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| The Original Macintosh |
Anecdotes about the development of Apple's original Macintosh computer, and the people who created it. (119 stories) 
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Bob Belleville: (14 stories)
 The Grand Unified Model (1) - Resources
The creation of resources
Date: December 1981
Author: Bruce Horn
Topics: Software Design,Origins,Technical,User Interface
Comments: 7
Rating:  (4.10)
 magine the challenge: designing and implementing a brand new, graphical user interface, operating system, and core applications for a small personal computer to compete with the IBM PC. That's what we were going to do with the Macintosh.
The year was 1981, and I had just graduated from Stanford University. The past eight years I had spent as much time as possible working in the Learning Research Group at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. PARC was the place where everybody who was anybody in computer science wanted to go work, or at least visit. And I had just decided to leave PARC to join Apple (see Joining the Mac Group) .
I was used to working on Altos and Dorados, powerful workstations with bitmapped displays, mice, networking, and the most advanced software development system of the time, Smalltalk. These machines had lots of memory, at least 3MB of fast disk storage (remember, this was 1981), and were very fast. To build one of the Altos cost over $15,000, and Dorados much more. At Apple, the Macintosh was going to be a much more limited machine, with a tiny bitmapped display, no hard disk, and a mere smidgen of memory. It would have to be able to be built for under $1000 if we were to compete with the IBM PC and other personal computers of the time. And we were going to try to build a graphical user interface and operating system that would work acceptably on an 8Mhz 68000 microprocessor.
Fortunately, I had worked on a 8086-based system at PARC, the NoteTaker (see Joining the Mac Group) , so I knew what the limitations of small systems were. Still, I was used to the Smalltalk user experience, and wanted to do whatever I could with the Finder to approach the friendliness, flexibility, and ease of use that Smalltalk provided.
Smalltalk was an integrated object-oriented language and programming environment, decades ahead of its time. The class library (one of the first of its kind) was extremely sophisticated, with high-level frameworks for interface support, windowing, and graphics. Programming in Smalltalk was (and still is, in many ways) unlike any other system; making changes to code was fast and easy, and the turnaround time was very short, since the system incrementally incorporated changes as you made them. I was spoiled by the availability of well thought-out class library code that could be leveraged, and by the flexibility and ease with which new code could be written and existing code changed.
But now I was facing a new reality. Macintosh programs would be written in assembly code and Pascal, in a traditional edit-compile-link-debug cycle, and the dynamic nature of a system like Smalltalk was nowhere to be found. And my project was to be the Finder, the program that every Macintosh user would interact with to organize and manage their files, folders, and applications, which would be the "face" of the Macintosh.
The rigid nature of traditional programming bothered me. The idea of an application frozen in code, with no way to change anything dynamically, was anathema to my ideals. I wanted to be able to change as much as possible at runtime. Of course, the application code itself couldn't be changed, but what could be changed without having to recompile the code? The Finder, in particular, was going to need to maintain dynamic information about the files on the disk, and their relationships to the programs that created them and some of this information, such as a program's application and document icons, would have to be extracted from the program itself. How would this information be stored?
Alan Kay always said that any problem in Computer Science could be solved by adding another level of indirection. I thought that if we could refer to the program *data* separately and indirectly -- the strings, bitmaps, window and dialog layouts, and other non-code information -- we could make it possible for this information to be changed by people who would not have access to the source code. These people -- translators, artists, and designers -- would be able to change the text strings (to translate menu items from English to Norwegian, for example), modify the application and document icons, and replace graphical elements in the program, if the program were written such that these items were factored out of the application.
The ability to easily localize applications and the operating system would be novel, especially in the early 1980's. None of the systems that I had used, including Smalltalk, had this ability; it was just assumed that everybody using the system would be English-speaking, and that other countries would be building their own systems. If the Mac were able to be released in other countries, with menus, icons, dialogs, dates, and sorting orders translated to different languages, it would make a big improvement in our potential market share. I can't even remember when I started to recognize that the localization ability was necessary; it was a meme (probably started by Joanna Hoffman) that infected us all in the Mac group.
I figured that the Mac should provide this facility for all developers as a part of the User Interface Toolbox: a way to both provide for factoring out non-program data to make it easy to write modifiable applications, as well as manage memory on a fine-grained basis, object by object. Thus the idea for Resources was born.
Resources
The Resource Manager was a solution to several problems: managing dynamic data for the Finder; factoring out localizable information (strings, icons, and so on) from applications, and finally, managing memory use as frugally as possible. The Mac had relatively little memory, only 128K, for both the system and whatever application was running. The floppy drive was only 400K, and would have to store the system, applications, and documents, so anything that could reduce the amount of space required, by sharing data, would have a big impact. Graphics were notoriously memory-hungry, and the Finder, in particular, would have to juggle icons, swapping their bitmaps in and out of memory as required. The Resource Manager would have to handle each of these small entities separately. Thankfully, I knew of a similar system in Smalltalk, an object-oriented virtual memory called OOZE that was designed by Ted Kaehler, that swapped objects in and out of main memory as required. This was my inspiration for the Resource Manager. Find out more about OOZE here
.
Like OOZE, the Resource Manager maintained objects in a resident object table, called the resource map. A resource file was the on-disk representation of the resources. Resources would be typed: a menu object would be of type MENU, and a text string would be of type TEXT. Resource types were four bytes, to fit within a single 32-bit word as well as to be somewhat human-readable. All resources would have a resource ID, unique within the type domain of the resource file, and any resource could also be named, for the convenience of the programmer.
