Macintosh's Other Designers, Byte, August 1984
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he Apple Macintosh computer has attracted got so excited that I told the program I was Three original so much attention that it's curious so little in at school-a fairly prolonged M.D. program designers Thas appeared on the formative days of the with a Ph.D. in neurophysiology-that I wanted development project. To set the record straight. BYTE to take a year off. or maybe more. Finally they discuss the West Coast Editors John Markoff and Ezra Shapiro let me take the year off with the option of go- intewiewed three of the original members of the Macin- ing back. When I got here Jef's group was made up earliest davs* tosh design team: lef Raskin, ~udTribble, and Brian Howard. (The fourth member was hardware designer of Jef.Brian, myself, and Burrell Smith. I think Burrell Smith.) flue of the three left Apple before the Joanna IHoffmanl joined just after I did. Macintosh was introduced; Tribble switched to a new Burrell had already mocked up a Macintosh BY JOHN MARKOFF career in medicine, and Raskin started his own wm- compyter. It consisted of a 6809 processor, AND EZRA s~~p.1~0puny, Information Appliance Inc., in Palo Alto, Califor- 64K bytes of memory, and a screen linked to nia. However, their recollections of the development ef- an Apple 11, and you could download pro- fort provide an interesting perspective on the Macin- grams into it. Jef had written down his exten- tosh as a product. sive ideas about what it should look like in the end and some ideas about user interface. My first order of business was to just get this thing BYTE: We thought we wuld start by asking each of to be able to assemble and cross-assemble you to introduce yourselves and to te!l about your role on the Apple 11, to get a basic BlOS or oper- in the Macintosh project. ating system up on the machine, and also to HOWARD: I'm Brian Howard. and 1 joined the worry about other kinds of things-whether Macintosh project almost in its infancy to help it should have a modem, include serial inter- out with documentation and publications for faces, and what kind of mass-storage device it. Since it turned out that there wasn't much it should have. to write about in the early days, I started to 1 was very impressed with the amount of help Burrell Smith build all the original pro- work already done, -before even having a totypes and to document the hardware, and machine, in deciding on a philosophy for the I more or less stayed on in the hardware vein. machine. I was also impressed with the caliber TRIBBLE: My name is Bud Tribble or Guy Pib- of that core group, especially Burrell. ble. depending on what city you know me in. BYTE: Who put the Book of Macintosh together? I knew people at Apple for a long time, Jef RASKIN: I think I wrote almost all of it. Macin- [Raskinl before Apple, and Bill Atkinson down tosh started out as my dream of what a per- at UCSD. I heard from lef that he was work- sonal computer might be. I was already think- ing on a new project at Apple; specifically, he ing about it at UC San Diego back in the early was starting up a research section at Apple, seventies when I developed the "flow lan- and that he had some interesting ideas for guage," a language that was so simple that it making a computer that was different from had no error messages at all; it was impos- what had been on the market previously. sible for a user to make a syntactic or seman- Since I was interested, I came down and talked tic mistake. Students loved learning program- to him. He showed me a big notebook that ming on it. Working on that and other projects was the Macintosh Document, which had been had taught me that one could do things more worked on by Brian and lef. simply than had been done and that com- BYTE: What year was it? puters had a long way to go before they were TRIBBLE: I think it was 1980. pleasant to use. RASKIN: Sounds about right. We already had (continued) the Book of Macintosh at that time-400 pages. ........................................... R TRIBBLE: And it was an extensive description Ezra Shapiro (McGraw-Hill, 425 Battery St., &I of a cheap, user-friendly machine that went Francisco, CA 941 11) is BYTE'S West Coast bure beyond what was the state of the art then (the chief. John Markoff (1000 Elwell Court. Palo Alb Apple 11) in terms of a personal computer. I CA 94303) is a BYTE senior technical editor. BYTE WEST COAST What I wanted with Macintosh was a BYTE: What's the other side? In what sense low price, I wanted it to be all in one is Macintosh a departure from what was being piece with no connecting cables, a done and thought of at PARC? . minimum number of parts, and a mini- RASKIN: Theirs was all based on Small- mum number of interconnects so that talk and had a different model of what it would be highly reliable. Brian and I the user interface wourd look like. 1 built many cardboard inodels and did thought they had a lot of good ideas. dozens of drawings. So if the fact that The difference between Apple and it's two pieces is one of the great suc- PARC is that Apple was designing things cess factors, it's certainly not from to be sold in large quantities and PARC something that I can take any credit for. designs things to play with. While they I also wanted it to have a mono- weren't concerned with questions of chromatic screen that could be bit- production. I very much was. mapped, rather than a character BYTE: Why did you initially settle on the 6809 . generator. microprocessor? As a matter of fact, when I started RASKIN: It's a very pleasant micropro- working at Apple, the Lisa was a char- cessor. It seemed like it would be avail- acter-generator machine and I was the able in great abundance. It's much, only voice saying it should be bit- much cleaner, and it doesn't segment mapped, and I convinced the crew memory into 2 56K-byte parcels. working on it. I guess I was also this Photo 1: Brian Howard TRIBBLE: Bill Atkinson was heavily in- disembodied voice that changed it from volved with developing QuickDraw and a three-button mouse to a one-button and Macintosh technology come in some sort of working on the Lisa project. While I was mouse at Apple-that was a big fight. straight line from inside the corporate sanctum working on the 6809. writing software Macintosh was started very close to of Xerox PARC [Palo Alto Research Center]. to run on a bit-mapped screen, he was the time Lisa was. Wo totally separate RASKIN: Yes and no. I always thought developing this neat bit-blit software to tracks. that Babbage and lbring and Van do characters and graphics on the Lisa BYTE: 'ha separate philosophies? Neumann hadn't gone quite far enough screen on the 68000. HOWARD: Actually. I think Lisa had in generalizing the idea of a computer. 1 realized that in terms of the cost of been worked on in some form for I remember clearly enunciated-sort of the machine, the microprocessor is a almost a year. the ?Irringprinciple-that memory could small percentage; it didn't make sense RASKIN: But it was a very different hold anything. A symbol is a symbol to limit ourselves to the 6809, and if we machine then. and you can interpret it in different could use the 68000, we [also]could HOWARD: It was going to be a bitslice ways. But then at PARC they had clever- take advantage of a large portion of the piece of hardware. They were going to ly gone on to generalizing the screen. software that was out for Lisa. I was do a Pascal p-machine chip set. Any point is the same way as any other thinking of lower-level things like the TRIBBLE: Since Jef was on the initial point. Characters just happen to be one QuickDraw software. This represented user-interface committee for Lisa, he kind of picture we can generate. The a major investment; I didn't want to do was putting in his ideas, and at the same keyboard is the same way. it over again for the 6809. time he was managing the initial Macin- One of my first thoughts was that 1 also figured out that the project tosh project. Macintosh should be the most absolute- simply could not be done fast enough RASKIN: One thing I strongly believed ly general machine that you could con- on a 6809. 1 got together with Burrell was that Lisa was much too large and ceive at that price, so that you could do Smith and said, "Can you hook up a expensive a machine for a company of anything on it you could do with any machine with only 64K bytes of mem- Apple's style and type. Usa was definite- machine with that amount of hardware. ory:' which is what the Macintosh was ly headed toward the business market. I tried for over a year to get Steve Jobs supposed to have then, "and run with and I thought that it was a severe to see what they were doing at PARC the 68000?" That was kind of a trick mistake to make a machine that would, because I felt that they were at least because 64K bytes done on a 64K-bit in price and capability.