier to manufacture. Some design details were changed even before first ship, partially obscuring some of the signatures. Each time the case was revised, more names were left off, as dictated by the nature of the revision, until a substantial number of them were gone. I’m not sure which model was the last to have any names at all, but I’m pretty sure the Macintosh Classic, from the early 90s, didn’t have any.

  And Another Thing...

  March 1982

  Friction between the Mac and Lisa teams

  By early 1982, the Macintosh was beginning to be acknowledged as a significant project within Apple, instead of a quirky research effort. But it still remained somewhat controversial. Since the Mac was sort of like a Lisa that was priced like an Apple II, it was seen as potential competition from both groups. Also, Steve Jobs had a habit of constantly boasting about the superiority of the Mac team, which tended to alienate everybody else.

  Larry Tesler, who came to Apple from Xerox PARC in the summer of 1980, was the manager of the Lisa Application Software team. He understood and appreciated the potential of the Macintosh and was very supportive of the project. He was concerned that some of the Lisa team didn’t share his enthusiasm and thought it would be helpful for us to demonstrate the Mac to them and talk about our plans. He arranged for Burrell Smith and me to give a demo during a lunch meeting.

  By this point, we had standalone Macintosh prototypes that no longer depended on an umbilical cord to a hosting Lisa. We didn’t have the real plastic cases yet, but we were able to house the prototypes in plastic boxes of around the same size that were a passable imitation. The demo software environment was based on the “Lisa Monitor,” a simple operating system cooked up by Rich Page (one of the main Lisa architects), that I got running on the Macintosh. The monitor was based on the UCSD Pascal system Filer and offered a simple, menu-based UI. We were able to boot the Mac into the monitor from an Apple II floppy, and then use it to launch various demo programs.

  Burrell and I set up the prototype in a large conference room in the Lisa building. The Lisa applications team was seated around the table, but quite a few other team members had also gathered around—standing room only, perhaps 25 people in all. Larry Tesler gave us a nice introduction, and then we booted up the prototype and started to run through various demos while explaining the capabilities of the machine. Everything was going well, when suddenly there was a loud, insistent knock at the conference room door.

  The door was flung open before anyone could respond, and in strode Rich Page, the systems wizard who was one of the main designers of the Lisa. Rich was a tall, bearded, ursine engineer who was equally adept at hardware and software. But I had never seen him looking as angry as he was at the moment.

  Key members of the Lisa team: Paul Baker, Bruce Daniels, Chris Franklin, Rich Page, Larry Tesler, and John Couch (with arm on Lisa).

  “You guys don’t know what you’re doing!” he growled, obviously in an emotional state of mind. “The Macintosh is going to destroy the Lisa! The Macintosh is going to ruin Apple!!!”

  Burrell and I didn’t know how to respond, and neither did anyone else in the room. Larry Tesler gave me an embarrassed glance, trying to figure out what to do. But Rich wasn’t particularly interested in a response, he just wanted to vent his frustration.

  “Steve Jobs wants to destroy Lisa because we wouldn’t let him control it,” Rich continued, looking as though he was going to start crying. “Sure, it’s easy to throw a prototype together, but it’s hard to ship a real product. You guys don’t understand what you’re getting into. The Mac can’t run Lisa software; the Lisa can’t run Mac software. You don’t even care. Nobody’s going to buy a Lisa because they know the Mac is coming! But you don’t care!”

  “You guys don’t know what you’re doing!

  The Macintosh is going to destroy the Lisa!

  The Macintosh is going to ruin Apple!!!”

  With that, he turned around and strode out of the conference room as quickly as he had come in. He slammed the door as he left and the noise reverberated ominously in the stunned silence. There was some nervous laughter but nobody knew what to say. Larry Tesler started to apologize, explaining that Rich didn’t speak for most of the Lisa team, when suddenly the door was flung open again and Rich Page was back, just as angry as before.