As it happened, our memory manager provided a mechanism that the Resource Manager could leverage for in-memory storage of a resource object: the handle. A handle was a relocatable block of memory, referenced by an indirect pointer (a pointer to a pointer). To allow resources to be purged from memory, blocks could be reclaimed, releasing memory for other uses, while maintaining the original indirect pointer which would then point to a nil value, indicating that there is no block of memory reserved. This allowed objects to be referenced by unique handles whether or not they were currently in memory, greatly simplifying the task of managing dynamically-loadable objects.
I wanted to make sure that we could leverage resources throughout the system, but with maximum flexibility. I felt that it was important that there be a mechanism for system resources to be overridden by the application, and for application resources, in turn, to be overridden by the application's open documents. We could then have documents that carried their own fonts, images, and so on; applications with application-specific resources, such as (again) fonts and images; and system resources that would be shared by all applications. So, resource files would be linkable, staging resource lookup: searching first the document, then the application, and finally, the system.
One of my faults as a software designer is that I seem to try to solve the biggest problems, and to do it bottom-up; that is, I end up doing lots and lots of work with no apparent results, as I build the foundation for the rest of the system. I ended up making the Finder dependent on the Resource Manager, which, while logical in fact, unnecessarily made things a bit more exciting than they otherwise would have been in the development of the Mac, as the Finder's development was pushed out later and later in the schedule. And of course, I didn't come up with these ideas all at once, but as I gained experience with the idea of resources, and as others in the group began to use resources in the rest of the system, the features needed became apparent. And the concepts behind the Resource Manager widely influenced the handling of data throughout the Mac in a sort of Grand Unified Model.
When I started talking with the rest of the team, Larry Kenyon and Andy Hertzfeld realized immediately the importance of resources, and realized that they'd have to make changes in the rest of the system to take advantage of the Resource Manager. Larry was writing the memory manager, and Andy was writing much of the rest of the Toolbox; both were rather far along and the Toolbox, in particular, needed significant changes to use resources. We were all in agreement...but I failed to mention this to Bob Belleville, thinking that it wouldn't take that long to finish anyway, so why bother?
I started writing the code. Some weeks later, Bob Belleville asked me what I was doing, and I told him about the Resource Manager and why we needed it. He told me to stop working on it. I was flabbergasted. I tried to explain to him that the Resource Manager was the keystone of the entire data architecture of the Mac--that the Toolbox, Segment Loader, and the Finder were all dependent on it, and I couldn't think of a way to solve all the problems we needed to solve without something like the Resource Manager.
Bob told me to abandon the project, that we didn't need it, and that I should focus on the Finder (see Resource Manager Countdown) . Of course, the way I planned to fit all the pieces together with the Finder also required the Resource Manager, and I thought it would take much longer to try to code the system without it. I told Bob that I was going to do it anyway. (see You Can't Fire Bruce!) .
It was quite a job, since we only had 64K bytes of ROM for the entire Toolbox. By writing in assembly code, I was able to implement the complete Resource Manager in only 3K bytes of code, leaving a few bytes left over in the ROM for the inevitable bug fixes and feature additions. But it had taken quite a bit longer than I had hoped it would, and the delay put time pressure on all of us.
We were lucky: it turned out that resources were the answer to quite a few questions we hadn't known to ask. Andy used the Resource Manager to swap code segments dynamically, so that large programs could run in the tiny amount of RAM; he rewrote the Font, Menu, and Control managers to store and retrieve their data from resource files; and more and more shared data in the system ended up being stored as resource objects. Because it was relatively simple to use resources to store text strings and menus in the system and in applications, it became much easier to provide localized systems for different languages and countries. Joanna Hoffman and Alain Rossmann designed a resource-based system for handling special time and date formats for different countries, and the Mac became a truly multilingual system.
Almost every piece of data in the Macintosh ended up being touched by the Grand Unified Model. Even transient data, data being cut and pasted within and between applications, did not escape. The Scrap Manager labeled each piece of data on the clipboard with a resource type. In another Mac innovation, multiple pieces of data, each of a different type, could be stored on the clipboard simultaneously, so that applications could have a choice of representation of the same data (for example, storing both plain and styled text). And since this data could easily be stored on disk in a resource file, we were able to provide cutting and pasting of relatively large chunks of data by writing a temporary file called the Clipboard.
So, in late 1982, with the Resource Manager finished, more or less, I finally turned my attention back to the Finder (see The Grand Unified Model (2) - The Finder) .
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Signing Party
The artists sign their work
Date: February 1982
Author: Andy Hertzfeld
Topics: Management, Apple Spirit,Industrial Design
Comments: 12
Rating: (4.29)
 he component of the Macintosh hardware that had the longest lead time was the hard tool that molded its distinctive plastic case. After tweaking the case design for more than six months and building a small production run of 50 units with a soft-tooled case, the final design was ready to go out for hard tooling toward the end of February 1982, so we could meet the ship date that 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 ourselves 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.
Since 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. Most customers would never see them, since you needed a special tool to look inside, but we would take pride in knowing that our names were in there, even if no one else knew.
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The signature sheet
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We held a special signing party after one of our weekly meetings on February 10, 1982. Jerry Mannock, the 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 forty minutes or so for around thirty-five team members to sign. Steve waited until last, when he picked a spot near the upper center and signed his name with a flourish.
We were aware that the team was still growing rapidly, and in a few months there would be a new crop of key contributors that also deserved to sign the case. We decided to draw the line at the date of the signing party, and not to let new signatures come in later, but we 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: 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 hired on 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, like marketing manager Mike Murray and original evangelist Mike Boich, who started before he did and who otherwise would have just missed the cut-off.
And then, over time, names gradually began to disappear for practical reasons, as Apple changed the case to make it easier to manufacture. Some 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 that the Macintosh Classic, from the early nineties, didn't have any left.
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And Then He Discovered Loops!
