Left to right: , , , Geo rge Crowe, , Jern) Manock . An Interview: The Design Team The making of Macintosh On October 14, 1983, the design team for Apple Computer Inc .'s new Macintosh computer met with BYTE Managing Editor Phil Lemmons at the company's Cupertino, California, headquarters. In the dialogue that followed , Bill Atkinson, , Andy Hertzfeld, Larry Kenyon, Joanna Hoffman, , Dave Egner, Chris Espinosa, , , , and George Crowe discussed the evolution of their brainchild.

BYTE: How did the Macintosh pro­ everyone can afford it. It's not very Quickdraw and have a mouse on it­ ject begin? many years ago that most of us in this in essence, build a really cheap im­ Jobs: What turns on Andy and room couldn't have afforded a $5000 plementation of Lisa's technology Burrell and Chris and Bill and Larry computer. We realized that we could that would use some of that software and everyone else here is building build a supercheap computer that technology. That's when the Macin­ something really inexpensive so that would run Bill Atkinson's amazing tosh as we know it was started.

58 February 1984 © BYrE Publications Inc. Hertzfeld: That was around January of 1981. Smith: We fooled around with some other ideas for computer design, but we realized that the 68000 was a chip that had a future and had . .. Jobs: Some decent software! Smith: And had some horsepower and enough growth potential so we could build a machine that would live and that Apple could rally around for years to come. So we looked at what "-=. . the Lisa group was doing and knew that the designers were onto some really hot ideas. They have a lot of very advanced things they want to do with Lisa . Mac basically does one thing at a time as opposed to doing several things simultaneously. The memory-management unit that's critical for a Lisa application, for ex­ ample, becomes something we can do without very nicely. Our real goal was to design a great system with just a bit map and based on a 68000 but also a really cheap system. Could we write incredibly great software that wouldn't chew up megabytes of memory? To do what used to take megabytes in a very tiny machine? Atkinson: It's not like we didn't want a memory manager in it or didn't want lots of memory or didn't want hard disks. What we wanted was for lots of people to be able to own these things. We saw something beautiful that we built and we said, "How can we get this out to a lot of people?" Bill Atkinson. Espinosa: It doesn't matter how great the computer is if nobody buys it. trate on making the world's best soft­ the right ones together in the right proved that. The key thing ware for it. way and make them do things you've got to remember is that back Espinosa: And you look at this they've never done before, then you then, if you told anybody you could board, and every chip on there is can come out with something that's build a computer using a 68000 with pretty expensive. There's not a lot of small and inexpensive and incredibly anything under a hundred integrated jellybean TTL [transistor-transistor powerful. circuits, they would have said you logic 1 running around, not a lot of Smith: What gets me is that a lot of were crazy. little off-the-shelf chips. Everything programmers will have this long Kenyon: Most people have twice as on there costs $4 to $9 apiece, and laundry list of things they must have many chips just for central process­ that's expensive for a chip. But we've before they will sit down and allow ing unit support on the 68000. So got so few of them; instead of taking fingers to touch the keyboard. I was nobody had ever conceived that you up board space with a lot of stuff that really lucky because these guys are could build a cheap system ... an you just don't need and making it un­ the best programmers I've ever seen Apple II chip-count system with a reliable because you've got to have anywhere, not just with Apple. They 68000. connectors and you've got all these walk around between the Apple divi­ Atkinson: We want the most com­ problems with soldering. If you just sions, contributing this amazing puter that you can get for the least carefully pick what chips you want to graphic stuff to Lisa- and then help dollars so that the most people can use and you've got somebody like out on the Mac, too. Everybody had have it. . . and then you can concen- Burrell who's genius enough to put this common goal of making the Mac

February 1984 © BYTE Publications Inc. 59 screen, just Bill's amazing software and Burrell's amazing hardware, then in between that the other amazing software that we have. We tried to do that in every single way, with the disk and with the 110 .. . rather than slots. When we first started off with Apple II, the variability-how you customize your machine-was with hardware; you plugged in a card. And because we didn't have any idea what these computers were going to be used for, that variability was very important. But now we have a much greater understanding of what people are using these products for. And the customization really is mostly soft­ ware now. The way I customize my machine to do what I want is by stick­ ing in a disk more than anything else. Atkinson: We've already built in the hardware that most people want. Jobs: Right. Most of the options on Andy Hertzfeld. other computers are in Mac. So Andy and Burrell really came up with an flexible and general-purpose because go the distance to get there. I/O scheme that was serial. We don't we didn't know what we might want One of the things we really learned . have slots .. . slots cost a lot of money, to do five years from now. We knew with Lisa and from looking at what they make the box much bigger, and the kind of direction we were going, Xerox had done at PARC [Palo Alto you need a much bigger power sup­ so instead of building in a graphics Research Center] was that we could ply because you never know who's controller that takes 25 chips and construct elegant, simple systems going to plug in what. Do you realize then trying to figure out some way based on just a bit map .. . no char­ that in an IBM PC the video board, to soup up the architecture so that it acter generators .. . and save tons of just the black-and-white video plug­ actually would work with it, we chips if we had software fast enough in card, has got way more chips than relied a lot on the processor assem­ to paint characters on the screen, the entire Macintosh? Anyway, so the bly-language code in ROM [read-only given the processor. Apple was the Mac's got most of the stuff built in. memory]. And it turns out that we first company to figure out how to do . Rather than putting in serial ports can make the whole system go faster that with a microprocessor . .. and that operate at 9600 or 92,000 bits per by eliminating a lot of the bus traffic really still is the only company that's second, we paid more money and we that normally slows the machine doing it with a microprocessor. That's put in this super chip. We used the down. what Bill figured out how to do with Zilog SCC chip that Burrell picked Jobs: We learned a lot on Lisa. Quickdraw. out, and Larry Kenyon and Andy Atkinson: We're still learning a lot! The real reason that we chose wrote the software to make this chip Jobs: If you read the Apple's first originally to use the 68000 was so we sing. And it goes up to, what, 230 brochure, the headline was "Simpli­ could pick up Quickdraw. Macintosh kilobits per second? city is the Ultimate Sophistication." uses the exact same graphic structure Smith: It can go up to a megabit per What we meant by that was that and package, the exact same code, as second with external clock. when you first attack a problem it Lisa does. So, by paying a little more Jobs: And it does all the asyn­ seems really simple because you for the microprocessor, not only were chronous and tons of synchronous don't understand it. Then when you we able to give the customer an in­ protocols all inside the chip. So we've start to really understand it, you finitely more powerful chip than, say, got superhigh-horsepowered serial come up with these very complicated an 8-bit chip or one of 's baby ports. solutions because it's really hairy. micros, but we were able to pick up Smith: The whole idea is that later on Most people stop there. But a few this amazing software, and that we'll be able to have logical slots in­ people keep burning the midnight oil allowed us to throw tons of chips out stead of physical slots. We'll be able and finally understand the underly­ of this thing. We didn't have to get to have multiple devices per port; ing principles of the problem and special custom text or graphics chips. we'll use a port a lot like the way you come up with an elegantly simple We just simplified the system down have slots in Apple II. But one of the solution for it. But very few people to where it's just a bit map on the other advantages that Steve didn't