  “And another thing,” he said, before pausing to look directly at Burrell and myself. “I don’t have any problem with you. I know it’s not your fault. Steve Jobs is the problem. Tell Steve that I think he’s destroying Apple!” Once again, he turned around and left abruptly, slamming the door for a second time. We steeled ourselves, wondering if he was going to return for a third round.

  But this time Larry was able to finish apologizing, and then we finished the demo quickly and held a brief question-and-answer session, though everyone was still a bit shell-shocked from the unexpected outburst. We told Steve Jobs about Rich Page’s oration later that afternoon, and he just shrugged, “That’s Rich Page for you. He’ll get over it.”

  The next morning Bill Atkinson called and told me that Rich Page felt bad about what happened and wanted to take Burrell and me out to lunch to apologize. So that afternoon the four of us went out for a long lunch during which Bill explained that Rich was just trying to do what he thought was right, and he didn’t intend to get so emotional. Rich told us he really appreciated that Burrell and I were doing great work for the company, but he was frustrated that Steve was such a loose cannon and wasn’t working for our mutual success. We left on decent terms, but in the back of my mind I was still worried that such obvious resentment would be a problem for us in the future.

  Rosing’s Rascals

  March 1982

  The Lisa Filer is radically redesigned with no time to spare

  By the spring of 1982, the Lisa User Interface was finally settling down, and the software team was working feverishly to get everything ready to ship by their deadline in the fall. Though myriad problems remained, most of the applications were shaping up, and the team could finally sense a glimmer of light at the end of the long tunnel.

  Dan Smith and Frank Ludolph were working on the Lisa Filer, the key application that managed files and launched other applications. It was beginning to come together, but Dan was still unsatisfied with the current design.

  The Filer was based on a dialog window that prompted the user to select a document from a list, and then select an action like Open, Copy, or Discard, and then answer more questions depending on the selected action. There was so much prompting that it became known as the “Twenty Questions Filer.” Dan thought it wasn’t easy or enjoyable to use, but there just wasn’t enough time left in the schedule for further experimentation, so they were pretty much stuck with it.

  One afternoon Dan mentioned his dissatisfaction to Bill Atkinson, the main designer of the Lisa User Interface. Bill suggested they meet that evening at his home in Los Gatos for a brainstorming session to see if they could come up with a better design, even though it was probably too late to implement for the initial release.

  Bill favored a more graphical approach and wanted to use small graphical im
ages to represent files that could be manipulated by dragging them with a mouse. He remembered an interesting prototype he saw at M.I.T. called Dataland that allowed data objects to be spatially positioned over a large area. He adapted the idea for Lisa by allowing icons representing files and directories to be positioned on a scrolling, semi-infinite plane.

  After a couple nights of fiddling around, Dan and Bill had an interesting mock-up with icons representing documents and folders, including a trash can with flies buzzing around it. The icons used a mask bitmap to define their borders so irregular shapes could be rendered seamlessly on the gray desktop. The new design seemed to have the simplicity and elegance they were striving for, and they began to get excited.

  They were both eager and afraid to show the mock-up to the rest of the team. The design of the Filer was supposed to be frozen, and embarking on such a major revision would surely slip the schedule, which was already precariously close to unrealizable. They gathered up their courage and approached Wayne Rosing, the Lisa Engineering Manager, and explained their dilemma.

  Wayne appreciated the potential of the new approach, but wasn’t ready to slip the schedule to accommodate it. He thought it was barely possible to go with both the new design and the current schedule, if they could turn the mock-up into a solid working prototype in record time. He proposed a deal: he gave them permission to work on the new design in secret for the next two weeks. If they had a robust, stable prototype by then, he promised to support it. If they didn’t, Bill and Dan promised to forget it and work to finish the earlier design.

  Wayne extracted one additional promise from Bill. Under no circumstances was he to show the mock-up to Steve Jobs. Wayne knew Steve would have a strong reaction and would probably wreak havoc with the schedule accordingly. He didn’t want Steve to see it until they knew they could pull it off.