Bob has written many lines of code
Date: April 1982
Author: Andy Hertzfeld
Topics: Software Design, Management
Comments: 2
Rating: (4.26)
 e interviewed quite a few candidates to replace Bud as the software manager before encountering Bob Belleville, who was one of the main hardware designers of the Xerox Star, the first commercial computer with a graphical user interface. He was intelligent and soft-spoken, and dryly skeptical about human nature. One of his many aphorisms was "The Law of Conservation of Misery" (no matter what course of action is taken, the total human misery in any given situation is maintained), which seemed particularly applicable to large computer companies.
Bob's background looked to be a lot stronger in hardware than software, so we were somewhat skeptical about his software expertise, but he claimed to be equally adept at both. His latest project was a rebellious, skunk-works type effort to make a low cost version of the Star called "Cub" that used an ordinary Intel microprocessor (the 8086), which was heresy to the PARC orthodoxy, who felt that you needed custom, bit-slice processors to get sufficient performance for a Star-type machine. Bob had written much of the software for Cub himself.
"I've got lots of software experience", he declared, "in fact I've personally written over 350,000 lines of code."
I thought that was pretty impressive, although I wondered how it was calculated. I couldn't begin to honestly estimate how much code I have written, since there are too many different ways to construe things.
That evening, I went out to dinner with my friend Rich Williams, who started at Apple around the same time that I did. Rich had a great sense of humor. I told him about the interview that I did in the afternoon, and how Bob Belleville claimed to have written over 350,000 lines of code.
"Well, I bet he did", said Rich, "but then he discovered loops!"
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You Can't Fire Bruce!
The software team has a personality clash
Date: May 1982
Author: Andy Hertzfeld
Topics: Management,Personality Clashes
Comments: 2
Rating: (4.08)
 ven though he was only twenty two years old when he joined the Mac team, Bruce Horn already had seven years of experience tinkering with graphical user interfaces. He was recruited as a 14-year-old by Ted Kaehler to do some programming experiments in Smalltalk at Alan Kay's Learning Research Group in the mid-seventies, and he took to it so well that he had worked part-time at Xerox PARC ever since. By the time he joined the Mac team in late 1981, he was an expert in object-oriented programming and graphical user interfaces.
Bruce was a bright, idealistic and uncompromising programmer who fit right in with the prevailing values of the team, and he quickly became an important contributor to the Macintosh system software effort. He was slated to work on the application that graphically represented files, which Bud Tribble had dubbed the "Finder", but after a few weeks he convinced us that we were missing a crucial level of the system that he called the "Resource Manager", which was a way to manage the various chunks of data (like text strings and images) that an application relied on, and which was going to be needed for the Finder application as well for managing icons and bindings between documents and applications (see Resource Manager Countdown) .
Bruce was busy implementing the resource manager when Bob Belleville arrived on the scene as the new software manager in April 1982, replacing Bud Tribble, who had to return to medical school at the end of 1981. Bob was also a Xerox alumnus, but otherwise they couldn't have been more different. Bob was pragmatic and somewhat authoritarian, with his world-view substantially forged by his stint in the Navy, and he immediately began to clash with Bruce's idealism.
I spent a lot of time with Bob when he first started on the project, helping him to get up to speed, and we got along well at first, even though we had very different perspectives. Bob was a little bit older than most of the core team, with a wife and family, and he was naturally skeptical. He didn't understand why we were so excited about the Macintosh, which he saw as just another increment along a continuum. "I don't get it", he complained to me, "This computer will be obsolete in a year, and then there will be another one, and another one after that. What's so special about this one?"
The first software team meeting that Bob presided over took place in the main conference room of our new building, soon after we moved from Texaco Towers to Bandley 4, around a long table that Burrell and I used for afterhours ping-pong. Up to this point, the software team had a very loose management style, without formal meetings, so this was something new for us. Bob had us go around the table, telling the group what each individual was currently working on, and when we were planning to complete it.
When it was Bruce Horn's turn, he described his Resource Manager work, but refused to give a date as to when it would be finished. Bob visibly bristled, and asked him to make the best estimate that he could, which Bruce refused to do, claiming that it wouldn't be accurate. Bob wanted Bruce to put the resource manager aside to work on the Finder, which Bob thought had much higher priority, but Bruce refused to go along with him, because of the dependence of the Finder design on the resource manager. They were at an impasse, but finally Bob said he'd resolve it by talking with Bruce privately, and the meeting was able to move on.
I was worried about how the obvious tension between Bruce and Bob would be resolved. A few days later, Bruce came up to me in the late afternoon, visibly shaken.
"You wouldn't believe what just happened! I finally had my meeting with Bob about the resource manager."
"So what happened?"
"We started off talking about the work that was needed to finish it, but I guess I said something that he didn't like. He started getting all weird, and told me that I was insubordinate, and that he was my manager, and that I had to follow his orders or else. Or else what?, I asked him. You wouldn't believe what he did!"
"What did he do?", I asked him, not knowing what to expect.
"He threatened me! Can you believe that? For a second I thought we were going to have a fist fight, but he started smiling as if he was joking. I didn't know what to think. Finally, he said we'd talk more later and walked away."
The image of Bruce and Bob duking it out was ludicrous, as Bruce was at least 8 inches taller than Bob and probably more than 60 pounds heavier. Bruce's father was an ex-professional football player before he became a doctor, and Bruce was built the same way. I tried to calm him down and told him that I would help him get this resolved. The next morning I went to Bob Belleville's office as soon as I arrived at work.
"Good. I'm glad that you're here", Bob greeted me. "I need to talk to you about Bruce Horn."
"Yes, that's what I want to talk about", I responded. "Bruce told me about the conversation that you had last night."
"Well, it's not a problem anymore", Bob said, flashing a cryptic smile.
"Why not?" Something didn't sound right to me.
"I decided to fire him. He doesn't respect authority enough to work on this team."