60 February 1984 © BYTE Publications Inc. mention is that you don't have to change the memory map of the com­ puter. Andy and Larry Kenyon worked on the system and the driver software and things like that. They said, well, gee whiz, on the Apple II you keep having the rug sort of changed on you; someone plugs in a new card or, worse yet, on other micros people are plugging in dif­ ferent software and different hard­ ware, and it's hard to keep track. Atkinson: You get into incompatible combinations; you just can't use this card with that card. Jobs: The other thing about the hard­ ware is that when Apple II was de­ signed, a microcomputer system cost a lot of money to build. I mean, to get a microprocessor and RAM [random­ access read/wrIte memory] and ROM might have cost $50, $60. You ob­ viously wanted to share that among the peripherals, which is what the Apple II did, what any slotted system generally does. Now you can buy a microprocessor and RAM and ROM in a single-chip micro for about $4. So giving each of the off-board peripherals its own little micro­ processor system is adding $5 to the cost of the peripheral. And the cost for providing them with the bandwidth that's needed for most of the peripherals that are not on this board is very low. Add a $5 bill to the peripheral, put a single-chip micro in it, and then talk serially, rather than have every single user pay an extra few hundred dollars for the price of the slots that may never get used. Atkinson: One way to look at the bandwidth thing is real simple: if there are 128K bytes, that's an eighth of a megabyte. There's 1 megabit in the machine, so the worst transfer you could think of, transferring the entire contents of the machine, takes one second. You transfer the entire contents of the Mac through that serial port in one second. BYTE: What are the serial connec­ tors? Jobs: There are two connectors, DB9s ... Atkinson: They're tricky. They can run anything from 300 baud on up; you can use them as R5-232C or RS-422A. Burrell Smith.

February 1984 © BYTE Publications Inc. 61 which are the most prominent, we just supply the cables. We also will supply cables from one of these things to a variety of DB-25s . . . for the modem version, the printer version . .. Atkinson: Lines 2 and 3 are switched on a modem versus a printer, so you just use a modem cable or a printer cable. BYTE: From a very early time you knew that you wanted to take advan­ tage of Lisa's software technology, and you also had the goal of making that possible at low cost. When did you have a consensus on exactly what this hardware would have to be to achieve that goal? Smith: In 1981 we started looking at the Lisa. I came up with a proposal that said it ends up costing $14 more .. .. to use a 68000 with 64K bytes of , · memory than it does with 6809-based · machines, if you count power supply. ·:. ·. .·, · ·., It turns out that it's actually easier to ·: ·. · .,. ·· interface memory to a 68000 than to ·· a 6809. So in January we started really · ·, looking at the 68000 and the work · . , that Bill was doing. · · ~ . ., In June of 1982 we finally decided . . on what we thought was enough •.• video. It turns out that the original . ,. machine had 384 by 256 pixels. We · , chose that because we thought we had a shot at squeezing the machine Jeny Manock . down into 64K bytes, and we didn't want to throwaway a quarter of the Jobs: Are you familiar with RS-422A? can go back into the lab and make_ memory just for the screen. BYTE: Just that it's a high-speed video digitizers and hard-disk inter­ Atkinson: The thing that drove us is serial standard. faces and things like that. When we the 80 columns. In a word processor, Smith: You can do point-to-point want the bandwidth, it will be there we really wanted the lines to break communications at very high speeds for the applications that we need to on the screen at the same place they with Mac without having to add, for support. break on the printer. There are two example, a fancy transmitter/receiver Jobs: Another thing is that you can kinds of word processors. There are thing. We realize RS-232C is an im­ run RS-422A twisted pairs, which the ones where you just have a string portant thing. It's sort of the industry means I can run these things for of characters and you see them how­ standard, and a lot of stuff talks that several hundred meters. I can string ever they wrap on the screen. Screen way, but we wanted to allow some­ lines if I have a laboratory and a com­ wrap is a function of the screen, and thing a little more whizzy. It turns puter on my desk, do whatever I how characters wrap on the printer out that RS-232C was created before want to do. They aren't DB-25s. We've is the printer's doing. Then there are the concept of a bidirectional pin was been living with giant connectors word processors where what you see invented, which hampers it with now for years but using only a few is what you get. You layout a line things like not knowing the sex of of the pins. So, again, we tried to save and you know it's going to break at devices and terminals . . .. It gets con­ a little bit of space in the back the same place on the printer as the fused as to whether they're com­ because the connector space we have screen, so you can do columns and puters or not. We wanted Mac to talk is limited. We tried to cut down the tabs and a couple of columns of num­ to those devices. We wanted to pro­ cost to the customers again, and so, bers. Then you have to have enough vide for the future so that, for exam­ for connecting to devices like printers pixels to generate a full printer line ple, if I ever get a spare moment, I and modems, which we offer and across. ' We thought we could do it

62 February 1984 © BYTE Publications Inc. The Wizards behind the Macintosh Bill Atkinson nearly had his Ph. D. in really believed that Mac was a product new machine called . His mom wor­ neurochemistry before he admitted to when Larry joined the Mac team. It was ried when he was offered a ride to the himself that his real love was computers. just a research effort, and there was some Homebrew Computer Club meeting with He "got a quick E. E." and started his own risk involved-would you still have your two scru ffij cha racters named Jobs and Woz­ company. He was happily minding his job in a few months? niak, but she gave in, and the rest is own business when his friend Jeff Raskin history. Chris spent a Christmas vaca tion asked him to come see what was happen­ Joanna Hoffman is still on leave from debugging Apple's BASIC in exchange for ing at Apple, which was th en six months her Ph . D. program in archaeology at th e a whole row of 4K-byte RAM chips, which old. Bill wasn't really interes ted, but University of Chicago. She has a back­ he th ought was a pretty good deal. He airplane tickets showed up in themail.so ground in anthropology, physics, and worked part-time during college writing he took a look. What he saw was "seve ral lingu istics. She came to Apple because of BASIC programs and reference manuals years reaching into the future" of anything Mac. After using her computer skills in the and signed on full-time when he gradu­ he could do where he was. He stayed to field of archaeology for so long, she was ated. He likes being in on the design write Apple's Pascal and later became Mr. tired of looking at the past and turned to process--!'If the machine is designed right User Interface for Lisa before he moved over the future. She was Mac's entire marketing in the first place, you don't have to write to the Mac team. department for more ' than a year. She a lot about it." wants to make Mac a tool that feels natu ral Andy Herlzfeld says, "Th e Apple II for international users bt) making it speak Jerrold C. Manock was a freelance changed my life." Th e computer people at their languages. product-design consultant with a Stanford Berkelelj were a little narrow-minded about education who finally joined Apple when letting a grad student really get into th e Burrell Carver Smith encountered the he saw that three-quarters of his billing computer as Andy wanted to. So he spent Homebrew Computer Club in 1975, got was to Apple anyway. He worked 011 th e nearly all the money he had in the world hooked 011 microprocessors, and moved to Apple II, th e Disk II, the III, and Lisa on an Apple II and had a computer he the Bay Area. Ju st riding around in a bor­ before design ing Mac. In Macintosh , he could con trol completely. He decided th e rowed truck one day, he saw Apple and says, "Th e outside matches th e inside in Apple was more interesting than his classes decided to drop in. Th e only job Apple had elegant simplicity." and began writing programs for magazines. available was in the service department, Wh en Apple bought one of Andy's pro­ repa iring Apple IIs. He took the job and Bruce Horn grew up at Xerox PARe, grams, Steve Jobs offered him a job, which fixed at least a thousand Apple II boards much th e same way Ch ris grew up at he took when he finished school. He and got involved in other projects before Jeff Apple, and later attended Stanford . Bruce worked on silent-type printers and Apple Raskin and Bill Atkinson recruited him for started working at Xerox when he was 14 III demos until a shake-up in his part of Mac . He talked th e Lisa engineers out of years old-he was one of the kids Xerox the company shook him loose. He looked some chips and stuff and got a prototype brought in to test Smalltalk . Turns out he around and decided to go with Mac. running over Christmas 1979. He was the was brighter than most and beca me a sys­ first full-time Mac person after Jeff Raskin. tems wizard who actually implemented Larry Kenyon arrived at Apple from Smalltalk on a variety of different pro­ Amdahl with a double degree in psychol­ Chris Espinosa says, "There was no cessors. Bruce is all of 23 years old now, ogt) and computer science. He was work­ life befo re Apple." At 13 years old he could but he spent seven years at Xerox PARC ing on Apple II1Apple III products when be fo und cruising up and down the bus line and brought Apple that perspective. th e same shake-up that shook Andy loose in his home town, spel1ding a few hours freed him, too. Andy asked La rry to join at each Byte Shop on th e line until th e George Crowe and David Egner th e Mac crew becau se he was one of the owner threw him out. He discovered the des igned th e analog board in the few people who understood the arcane art way to keep from getting thrown out was Ma cintosh. of making the Apple II work with printer to write demo programs for the machines, peripherals, and anybody who can do that so he wrote for whatever was lying Steve Capps assisted Andy Hertzfeld has to be good. No one in th e company around-Altairs, IMSA ls, 01' this weird with the systems software.