Now it was my turn to get upset. "You can't fire Bruce!", stating something that I thought was obvious. "He's doing really important work for us, and losing him would set us back months."
"Keeping him will set us back even more, because he's a trouble maker, and he'll cause more trouble in the future."
But I was adamant, defending Bruce until Bob got frustrated with me. "Well, Andy, I am very disappointed in you. I thought you had more sense than that." I walked out of his office not knowing what was going to happen.
Later that day, when Steve Jobs came by for his usual early evening visit, I told him what transpired and repeated how bad it would be if we lost Bruce. I don't know what Steve eventually said to Bob, but he apparently dropped his plan to fire Bruce since he never mentioned it again. But I never thought of Bob the same way after that, and I think that was when he started to have problems with me as well.
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Resource Manager Countdown
Bob gives Bruce thirty days to finish the Resource Manager
Date: August 1982
Author: Andy Hertzfeld
Topics: Software Design, Management
Comments: 1
Rating: (4.05)
he Resource Manager was one of the cornerstones of the Macintosh Toolbox. It provided a way to manage chunks of data so they could be easily accessed by the code but be stored and edited independently from it. This was the basis of our localization, for example, since text strings could be stored as resources and translated without having to change the code and rebuild the entire application.
Resources were conceived and implemented by Bruce Horn. They came a little late in the design cycle, and we had to rewrite some other parts of the toolbox to take advantage of them, although that wasn't clear initially. But in the summer of 1982 they were definitely one of the riskier parts of the design.
Bob Belleville, our new software manager, assessed the situation and decided that the resource manager was too big a risk, and tried to convince us to drop it from the design. Bruce went apoplectic, and Bob eventually compromised on giving Bruce 30 days to implement the resource manager. Bruce agreed that if it wasn't ready within 30 days, it would be dropped from the project.
The next day, Bruce came to work with a few pads of yellow sticky notes. He tore off one note at a time, wrote a number on it, and then stuck it on the wall of the double-sized cubicle that I shared with him. Soon the cubicle was encircled with little yellow notes, each with a number from 1 to 30.
"This shows me how many days that I have left", Bruce explained. "I'll tear one down each day, and it will remind me of how much time is remaining."
For the next month, the first thing that Bruce did every morning was dramatically tear off the note with the lowest remaining number. As the days passed, he was making good progress but it wasn't at all clear that he was going to make it.
When there were only three notes left, I began to wonder what was going to happen if Bruce missed the deadline. The resource manager was mostly working now, but he didn't seem to be on a path to closure, as he continued to refine the design.
Finally, there was only one note left on the wall. But when Bruce came in that morning, he had a new pad of yellow notes, and instead of taking the last one down, he wrote another ten numbers and posted them up, before taking down the previously final note. I started to laugh.
"It's overtime", he explained. "I swear I'll really be done in ten more days."
I was waiting for Bob Belleville to confront him, and tell him that he missed the deadline, but Bob wisely saw that the resource manager was far enough along that it could stay. And Bruce really did finish in the next ten days, kind of.
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Credit Where Due
Why the Mac design team got credit for their work
Date: January 1983
Author: Andy Hertzfeld
Topics: Marketing,The Launch,The Press,Retreats
Comments: 4
Rating: (4.23)
he Macintosh team held a series of off-site retreats, every six months or so starting in January 1982. A retreat usually lasted two full days, including an overnight stay. We'd travel by bus to a naturally beautiful resort an hour or two from Apple's offices in Cupertino, like Pajaro Dunes near Monterey Bay. Every employee on the team was invited, as well as folks from other parts of the company who were contributing to the project. The retreats were a mixture of a divisional communications meeting, an inspirational pep talk and a company party, featuring chats with industry legends like Robert Noyce (inventor of the integrated circuit) or Ben Rosen (the VC who funded Compaq and Lotus), and entertainment from Wyndham Hill artists like Liz Story.
The third retreat was scheduled for January 27th and 28th, 1983 at the La Playa Hotel in Carmel, and it came at a pivotal time for the project. The Lisa was just introduced the previous week, after four years of development, on January 19th (although it wouldn't actually ship for another five months), and it was becoming increasingly clear that it was time for the Mac team to shift gears, buckle down and change our focus to doing whatever it took to finish up and ship.
After the two hour bus ride from Cupertino, we gathered in a large meeting room to hear Steve Jobs' opening remarks, which set the agenda for the retreat. Steve was fond of summarizing the themes of the day into a few succinct aphorisms, which he called "Quotations from Chairman Jobs". The sayings from the previous retreat, held in September 1982, were "It's Not Done Until It Ships", "Don't Compromise!" and "The Journey Is The Reward". This time, they were "Real Artists Ship", "It's Better To Be A Pirate Than Join The Navy", and "Mac in a Book by 1986" (see Pirate Flag) .
Even though he was technically a member of the Lisa team, Bill Atkinson attended the Macintosh retreats. Actually, now that the Lisa was finally completed, he planned to shift to working full-time on the Mac, to create a killer graphics application to be bundled with every machine (see MacPaint Evolution) . He was going to start working on it soon, and we were all excited to see what he would come up with.
The first day of the retreat was focused on engineering, and it went by quickly, as each member of the engineering team gave a short talk about their recent and upcoming work in the form of panel discussions, moderated by engineering manager Bob Belleville. At 4PM, the formal part of the meeting ended for the day, and we had a couple of hours of free time to enjoy before dinner. I was about to join a group going for a walk on the nearby beach when I was pulled aside by Bill Atkinson. It was obvious that something was bothering him.
"Do you have a minute?", Bill asked me urgently, looking kind of somber. "I want to show you something privately." We picked one of the small conference rooms, went inside and closed the door.
Bill was carrying three magazines, which he laid out in front of me on the table. Two of them were very recent issues of personal computer magazines, like Byte and Popular Computing, while the third was more business oriented. They all contained articles about the recently introduced Lisa. He opened one of them and showed me an article, with a sidebar entitled "An Interview with Lisa's Designers".
"Hey, that's cool," I told Bill, "You made it into Byte!"
"Look closer", Bill told me, with a pained expression on his face.
I started to browse the article, and noticed that it interviewed engineering manager Wayne Rosing, software manager Bruce Daniels, and applications group manager Larry Tesler. I finally saw why Bill looked so upset - he wasn't included as one of Lisa's designers, which was absurd, since he did more of the design than everyone else combined.
All three magazine articles featured quotes from Wayne, Bruce and Larry, as well as Steve Jobs and John Couch, the top Lisa executive, but apparently, no one thought to include Bill, even though he designed and implemented the most important parts of Lisa almost singlehandedly, possibly because he wasn't a manager. He was very disheartened, especially because something like this had happened to him once before.
Bill told me that he was haunted by a similar incident that occurred six or seven years earlier. He did some groundbreaking work to create a detailed 3D animation of the human brain. He scanned a series of brain slices, and then wrote software to reconstitute them in an animated sequence, rendering them frame by frame to produce a spectacular movie that depicted important brain structures in stunning detail. The movie won various awards, and a frame from it graced the cover of the October 1978 issue of Scientific American, but one of the professors that he was working for stole most of the credit, acknowledging Bill as only a minor collaborator in the published papers. Now it seemed to be happening all over again.
I tried to cheer him up, telling him that the press was usually wrong about everything anyway, and that everyone at Apple understood his leading role in both the Lisa and Macintosh projects, and that there would be plenty of opportunities to talk with the press in the future. He told me that he was so upset that he was thinking about quitting, unless Apple rectified the situation somehow. We both knew that he needed to talk with Steve Jobs about it, but he was nervous about bringing it up with Steve. I told him that I thought he was completely justified, and that Apple ought to try to make it up to him.
A few hours later, after dinner, Bill told me that he arranged to meet with Steve in private early the next morning, before the day's meetings commenced, but he surprised me by asking me to accompany him. I told him that it wasn't my business, and that I felt that it was inappropriate for me to attend, but Bill insisted, telling me that he needed my support, if only to have someone else present to help ground Steve's infamous reality distortion field (see Reality Distortion Field) . Even though I knew it would be awkward, I told him I would do it.
We both were nervous as Bill knocked on the door of the small office that Steve was using, in the back of the large meeting room where breakfast was being served to the team, at the appointed time. Steve opened the door, but he looked angry when he noticed that I was present.
"What is he doing here?", he asked Bill, before turning to face me. "Go away. This isn't any of your business!"
"No, I need to have Andy here," Bill intervened. "He didn't want to come, but I asked him to be here to support me."
Steve shrugged, and decided to continue as if I wasn't there. "OK, let's hear it, and you need to be quick, because we have to start the meeting soon. What's the big problem?"
Bill explained how upset he was that he didn't get any recognition for his work on Lisa, his voice hesitant at first, but picking up conviction as he started to get emotional. He told Steve that he was thinking about leaving Apple, because he was treated so unfairly.
Even though Steve had enormous respect for Bill, he began to get annoyed, although you could tell that he was trying not to.
"Hey, listen, I'm sorry, but you're overreacting and blowing things out of proportion," Steve replied in a dismissive tone. "Who cares about a couple of magazines? You should have been included, but you weren't. Someone made a mistake. It's not such a big deal."
"That's easy for you to say," Bill retorted, upset at the lack of sympathy. He raised his voice, which was full of emotion. "I'm not going to work here anymore if you don't appreciate what I've done and treat me fairly."
Steve took a step toward the door. He seemed impatient. "I don't have time to deal with this now. We'll straighten it out when we get back. I have 60 other people out there who are pouring their hearts into the Macintosh, and they're waiting for me to start the meeting." He opened the door and left the room without saying another word.
Bill and I remained in the small office, unable to speak, emotionally exhausted from the intense encounter. After a few minutes, we heard a loud cheer, as Steve made a number of announcements to kick off the second day of the retreat. Bill sighed, and we left the office to attend the rest of the meeting.
The following week, Steve arranged for Bill to meet with Apple's HR team, to discuss what was bothering him. Bill reiterated that his main complaint was getting recognition for his work. After more discussions with Steve, they came up with something that was mutually acceptable to everyone.
The solution was to appoint Bill as an Apple Fellow, in recognition for his work on the Lisa. Apple Fellow was the most prestigious technical position at Apple, awarded to only two employees so far: Steve Wozniak and Rod Holt. Now there would be two more, Bill Atkinson and Rich Page, who also made seminal contributions to Lisa. A fringe benefit of being appointed an Apple Fellow was a fresh pile of stock options, which could be quite valuable if Apple's stock price continued to rise.
But most importantly of all, Steve promised Bill that he would receive public recognition for his work on Macintosh. Mac programs had an "About Box", a descriptive dialog box invoked by the first command in the leftmost menu, which would display the author's name. Furthermore, Bill could display his name in the title bar of the main window each time his graphics application was launched. Finally, Steve promised that the Macintosh introduction would acknowledge the folks who actually created the design, rather than the managers who supervised them.
Steve was true to his word, and the seven people that he designated as the "design team" were featured in various ways during the Macintosh launch. Chiat-Day even filmed us for a series of television commercials, which never aired because they were deemed too self-congratulatory. It was fun to get our pictures in the national press (see Can We Keep The Skies Safe?) , but it was also problematic, because there wasn't a fair way to draw the line. At least a dozen individuals made crucial contributions to the design, so there were some hard feelings from the people who didn't make the cut.