with 384, and we tried it with real live to mean? And we ended up with to run the applications. documents-and we couldn't do it. 128K and . .. Jobs: I just thought I'd show this to You could do it with 512, but you Atkinson: 22K bytes on the screen, you. This is the IBM video board; it's couldn't do it with 384. and in a 64K-byte machine you only video, nothing else. It's 69 inte­ Smith: The diagonal lines look better, couldn't have afforded it. That drove grated circuits, more chips than an too; the jaggies are removed some­ us to 16 RAM chips instead of 8. entire Macintosh, and it basically what, and things like that. So, with Hertzfeld: By then, we knew we does nothing. And it doesn't even do that, we said, OK, what's that going were going with 128K bytes anyway, that very well.

February 1984 © BYrE Publications Inc. 63 Espinosa: Forty percent more chips the disk is spinning, while the mouse "Gee, that's a good way of doing it;' than the Mac. . is moving, while it's making sound. and so we did. A lot of it was ex­ Jobs: So that sort of gives you a feel­ You know, all with that single board. perience on the Apple TI , knowing ing. And again, that just has the BYTE: What were the roots of that what was sort of bad there-what we video on it. Macintosh, in addition to operating system? wanted to do great here. That at least having video that's far higher in res­ Kenyon: When we started, of course, was the conception of the asyn­ olution and far faster, has a 32-bit we were looking at the work Lisa was chronous 1/0 . I knew from the Apple microprocessor, 128K bytes of RAM, doing, and the Lisa group was rolling II that when you make a disk request 64K bytes of ROM, two serial ports, its own operating system, and it just it waits there for a whole second, a the mouse, the serial, keyboard, and didn't seem appropriate. We took the million microseconds, just waiting for mouse interface, the incredible graphics software, which was perfect the disk to come up to speed. We sound, the clock calendar, the disk for our machine. should be able to do other useful controller ... Capps: The Lisa's operating system work while that's happening. On the Smith: We rolled the whole disk con­ took a lot of the user interface. For the Apple II if you want to make a beep, troller into one chip. window manager, even the memory the whole processor, the entirety of Herlzfeld: And it has Lisa's graphics manager, we started with what Lisa the machine, is devoted to making a and user-interface software built in­ had. beep. And when you've got all the to every board. Herlzfeld: It turns out that Quick­ horsepower of the 68000 there, you Jobs: Andy was sort of the software draw is built on top of what Lisa don't want to waste it all on making technical leader behind the project, would call the intrasegment memory sounds. from its inception. As Andy puts it, manager. You relocate little objects. Atkinson: We still make a beep with software sometimes stands on its We took that because Quickdraw re­ the processor. head to get rid of a chip in the hard­ quired that support, and we sort of Herlzfeld: But we time-slice the pro­ ware. And so, with a system as turned it into our system-wide mem­ cessor such that you can be doing powerful as this, we wanted.to take ory manager. Even the Lisa group other things. It happens on the inter­ advantage of all the features, for in­ uses it only for the intra-application rupt level instead of being dedicated. stance, in the serial chip and the disk memory . manager. Someone men­ Macintosh uses the processor for and stuff. We really wanted to be able tioned a neat way to do a file system, everything, just like the Apple II to have the serial ports reading while and we thought about it and said, does. In terms of the disk, we have

64 February 1984 © BYfE Publications Inc. Circle 270 on inquiry card. the same disk-controller architecture twice that would become an industry lion or two million computers a year, as the Apple II, but we are just a little standard ... at least an Apple inter­ which we intend to do, when' people more sophisticated in how we use in­ nal standard. So we built in a mode, are buying media from 10 different terrupts. We give the time back to the a high-speed mode, so that it can go sources and they expect to take disks applications while the I/O is going twice as fast . out that were recorded in Alaska in on. Atkinson: While you're getting input really cold weather and stick them in­ BYTE: Can you say more about the from the serial port at 19,200 bps, you to machines in Florida in a heat wave custom disk controller? can be writing to the disk and not and have them work, that margin is Smith: Sure. A long time ago we sort missing a beat. It's not the buffer really important. If you want to of figured that everybody who was that's doing that. It's Larry Kenyon. equate that to reliability, we are doing designs at Apple with disks Every 4 nibbles, you look to see if significantly more reliable than any loved what Woz [] had there's something on the port, other disk system on the market, done on the Apple II. I'll never forget, because in one sector's time, 24 bytes while having higher capacity. So that the first time I looked at the Woz con­ go by. was the key decision, to stick with troller I said, "OK. Well, this must be Jobs: After we reexamined every­ the same encoding format and the the interface disk controller. Where's thing, including the disk format, we same scheme that we've used since the disk controller?" I never found said, "Do we want to go to MFM 1978. So, while everyone else is run­ the disk controller. And we've just [modified frequency modulation]?" ning at roughly the same rates as Ap­ been in love with the way that that's And the more we reexamined it, ple II, the IBM PC, and everything done. It's used to modify group code. what became clear was that the else, we doubled it on Macintosh. We One of the things we knew, though, original idea that we had for a disk set a new internal standard with the was that disks would be going faster in 1978, which we are still using, is 31f2-inch disk and this new single­ in the future. So we initially designed great. chip controller. And every new 32-bit this chip so the whole company Atkinson: We get 400K bytes on this product a't Apple will use that new would be able to have an ultra-Iow­ thing, while most people get only standard. The media, the sector cost way of using Wozniak's disk 270. format on that media, the disk con­ technology for every product. But we Jobs: As an example, our scheme has troller, and the routines and every­ knew that we weren't just going to be twice the margin of MFM. In other thing to drive them is a new Apple going at 4 microseconds per bit, that words, when you're shipping a mil- 32-bit standard that you'll see com- S100 system integrators ... Integrand solves EMI problems!

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66 February 1984 © BYTE Publications Inc. Circle 183 on inquiry card. ing out in every future product that go at exactly the same speed by hav­ Jobs: And so, again, it gives you we do in that family. ing the software constantly monitor­ greater performance, because you Smith: There were some voices ing the speed and saying, "Ah, it's don't have to write only at special within the company that said, "Oh, running a little slow; jack it up a lit­ times and slow yourself down. It cuts you guys ought to go with standard tle bit;' so that each disk doesn't have the chip count way down because formats and things like that." We to be adjusted at all. You switch disk you don't need two banks of RAMs, looked at doing that and it turns out drives, and the new one will run at so the customer's not paying for these that it takes more chips to interface exactly the saine speed because you extra chips, and it just makes a more to a standard floppy-disk controller, force them all to. elegant product. and we have ... Smith: It turns out that the speed BYTE: How far does the similarity Jobs: Well, I can go get the IBM variations occur partly because you extend between the Apple II video floppy board. It looks to have about plug in a new cassette that loads the and the Mac's video? 45 to 50 chips on it ... motor down in a different way and Smith: We have a three-part mem­ Espinosa: I'll come and help you also because of temperature varia­ ory architecture on Mac. We have a carry it. tions that cause very long-term drifts DMA window for sound, video, and Jobs: ... including an LSI [large-scale in the disk speed. Using a little bit of CPU. .. shared by three devices. Also, integration] disk controller-far less the processor to fix that doesn't cost what we do that is a little more performance, far less capacity, far us arty performance at all on the sys­ sophisticated than Apple II is return higher cost. tem. memory cycles to the processor dur­ Atkinson: And less reliability. BYTE: What about the display elec­ ing horizontal and vertical retrace. Jobs: Oh, far less reliability. Larry's tronics? And with the analog design we're software senses the disk speed, and Atkinson: Where is the display con­ able to lengthen the horizontal Burrell's hardware can adjust to one troller? retrace interval, which gives us more of four hundred speeds. So if it's Hertzfeld: It's hidden. performance for graphics by making written on something that's a little Jobs: If you bite into that IBM display more time available to the processor out of whack, we can just adjust right board, it'll totally flicker if you do it from memory and giving the analog down to the necessary speed and at the wrong time. You've seen that, electronics more time to retrace the read it. Everything on the Macintosh right? Woz just came up with this beam. On the Apple II, Woz sort of board-the serial timing, the disk really brilliant way to do the Apple designed this logic board and the timings, the microprocessor timings, II. He realized that memory was power supply was kind of added. On the video timings, the sound tim­ about twice as fast as the micropro­ Mac, we really designed the entire ings-comes from one crystal oscilla­ cessor needed it and twice as fast as system as a complete system from the tor and is synchronized from one the video needed it. So he put the ground up, so we used different con­ source. And, again, it';; better, of microprocessor over here and he put straints. I would say there's not much course, technically to do it that way. in essence the video over here, and similarity. The great thing about Mac Everything works much better, but it he put some multiplexers in the as a product is that it really wasn't also saves parts, and we can offer this middle. He shared the exact same designed as just this piece over there thing cheaper to customers. And memory between the two in a way and this piece over there and this most of this stuff customers will such that this one thought it had all other piece ... All of it was designed never ever realize or care about any­ the memory all the time and this one in parallel, everybody knowing what way. I mean, who cares how many thought it had all the memory all the everyone else's job was. crystal oscillators you have? But you time, yet they shared the same mem­ BYTE: How did you decide on the do care about how big your computer ory! All this thing had to do was appearance of the machine? is. You do care about how much it write into certain memory locations Manock: Our goal in the beginning costs, and you do care about how and, magically, it would appear on was portability. We actually had this well it works. the screen. The microprocessor never cardboard model that looked amaz­ Atkinson: If you ever drop your com­ even had to think about the screen. ingly like the Osborne. And that was puter you find out quickly how many All it did was look at memory loca­ way before the Osborne came out. As crystal oscillators you have. tions. I said, portability was primary here, BYTE: So with the variable speed in Atkinson: And there was no way to and this version had an attached the disk drives, I guess there's no glitch the video because accesses keyboard that had a sort of rubber problem having two drives that are were mutually exclusive. boot around it that would fold up 3 percent different in speed. Jobs: Right. And so it turns out that, and give you protection over the Jobs: We read it and adjust it so that try as we might, we have never been screen. Steve really changed the em­ the speed is accurate relative to that able to find a better way to do it. phasis of the product one day when crystal. That crystal on the board is Atkinson: At the same time that the he said that we didn't want portabil­ superaccurate. We can adjust the disk processors have gotten faster, mem­ ity to be the primary aspect of this, drive relative to that superaccuracy. ory's gotten faster; the memory is still but we did want .it to take minimal Atkinson: You force all the disks to twice as fast as the processor. desk space. With that goal in mind,