In fact, Steve eventually decided that giving recognition to the designers was a bad idea. Nowadays, Apple has abolished programmer names in the "About Box", and closely guards the names of their designers, allowing only a select few employees to interact with the press at all.
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Too Big For My Britches
My belated performance review is delivered verbally
Date: February 1983
Author: Andy Hertzfeld
Topics: Management,Personality Clashes
Comments: 2
Rating:  (4.66)
 pple's HR policy dictated that each employee was supposed to receive a performance review from their manager every six months, which helped to determine your salary increase or possibly an award of additional stock options. But as the end of 1982 approached, I hadn't received my review for more than eight months.
This wasn't very surprising, since Bob Belleville, who was my boss and our software manager, was not getting along very well with the software team. He thought that some of us were intrinsically unmanageable, and that we didn't sufficiently respect him. Bob had replaced Rod Holt as the overall engineering manager in August, responsible for both hardware and software, and had just hired a new software manager, Jerome Coonen, who was slated to begin in January, which would allow him to further distance himself from the software team. But he still had to deal with us directly one last time to write our reviews for 1982.
By the end of January, everyone on the team had received their review except for me. Others mentioned that Bob had acted somewhat strangely during their reviews, making cryptic remarks that they didn't understand, so I wasn't particularly looking forward to mine. I occasionally had to interact with Bob, but he was reticent around me, not saying much, seemingly hiding behind his enigmatic, tight-lipped smile. Finally, after another couple of weeks, Bob's secretary called me to arrange an appointment, presumably for my belated review.
The meeting was scheduled for 5pm, toward the end of the day on a Thursday afternoon in mid-February. Bob was waiting for me when I entered his corner cubicle. I asked him what was up. He said that he didn't want to get into it in the office, and suggested that we discuss it on a walk around the block. That was fine with me, but now I was even more apprehensive - generally, walks around the block were reserved for firing or demoting someone, or to talk someone into staying after they had quit.
Bob waited until we were a full block away from Bandley 4 before starting to speak.
"Well, Andy, you're not going to like hearing this, but you're a big problem on the software team and I'm giving you a negative review for the last six months of 1982."
I knew that Bob disliked me, but I was nevertheless shocked. I was working my heart out for the last two years, devoting my life to the Macintosh, seven days per week, holding the project together after Bud returned to medical school. I was really doing two full-time jobs, writing the Mac Toolbox in assembly language by night and helping everybody else by doing whatever was necessary each day.
"How can you say that?", I responded, horrified. "I accomplished everything that I was supposed to, and a lot more besides". All my previous reviews from Apple were extremely positive, including the last one from Bob, so this was new to me.
Bob unfurled his mirthless grin. "Oh, don't get me wrong, I think your technical work was perfectly adequate during the review period, and I don't have a single criticism of it. That's not your problem area. I don't have a single complaint with your technical work." He paused for a moment, to take a deep breath, and then continued.
"The problem is with your attitude, and your relationship with management. You are consistently insubordinate, and you don't have any respect for lines of authority. I think you are undermining everybody else on the software team. You are too big for your britches."
At this point, as he probably expected, I broke down into tears. The Macintosh was at the center of my life, and it was suddenly clear that I was going to have to quit. I couldn't work for somebody who was saying this, no matter how much the project mattered to me.
Perhaps Bob was a little taken aback by my tears, so he tried to soften things. "Listen, this could be a very expensive conversation. It could turn out to be either very good or very bad for both of us. I'm trying to get you to see how if you listen to me, things could turn out very good for both of us."
I had no idea what he was talking about, or how a bad review could possibly be good for me. "What do you mean, undermining the team?", I managed to choke out, "I'm always trying to help everybody else on the team. Give me one example of someone that I've undermined."
"Larry Kenyon", Bob replied. "You're stifling Larry Kenyon. Now he is someone with a good attitude, and you're keeping him from realizing his potential."
I always thought that I had gotten along great with Larry. I recruited him to the Mac team, after working with him on Apple II peripheral cards in 1980, and then handed off the low-level OS stuff to him while I worked on the Toolbox. I thought Larry was a terrific programmer and a great all around person, and treated him with the highest respect, and always enjoyed it when we worked together. I think I knew what Bob was getting at, though, as I had reacted poorly a few months ago when Bob appointed Larry as temporary manager when he had to be gone on a short trip, probably just to irk me.
By this point, I was crying harder, and Bob looked like he might start crying at any moment now, too. We were also pretty far from Bandley 4 by now, and it was starting to get dark. The tone of the conversation seemed to shift as we both realized that we should start heading back.
"This doesn't have to be that bad", Bob said as we turned around. "All you have to do is listen to me and things will work out fine."
"What do you mean?", I asked him.
"You need to show more respect to authority. It's not just me. Jerome is still new, and I'm afraid that you won't let him do his job. He's your boss now, and you need to show him respect, and let him do his job . But that's not the main problem. What you really have to do is stop talking to Steve Jobs." Bob paused and flinched slightly, as if just mentioning Steve was difficult for him.
"Whenever there's something that you don't like, even little things, you go running straight to Steve, and he interferes. I don't have any authority with the software team, because they always hear everything from Steve before I do, and he always hears everything about the software straight from you. It's making it so I can't do my job. You should communicate through the proper channels. I can't tell Steve what to do, but you work for me, so I can tell you."
I did respect Jerome, and I was trying to make an extra effort to support him as our manager, because I knew that we really needed him. Jerome was a very smart guy, and a passionate genius when it came to numerical software - I loved to hear him elucidate the intricacies of his beloved floating point routines. But I did consider him to be more of a partner than a boss, just like I did everyone else on the team, but I didn't think that he had a problem with that. But apparently Bob did.