68 February 1984 © BYTE Publications Inc. we realized that the keyboard didn't have to be exactly the width of the computer, Jobs: To use the earlier design you had to have some sort of arrange­ .,II(CHASING AGE ment to tilt it up, And what we noticed was, well, fine, what if you just lift the back up here like this? works for yOU! Then, because you have all this space underneath, you could put the floppy disk underneath. So you We can buy any microcomputer product for you from our 288 participating make a unit that's more vertical, has wholesalers. Here are the net prices on a few of the 7,000 products we can buy for a smaller footprint. you, acting as your purchasing agent. Atkinson: It has to be up enough so COMPUTERS COMPUTERS MONITORS PRINTERS Anos 580·1Q 4.199 Northstar Adyantage Amdok 300 G HI·Aes 130 Cume 11140 wllnl 1.395 your eyes can see it anyway; you 586·10 5.650 w/Dual Floppies 2.107 300 A HI· Res 145 II /SSw/ml 1.558 586·20 6.018 wl5 meg. 3.249 310A 165 TlIlly 160l. wl\raclor 569 586·14140 8.270 wl!S meg . 4.315 AGBII 450 IBOl. wllrac\or 784 need the height. Basls·108 2,146 309 8MC 12 ~ Green 65 Sput! 80 299 On8~!~~8f~3e2o . 256K 10.454 Klmlron 85 AH CALL Texas Instr. TI 810 basIc 1.323 Manock: Steve thought, too, I co~~~g~~A~OdbOUI ' 4.000 8002 MU 20. 512K 14.338 NEC 1201 154 Tl810LO 1.789 Sys. 816A' · 3.850 C5002A. 256K. 14M. 9.022 1203 536 TI855 799 think-in a gut reaction sort of way­ 5ys. 816A AAM 21' 4.075 Pled Pi per 995 1205 162 ToshIba P·1350. parallel 1,499 5ys. 816A RA M 21" 3.925 PMC Mlcromate 101 CALL 1260 115 P. 1350. senal 1.499 Sys. 816AH" 6,630 Saga IV. Low Profl1e 3.470 14 10RGB 780 Transler 130 693 that everybody was going low profile Sys. alsc RAM 21' 6.632 IV. w/DG meg. 5.385 Princeton AGB wicable 485 140 1. 199 Sys. 816C AAM 21" 6.470 IV. w/12 meg. 6. 123 Ouadram Ouadchrome 510 315 col01 549 and wide, and we never have wanted Sys. 816CH · · 9,211 IV. w/18 meg. 6.275 Sanyo 12 NG HI·Res 181 SY:3 . 8160 RAM 21' 10.324 Sanyo 1250 2.433 Tuan 12 ~ Amber 125 Sys. 8160 RAM 21" 10,052 4000 2.677 RGB3 499 PLOnERS to be a "me, too," I think our vertical 81608 RAM 17" 6.471 SeaUle Gaze lle. hard disk 5.970 USI 12 " AfTlber 155 Amdek. x·y 592 816 16 RAM 21 " 10.052 Te levldeo TS·802 2.525 Houston Inslr., OMP 29 1.778 format is correct when you think of 81668KRAM21' 6.632 TS·803 2.027 PRINTERS DMP40 771 • Completely Assembled Vector 4·20 3.637 Anadex 9501 1.300 DMP42 2.321 human factors. • 'Unassembled Components Zenith ZF .IOO·21 2.245 9620 1.399 H, .Pad 763 M·Orlvl·H 1,100 ZF· 110·22 2.712 9625A 1.515 Strobe M 100 461 CPU 68K 500 ZF·120·22 2.789 WP6000 2.599 M 260 772 Hoffman: Jerry, you might want to CPU Z. 6 Mhz 234 ZW· 11O·32 4.261 Brother. parallel. daiSY 695 Swee t P 573 RAM 21. 128K. 14 Mhz 788 ZW·120·32 4.339 C. lloh A 10·20 534 turn the back around, We made it RAM 22 , 256K 1,292 8510 Pro I. par . 379 Disk 2. Hard DIsk Contr. 500 HARD DISKS 8600 1.017 TERMINALS truly international. I think it's one of PragmatIc 20 meg . 2.990 F· 10. 40 cps. 1.050 Adds ViewpOint Al 445 Cameo CALL Pragmatic 40 meg. 4,686 F·l 0. 55 cps. 1.425 Viewpoint A3 + 499 Chblsworth 4200 3.340 Columbia Sys .. 2·320K 2.779 C 1·300. 300 Ipm. 4.295 Ampex Dialogue 80 amber 720 the few products aside from Lisa that Sys .. 12 meg. 4.119 Corvus. 6 meg .. wlo Inll. 1.629 Datsywr,ler 2000. 48K 1. 150 1.395 Ann Arbor Ambassador 1.355 Sys .. portable 2.390 Datasoulh OS ·1eo 1.150 C. Iloh 80A 1.016 Corona desktop, 2·320K 2.487 ~~c~~l ;O~e~ .nlv . 2.172 Diablo 620. 25 875 is completely usable anywhere you Pragmatic 10 meg. 2.445 10lE 1,278 desktop, hard disk 3.545 630 API 1.710 Hazeltine Espflt I 478 portable.2·320K 2,437 Santa Clara Sys, 10 meg. 1.970 Epson FX·aO 571 care to take it. Ta llgra ss TechnOlogy Esprl111 540 Eagle 1620 3.450 FX· 100 750 Oume OVT102A 542 1630 4.699 6meg. \,781 MX· 100 657 6 meg, wit ape 2.322 OVTl02G 538 Manock: Did you see the icons on PC·2 2.699 FlOrida Oal a OSP·130 3.700 Televl deo 914 555 PC·XL 3.448 20 meg. w/lape 3.097 GE(General Electric) CALL 35 meg. wIt ape 4.337 924 713 the back? Molecular SM 8 10 meg. 4,648 Gemini 10 309 925 715 70 meg. wllape 5.112 454 Morrow Micro 0, MO·2 1.341 15 950 905 Micro D. MO·3 1.585 IBM Inlerl ace 116 Go rilla Banana 199 Trantor 10 meg. 1.737 970 1.015 Hoffman: We started out with the Mi cro 0 , MD·ll 2.3 19 IDS Pri sm 132 all options 1,395 Visual 330G 932 Morrowrlte, NEC 2010 995 Wyse WY ,100 680 case and went from the outside in, MWI ,MPloo 1.856 IBM PERIPHERALS 3510 1.365 WY·200 1.020 MW1·MP200 2.243 7710 1.900 WY·300 1.020 Hayes 1200 8 Modem 449 499 MW1·MP300 2,44 1 8023 Zenith Z·29 635 trying to make it more and more in­ MW2·MP100 2.321 Keytronlcs 5 150 Keyboard 189 Okldol. 80 CALL MW2·MP200 2.596 PlantronlCS Color Plus CALL 82A CALL ternational the more we thought MW2·MP300 2.786 Quadllnk 549 83A CALL ACCOUNTING NEC APC·H01 2.088 84P CALL SOFTWARE APC·H02 2,544 MODEMS 84S CALL about it. And Jerry was just great as APC·H03 2.999 92P CALL Altos Accountant 1.899 APC·H04 2.699 Hayes 1200 499 92S CAL L CYMA. each module 750 soon as he realized that we really did APC·HI2 US Robotics Aula 212A 479 93P CALL Graham Dorian. ea. mod 420 Color GraptHcs 618 Password 349 93S CALL MBSt . each module 455 APC·H26, 10 meg. 2. 172 2350P CALL MIcro Computer want to bring it to the whole world, APC·WPS 1 4,534 DATABASE 23505 CALL Consultants. ea. mod, 450 APC·WPS2 5.013 2410 CALL Mlcrotax CALL He had marvelous ideas on how to APCWPD4 5.622 SOFTWARE Qantex 6000 P 1.086 Open Systems, ea . mad. 568 8801A.64K 947 Condor 111 437 7020 1.235 Structured Systems, 8831A. 2·320K 868 DBase II 450 7030 \.548 each module 735 eliminate every word of text, take 8881A. 28 - 1.575 Personal Pearl 199 7040 1.703 Systems Plu S 345 everything off the package so that we CALL US FOR YOUR NET PRICE ON ANY OF 7,000 OTHER PRODUCTS don't have to be an American product WE CAN BUY FOR YOU. anywhere that vye go, F.O.s. shipping pOi nt. Prices subject to change withou t notice. 6·84·2 Jobs: In Mac, there's no English on the outside of the case. Everything's iconic, And there 'is absolutely no English in the ROM. It is universal in nature. When the thing comes on it puts a few icons on the screen, If THE something goes wrong, it can't boot or something, it puts a frowning Mac PURCHASING on, If it's it puts a happy Mac on. It loads all the languages, all the AGENT, INC. country-specific stuff, off the disk. 574 Weddell Drive, Suite 5 So, because the keyboard is detach­ Sunnyvale, CA 94089 able and mapped anyway, to localize (408) 744-0646 Mac all you do is change the key­ Open Monday thru Friday, 8·5 PST board, manuals, and the disks_ Nothing in the box has to change.