But the Steve issue was different. From the earliest days of the project, Steve would usually show up at the Mac building in the late afternoon, or sometimes after dinner, and ask us about the happenings of the day. We would demo the latest stuff to him, or he'd complain about something, or sometimes we'd just exchange the latest gossip. After Bud went back to medical school, Burrell and I were the only ones who would regularly stay late, but after a while, more of the team began to hang out with us. It wasn't unusual for six or eight of us to go out for a late dinner, and then come back and keep working. By early 1983, most of the software team was staying late, and even some marketing and finance people would join us, but Bob Belleville never did, since he had to get home to his wife and two young daughters.
"I can't stop Steve from coming around", I told Bob. "If you don't want me to talk with Steve, you're going to have to tell him about it. I like Jerome, and I have no problem working with him, but now it looks like I have a problem working with you. If you think that I'm undermining the team, I'm out of here tomorrow."
Bob looked at me intently. "I don't have the power to fire you", he said. "You're going to give me power that I don't have if you quit. Do you really want to do that?"
By now, it was completely dark as we were approaching the Apple parking lot. We stopped in front of Bob's car.
"This could be a really expensive conversation for both of us", Bob muttered cryptically. "It's entirely up to you." With that, he got into his car and drove off, and I wandered back into Bandley 4, feeling stunned and drained. I got back to my cubicle, put my head down on the desk, and started crying again.
It was around 6:30pm now, and most of the software team was still around. Capps saw that I was upset, and asked me what was wrong. He began to get angry when I told him and a few others what happened, and he made me promise not to overreact until he had a chance to find out what was going on.
Larry Kenyon was still in his cubicle, so I went over and told him what Bob had said. I asked him to be honest, and to tell me if he thought I was stifling him in any way.
"You've got to be kidding!", Larry exclaimed. "I think it's really great working with you, that's the reason I'm on this team. I think it's an honor to work with you." With that, I burst into tears again, touched by Larry's support.
I was exhausted and confused, so I went home to get some sleep and to think about what I should do next. When I came in earlier than usual the next morning, there was a message on my desk to call Pat Sharp, Steve's secretary. She told me to come by his office right away because he wanted to talk with me as soon as possible.
"I can't believe Bob gave you that review", Steve started talking even before I stepped into his office. "He showed it to me a week ago, but I refused to approve it, and I told him to write something more positive. Do you have a copy of it?"
I told Steve that he didn't give me a copy, he just delivered it verbally. I told him that I couldn't work for someone who feels that way about me, and that I had no alternative but to quit.
"It's good that you don't have a copy, because that review is rescinded, it doesn't officially exist. I just got done talking with Bob, and after I chewed him out, he also quit, because he said that he can't manage the software team. And Capps came in here and told me that the rest of the software team is so upset that they're thinking about quitting, too. What a mess! You and Bob don't have to love each other to work together. We're going to sit down this afternoon and talk this thing out until it's resolved."
So, at 4pm on Friday afternoon, as soon as Steve was available, the entire software team, plus Burrell, filed into one of the conference rooms. We all sat in a semi-circle of chairs on the right side of the room, waiting apprehensively. Finally, Steve strode in, with his characteristic bouncy stride, trailed by a despondent looking Bob Belleville, who took a seat on the left side of the room, facing the software team.
Steve started talking first, saying that tensions had been building up for a while, and it was time to clear the air, so we could all pull together down the home stretch. All the while, Bob was staring at the floor, unwilling to make eye contact with anyone else, controlling his emotions behind a tight-lipped expression, halfway between grin and grimace.
"OK, who's going to go first? What's the problem, and how do we fix it?", Steve asked.
Capps spoke up, explaining how painful and unmotivating it was to see me broken up about an obviously unjustified review. He wanted to know how things could have gotten so screwed up.
Steve nodded to Bob, encouraging him to speak up. Bob spoke in a monotone. "I didn't give Andy a bad review. I told him that his work was fine."
I was flabbergasted. "You said I was undermining the team, and stifling Larry," I blurted out. "I can't work for you if you think I'm undermining the team."
Bob looked up, looking me in the eye for the first time. He spoke in a mild, low emotionless monotone. "I didn't say any of those things. Why are you claiming that I said that?"
I was shocked. Bob was denying what he told me the day before, and I know that I didn't imagine it. Furthermore, he really seemed to genuinely believe what he was saying, and he looked to be in a kind of trance, both depressed and confused. If he didn't acknowledge what he said to me, there was no way to resolve it. I didn't know how to proceed, so I backed off my accusations.
A few more people spoke up, addressing other grievances, but Bob's trance-like manner persisted and eventually the meeting broke up, without anyone being satisfied. Steve tried to declare victory at the end, but no one was buying it.
I thought about things over the weekend, and realized that I cared too much about the Macintosh to quit before it was finished, managerial adversity notwithstanding. The situation that I feared when Bud left had actually occured, in spades, and I wasn't confident that Steve would live up to his promise to protect me. I wasn't sure what was going to happen, but I knew that my blissful days at Apple were over, and that things were going to be different from now on.
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RMaker
A wild hack is added to the resource compiler
Date: March 1983
Author: Andy Hertzfeld
Topics: Technical,Software Design,Prototypes,LaserWriter,Lisa,Lisa Rivalry
Comments: 2
Rating: (4.63)
he resource manager became stable enough for other parts of the Toolbox to use in the fall of 1982. At first, only the dialog manager (which was also written by Bruce Horn) used resources, but soon they began to spread inexorably throughout the system. By early 1983, we were using resources to define windows, menus and controls, but we didn't have a decent way for developers to specify them.