70 February 1984 © BYI"E Publications Inc. Circle 306 on inquiry card , And another real breakthrough is this that this could really be a great thing look of those dialogue boxes, or any­ thing called Resources that Bruce for a lot of stuff. thing, through something called Horn invented. Herlzfeld: Another thing to ask Resource Editors. Herlzfeld: The data is factored out Bruce about is the Finder, which is Jobs: Otherwise, you'd have to get in­ from the code. You know, most pro­ our most important application, the to the source listing. You'd have to grams are a mixture of control logic first thing that comes up on the ma­ change not only the languages, as and just raw code. chine. That's the program with all the Joanna said, but also the geometries Atkinson: The virtual-memory archi­ little icons, the desktop manager, I of the dialogue boxes and make them tecture on the data parts of the pro­ guess we're calling it. That's Bruce's bigger. It would take you awhile; it's gram allows us to factor it out 1;)0 that, conception and communication. not something that's impossible, but without rewriting a program at all, it's something that never gets done. without recompiling or relinking the And it's certainly something that you program, I can take a copy of Mac 'In Mac, there's no have to be the originator of the pro­ Paint and in 15 minutes make a Ger­ English on the outside gram to do. What we've done by pull­ man version. of the case. ing all the language-specific stuff out, Herlzfeld: Because all the text is kept Everything's iconic.' through this beautiful mechanism in a well-known, well-defined place. called Resources, is write these other Horn: Until December, people didn't programs called Resource Editors. By really know what the resource Hoffman: There are numerous running a Resource Editor, you manager was, because they really subtleties with this. Picture a could, if you knew German, simply hadn't had any contact with it, dialogue box, for example. A run a program on the program, get besides me. I knew what I wanted dialogue box, when you put English in there-literally on the screen-and from it because I had to do Finder text in German, starts overflowing its just stretch the boxes bigger. You and all that other stuff. Andy just limits and starts looking very dif­ could select a text and retype it in looked at it over time and figured out ferent. You have a button that says, German and move things around if what you could do with it. And I was "Put this away." In German, that you wanted. You can examine every trying to say, well, this can do this takes a paragraph and overflows the icon, every dialogue box, every alert and this ... It was really Andy having box .. . . But Resources lets us change box, every pull-down menu, every­ the biggest view of the system saying not only the text but also the physical thing, without being a programmer,

PLAIN TALK. TESTIMONY ''PortaPac™?,, Contrary to popular belief, PortaPac'· is not Here's how some of our customers are using their something you take with you camping. PortaPac PortaPac ... is a portable data container with multiple uses. • Transferring manuscripts prepared on Osborne Have you ever tried taking 50 pages of notes or to IBM and Xerox systems manuscripts with you on the road, on business calls? Well, that's how much you can put in a • As a portable storage device for the Tandy model P2064 PortaPac that measures 4 inches by model 100 computer 9 inches .. That's approximately the size of 2 packs • Demonstrate hardware with demonstration of cigarettes. Except PortaPac is thinner - it 's package stored in PortaPac only 1 inch thick. And what about versatility? • Transferring information between NorthStar PortaPac uses the industry standard RS232C Advantage, Morrow Design Micro Decision, communication protocol. No more worries or fuss and DEC PDP 11 machines about single density, double density, soft sector, 10 • As a replacement for floppies on machine tools hard sector, 16 hard sector, and other mumbo control computers jumbo disk formats. PortaPac can functio~ as data terminal equipment, i.e., similar to your ter­ • The list just goes on and on . . . minal, or as data communication equipment, i.e., AND HERE'S MORE ... similar to your computer or modem. Or, if you like, it can be put in line between your terminal Our model P2064F is a dedicated version of the and your computer. Totally transparent. Mainte­ model P2064. Once started, it will always retain nance? There is virtually none. All you do is the last 64K characters of information passing change the battery when the low battery light thru it. Put it inline between your computer and comes on - every 1 to 5 years depending on the terminal. No more cussing because you just lost model! What's more, your PortaPac ,automati­ the last 4 hours of work doing data entry when the cally retains its contents when power goes out. power went out or the diskette went bad . What can Porta Pac do for you, yo u ask? How AND AN ADDED BONUS ... about transferring information (including pro­ The PortaPac can function as a printer buffer! So grams) between computer systems? At 19,200 sus­ now you can take the PortaPac to a high speed tained rate! No more staying up all night just to serial printer and get your reports quick! Again get your data reliably thru the modem at 1200 and again if you wish . baud. How about taking it with you on sales calls? Display your information on the client's computer Want to know more? Write or call us and we'll or terminal, turn around and enter orders into send you additional information. Pronto! PortaPac for later processing. And what about your customer engineers? How about putting ~I Cryptronics, Inc. your diagnostic program in the PortaPac, and download it into the computer? The uses just go 11711 Coly River Circle, Suite 7 on and on ... Fountain Valley, CA 92708 Phone: (714) 540-1174 PortaPacN Is a trademark of Cryptronics, Inc.

72 February 1984 © BYTE Publications Inc. Circle 98 on Inquiry card. without getting the source code, and -that are world standards. Where And then the third thing is what very quickly, too, using the user in­ we didn't have symbols that existed, Burrell and Larry and Andy and the terface of the Macintosh. we used the lEC's closest symbol as other software people have done. Atkinson: Anything that XYZ soft­ best we could and then added what When we shipped the· Apple II, we ware company put together, even we thought made sense. For example, fundamentally shipped about 2K though the company didn't think we needed a symbol for a modem, so bytes of ROM with system code. The about Taiwan, will run in Taiwan. we started with lEC's telephone sym­ IBM system's got 8K bytes, but it's Jobs: But do we want it to run in bol. We tested them to make sure really kind of loose as a goose; it's Taiwan? there was good recognition. We'll about 4K bytes by our standards of BYTE: Are you going to market it ag­ submit these new icons to the IEC to code. Mac has 64K bytes of the tight­ gressively in Japan? have it suggest that they be the stan­ est, most elegant code that this com­ Jobs: Yes. dards added to its encyclopedia of pany's ever written. Most of the com­ Herlzfeld: My favorite thing about symbols. puters now are basically shipping a Resources, being selfish, is that the BYTE: What is this machine going to file system and a few drives, but same facilities that allow us to trans­ make possible that other comparably what's really interesting is that on top late English into 7, 10, 20, a million priced machines have not made pos­ of that, we've layered on memory different languages are the same sible? How will it change the per­ management and on top of this is facilities we use to translate technish sonal computing scene? Quickdraw. to English in the first place. Jobs: Right now, as you know, when Jobs: Mac's a completely open ma­ Hoffman: The other component of you use a word processor, it will do chine-we've got a book called Inside this is that it allows us to not just in­ two or three things. The first thing Macintosh that tells all the secrets of troduce products that feel to the Macintosh will do is make the exist­ it. But we're going to try to get a lit­ native user like a native machine, ing types of applications an order of tle uniformity through the carrot natural to them, but also that we can magnitude easier and more ap­ rather than the stick. And the carrot start coming very close to making proachable for people. Therefore the is that there's a finite amount of RAM simultaneous product introductions. available market for this machine is in this machine, and we've done all The software that is developed in the going to be giant compared to the these things for you in ROM. Now, U.S. can fly over there for them, for available market for the people who you can do them yourself, there's the fragmented markets in Europe, are willing to invest 40 to 100 hours nothing that says you can't do them for example. Europe does not allow learning to use their computers. yourself, but if you do, you've got to for the same kind of development of That's the first thing. write them, which is going to take software houses as the U. S. because The second thing is that there are time and means you're going to be the markets are all so fragmented you going to be new types of applications slower to get to market; you've got to can't amortize development of the available that could not be available chew up precious RAM space, and software over as large a user base. But on the current generation of personal the chances are pretty good that we given that the Europeans now have computers-it is technically impos­ did a better job than you'll do. So the capability of using a localized, sible to do. The perfect example is we're going to try through the carrot globalized software, if you will, their Paint. Paint is impossible to do on an to get a little bit of uniformity in the market grows because each in­ Apple II or an IBM PC or any of the user interface in some of the ways the dividual software developer in France other first-generation products. You things are done. now can view the whole world as a can do a mockery of it, but you can't Hertzfeld: See, we're really a 192K­ market. We feel that it will give an im­ really do it. And there are going to byte machine, and if the program­ petus to the development of software be lots of applications like that. mers want to throwaway 64K, then developers, third parties, in Europe, You've seen Lisa Project. That, of they're doing a dumb thing. and in more fragmented markets as course, will be running on Mac. And Jobs: We're a 192K-byte machine that well . we don't even know the kinds of ap­ deep-freezes 64K. Smith: An international power sup­ plications that are going to come out Hertzfeld: Highly tuned, tested, de­ ply, too, so the exact same unit basic­ in six months to a year. As an exam­ bugged, highly compact, very fast, ally can be used anywhere in the ple, we'll be able to laser-print output very high-quality consistent code. world. from this thing by next June, and that BYTE: What are all the factors in this Egner: It doesn't care whether it's is pretty exciting to us. So, if we sell that make it go so fast? 50-Hz input. these on a university campus, you'll Hertzfeld: Sweat. Manock: Just one additional thing on be able to take your disk into the li­ Jobs: Burrell, Andy, Larry, Bill-how these: the icons on the back are from brary and get output off a laser long did you work on Quickdraw? the International Electrotechnical printer, which will be approaching Atkinson: Four years. Commission (1EC). We didn't invent typeset quality. That's the kind of Hertzfeld: All of us care a lot about all these ourselves ...wherever pos­ stuff we're doing; you just can't do performance. Surprisingly, that's sible we used symbols that already that on a current-generation personal unusual. A lot of people don't care if existed-for example, AC line power computer. their system's . ..

74 February 1984 © BYTE Publications Inc. Atkinson: Like Quickdraw. I won't tion to figure out what's the most im­ where they don't have enough per­ even count the first runs in Pascal, portant thing. This little baby, the formance. And then you go back and but the first runs in assembly lan­ 68000, has sixteen 32-bit registers sit­ you measure, measure, measure, guage were running 160K bytes, ting there, and the way you get per­ measure, Optimization without mea­ before I added a lot of the new fea­ formance out of that is to keep them suring is wasted time, Find out tures. It's now down to 24K bytes full. Keep the registers full of impor­ where the application's really spend­ with lots more stuff in it. Character­ tant stuff all the time, That's the way ing time and go whump on that drawing speed is one you look at for you make this processor sing, So you code, And any other cases they're drawing an arbitrary size character, go down and you do register alloca- very seldom using, squeeze them an arbitrary starting pixel clipped to down in size, and stretch the other an arbitrary area. We were running, 'Optimization without ones, There's always a trade-off be­ when it was being developed on Lisa, measuring is wasted tween size and speed. Stretch out the about 1000 characters per second the time. Find out where common cases, let them be bigger first time. Well, I got that up to 4000. and much faster, and then keep the Mac is running about 7000. That's the application's really generality by squeezing down the in­ seven times 9600 baud. This is typical spending time and go frequent cases, So play your odds, of all of our software packages here. whump on that code: People draw characters in OR mode You go through, get the best algo­ a whole lot, and OR mode is about rithms first, get the stuff right. Then , tion, and then you don't stop, Then twice as fast as the other modes, so crunch it down, make a first pass in you feed it back, you get your people 9S percent of all characters are drawn Pascal, get the algorithms right, find to use it, in OR mode, Statistical measuring of the cleanest algorithms, find all the Quickdraw was designed by "pull" the use of the thing allows you to get corners, and make sure they're from applications rather than "push" much more performance on your tested. Then I translate it into loose from the design team. You provide a average throughput than you can if assembly language to get down into facility, watch the applications group you don't go back and measure, assembly language and get it work­ try to use it, understand where they r think we all believe that system ing. Then I'll go through and get all misunderstood something-maybe software should be done in assembly the bugs out again, and I'll go you've got a bad model, you want to language at this stage of the game through and do fine register alloca- make it simpler and cleaner-or because high-level languages can't & ~ D SANYO SUPER_S~Y..,;;,.ST,;;"";;;E;.;,,,;.M..;.;:;S_U-.. ____ ~ A":J'5 SA:~~~~t~50 $1195 SA~~~.~.~55 $1525 11! .~t..! SANYO GREEN MONITOR • SANYO GREEN MONITOR ~ \ ·• GEMINI 10 X • SOFTWARE • • GEMINI lOX • SOFTWARE. Son ya MBC-550 Si ngle Drive Computer' Sonya Sonya MBC-5 55 Dual Drive Computer' Sonya R ~ CRT-36 M onitor· Star M icro nics Gemini lOX · CRT-36 M onitor . St ar Micronics Gemini lOX . ~ ,..[ Cabling. WordStar· CaleSta r • Ea sywriter · Cabling. WordStar· CaleStor. SpeliStar' InfoStar ~~ ~~!S ~ MS-DOS ' Sonya Basic ' • Mail Merge' Easywriter. MS-DOS. Sonya Basic •

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76 February 1984 © BYTE Publications Inc. give you the performance and the totally new architecture for display­ ably doesn't. If we'd written this in code density that you can get out of ing things to the user. Pascal, we would have been able to assembly language. Atkinson: But the responsiveness is fit a fourth as much code in the ROM BYTE: So far, it has seemed that with where the code goes. or would have to have four times the all the systems that have mice, all Jobs: The responsiveness and the fact ROM, and you wouldn't have had those that are on the market, you pay that there isn't a mouse-based system the performance. Because we're go­ a great price in terms of performance out yet that uses a 68000. We're ob­ ing to sell 10 million of these things to get ease of use. viously using the power of the 68000 in the long run, it pays to super­ Atkinson: You make a responsive in addition to this code. handcraft it; we only have to do it system; it isn't just draw some char­ Smith: There are some tricks we once. Every time these ROMs are acters out there. It's also, remember played in the hardware, too. For ex­ burned, it doesn't cost us any more where you put them because if the ample, we knew that the ROMs engineering .. .it's all been done up guy touches on them you want to would have real important things in front. light them up. There's a lot more guts them. So we made the ROMs sort of Capps: Because we cared enough to in that application. read-only cache memory, whereas do it as well as we possibly could. Jobs: It's not just systems that have the RAM has to contend with video Jobs: We took a 12K-byte Pascal pro­ mice. What's happening is there are and sound for access, so we cut that gram running on a Lisa and we said a whole bunch of things that go with down to the bare bones, but the code we want to do this in 2K and make the mouse. It's not just hanging a that's in ROM, like Bill's graphics and it faster. But we had that extra year mouse on a first-generation personal the other stuff, can run as fast as you to do that. And we also had the computer and using the same old, can run a 68000. motivation, of course. fixed-pitch text and things like that, Jobs: If you look at the really great Atkinson: When you're writing as­ just replacing four cursor keys. What applications, even on first-generation sembly, you know each instruction is we've done here is take a quantum personal computers, most of them going to take 2 microseconds, it's go­ leap, where, in addition to having the are written in assembly language­ ing to take 4 bytes of memory. In mouse be the major pointing device, Visicalc, 1-2-3-it's like if you're going Pascal, you're removed from that, so we've gone to full proportionally to sell a million of something, it pays you don't concentrate on perfor­ spaced fonts, totally software-painted to handcraft it in assembly. If you're mance as much. When I'm doing I/O on the screen, any size, any shape ... going to sell 10 of something, it prob- stuff in assembly language I look at Quality you expect, at aprice you don't. BECK DOUBLE DENSITY DISKETIES SINGLE SIDEDS219jS2 79 DOUBLE SIDED Our message to you is simple. If you like 5'/4/1 flexible diskettes. The only major the quality of Dysan, Verbatim, 3M, et ai, ea ea difference is cost. We're less expensive. you'll like the quality of Beck soft sector • • .' In fact, a lot less expensive. Why does Beck cost less? _ What about quality and reliability? Our philosophy is: Excellent quality and reliability, at a cost -~ . 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the theoretical maximum speed you one reason to do it was that I didn't Less can run at. Why not do it as fast as want to write the system code until you can possibly do it? Especially I was good at writing 68000 pro­ for Your when you're doing disk I/O stuff. grams. So I just wanted to learn by How fast can you get into an inter­ having fun, and the other reason is Money rupt and out? that it gets people excited about it. BYTE: Andy, let's talk about the ear­ Just this raw hardware sitting there If you do word processing on your , you ly days, after it had become doesn't do too much, but once you probably know that there are Macintosh. start making this fun thing happen many programs for sale to help Hertzfeld: I don't know, there's and that fun thing happen, the ex­ you with your spelling. But the biggest spelling error you'll ever something that makes a job a little citement starts getting generated. You make is paying too much for your more fun to work on when the odds get to attract other good people, and spelling correction software. The are against you. And that's sort of one by one we picked up on more Random House ProofReader gives you less for your money - how it was in the early days. I was and more people. We were very, very less trouble, that is, and fewer maybe the fifth or sixth person to selective; it was very hard to find spelling errors. The Random come work on it. Steve took me over people to work on Mac software, House ProofReader is based on the world famous Random House to this little building separate from because on one hand we had the Dictionary. It contains up to everywhere else, where there were very high goals of doing this re­ 80,000 words, depending on these incredibly great people work­ search, Xerox PARC-like stuff with your disk capacity. You can add new words with the touch of a ing on this little wire-wrap PC board. uncommon, high technical stan­ key. It shows you the error and All it could do when you turned it on dards. On the other hand, we had a the sentence it's in. It instantly was write "hello" on the screen about very inexpensive, limited-memory suggests corrections. It even re­ checks your corrections. And it 80 times. And everyone was in­ machine. So all the Xerox PARC-type costs half as much as other credibly excited to see it write "hello" guys who came and interviewed programs with far less power. The on the screen because it meant that Random House ProofReader is said, "Oh, you don't have 2 mega­ compatible with all CP/M 2.2®, the central processing unit was there bytes? Forget it, I don't want to work MS-DOS® and IBM Personal and all that potential was there to be on this thing." They're all used to Computer® systems. mined. I spent my time mining that their Dorados. But gradually we potential. found great people like Larry and The very first time we got an early Bruce who were turned on by the version of Quickdraw running, and dream, and they came and joined our we got the mouse going-that'S just band, and I guess we reached critical an incredible thrill. Or getting back mass. the first PC board-we all went out Atkinson: Most of the early people for pizza on Friday night. We got the were recruited from Apple .. . and we boards in about four o'clock Friday have a pirate's flag that we sometimes afternoon, and Steve said, "Well, if put on the roof. The idea is we're you get these done before midnight, pirates and we go around and try to we'll take you for pizza," and we steal the best we can from anywhere stayed there ... not because we we can get it, and mostly that's been wanted the pizza, but because we from Lisa. A lot of it's been from Lisa, wanted to see that board working. but it's true in initially putting to­ And I think that none of our Mac PC gether the team, too; we try to get the boards have ever had to have a wire best people we can from anywhere in run to fix something, which is pretty the company. amazing. That's the attention to detail Hertzfeld: One of the slogans Steve that you just can't get people to do came up with when we had a retreat for money. We do it for love . . . this is in January was "Let's be pirates;' the the most important thing in our lives idea being that we were mavericks ... to make that great computer. out to blow people's minds and over­ It's fun for me because I like oper­ turn standards, create new standards, ating on a systems program where I not do things like everyone else. For o rders or information, see your can operate in an environment where Atkinson: There was always the thrill local d ealer or call 505-281-3371. Master card and VISA accepted. Or write . there's not that much support. In the that this was going to be the one proj­ Random Ho use ProofReader, Box 339- B, early days when I first started here, Tijeras, NM 87059. Please enclose $50 ect that was probably the most amaz­ and specify your computer model, the first thing I did was corne in and ing thing you were going to be do­ disk size and memory. write all kinds of crazy demos, ing in your life. Ra ndo m H o u s t: and t he Ho use desig n art: registered t rade m a rK s o f Ra ndom Ho use, Inc. C P/ M is a reg is ­ stretching things around on the tere d trademark o f D ig ital Researc h , In c IBM a nd IBM Herlzfeld: And the other slogan was Persona l Computc r a re rCJ;l:i s ttc' red trad e m a rks of screen and making balls bounce, and Inte rnatio n a l Busi ness Mac h ines, Inc MS-DOS is a "The journey is the reward.". regis te red trade mark o f Mi crosoft, Inc 80 February 1984 © BYTE Publications Inc. Circle 398 on inquiry card."""