Bruce had written a "dialog compiler" that read in a terse text-based description of a dialog and created the corresponding dialog resources. In February 1983, I expanded it into a general resource building tool that I called "RMaker", which ran on a Lisa and built a resource file from a text-based description. RMaker allowed arbitrary resources of any type to be specified in hexadecimal, and provided some specialized formats for specific types like windows or menus. For an example of an RMaker source file, click here
to see MacPaint's resource definition file.
The Macintosh was built around the Motorola 68000 microprocessor, which was an amazing chip for its day, but it did have a few problematic limitations. The instruction set was missing a way to specify a long relative branch, and absolute branches were forbidden since we needed our code to be position independent. This meant that the maximum size of a hunk of code was limited to the range of a relative branch, which was 32K bytes.
That wasn't nearly enough big enough for Lisa applications, so the Lisa development system supported multiple code "segments", stitched together with a jump table for inter-segment references. Since the Macintosh had much less memory than the Lisa, I thought that we could forgo more complicated machinery and get away with supporting only a single code segment per application, and that's what we did at first. But of course I was wrong.
In March 1983, Jerome Coonen came to me with a worried look on his face. Apparently, three different developers started running up against the 32K code size limitation all at once, and he didn't know what we could do about it. The schedule was already barely achievable, and it didn't seem possible to implement a multi-segment loader in the required time frame. He asked me what I thought we should do.
Even though I hadn't thought much about it before, it seemed clear to me that we should keep the code segments in resources, since that's what we were doing with just about everything else these days. We'd have to write a little bit of tricky code to create, load and maintain the jump table, but that didn't seem so bad. I told Jerome that I thought I could have a resource-based multi-segment loader going in less than a week.
Jerome was surprised, thinking that it would take at least a month and asked me to get going on it right away. I was a little hesitant, since my bad review from Bob Belleville a week or two ago was still fresh in my mind (see Too Big For My Britches) , which made me less inclined to put in another heroic effort, but as usual I got excited about the new approach and dove in to try to accomplish it.
The hardest part of the job was writing a tool to extract the code from the output of the Lisa linker and turn it into code resources. I was still working on polishing RMaker, and I realized that it was the perfect place to do the job. I added some code to RMaker to build code resources and the jump table from object files, and was able to get a proof of concept multi-segment loader working in just a few days.
The Lisa linker supported two different sizes of jump table entries. There was a 6 byte version, that just consisted of a single long jump instruction, to an absolute but virtual memory address, which relied on the memory management of the underlying OS to load the appropriate code. The Macintosh didn't have any memory management hardware, so that wasn't possible for us. Luckily, the linker also supported a 10 byte version, which didn't rely on virtual memory and made an explicit OS call to load the segment, which is what I used for my initial version.
It took four bytes to invoke a Lisa system call, but the Macintosh could do it in 2 bytes using a 'trap' instruction, so we really only needed 8 bytes per jump table entry. 8 bytes was a lot better than 10, since not only did it save precious memory, but it would keep everything aligned to 32-bit boundaries, which would eventually be important. I thought it would be simple to modify the Lisa linker to support an 8 byte/entry jump table variant, but I didn't have the source code, so I requested that the Lisa group make the change for us.
But the engineer on the Lisa team that was responsible for the linker, who will rename nameless in this account, wasn't a fan of the Mac project and claimed that he had other, higher priority tasks to accomplish before he could get around to it. He also refused to give me the source code, so I couldn't simply do it myself. After a week or so, I grew tired of waiting, and thought of a wild hack that would let me move forward without him.
The problem was that the linker generated jump table offsets for every inter-segment procedure invocation. Since it thought that the jump table had 10 bytes/entry, I had to find and correct every jump table reference, multiplying it by 8/10 to adjust it for the 8 byte/entry jump table. The jump table was only referenced by a few, specific op-codes, so I added a routine to RMaker to scan through the object code, identifying jump table references and patching them. This wasn't bullet-proof, since the patch routine couldn't tell code from in-line data, so it might inadvertently patch something it shouldn't, despite the extra sanity checks that I threw in. But I thought I could get away with it for the short while before a modified linker became available.
Even though I made repeated requests, the Lisa linker engineer didn't implement the 8 byte version of the jump table for more than nine months. In fact, he never did, but in early 1984, he transferred to another project, and Barry Haynes, the engineer who replaced him, was able to accomplish it a few days after taking over the job, just as I was going on my leave of absence in March 1984, so we were finally able to eliminate RMaker's ugly hack. It was a miracle that no one ever stumbled over it, at least as far as I know.
I went on leave of absence from Apple in March 1984 (see Leave Of Absence) , but I still was excited about writing software for Macintosh as an independent developer, and was full of ideas about different programs to write. But I wasn't happy about the fact that you still needed a Lisa to write software for the Mac; among other things, the recent linker problem had left a bad taste in my mouth regarding the Lisa development system. I had a Lisa at my house, but it really belonged to Apple, and I didn't want to have to buy one. I decided to try to cobble together an entirely Mac-based development system.
Bill Duvall was an old friend of Bob Belleville's from Xerox who we seeded with a Mac prototype in the spring of 1983 so he could port his development system to it, including an assembler and a C compiler, to be sold by his own tiny company named Consulair. His linker even generated Macintosh code resources, but there was no equivalent of RMaker for building the other resources required by a Mac application - you still had to do that on a Lisa. I decided to rewrite RMaker for the Mac, so I could finally abandon the Lisa. I used assembly language, since the assembler was much further along than Consulair C was at the time. In a week or so, I had a new RMaker that was integrated with the Consulair tools, so you finally could write a complete application with just a Macintosh.
In the summer of 1984, I got a call from Dan Cochran, who was the marketing person at Apple in charge of developer tools. He had heard about my new version of RMaker, and wanted to bundle it with the Consulair package. After a bit of negotiation, I sold it to Apple in exchange for a brand new LaserWriter prototype. I drove up to Bill Duvall's house in the Berkeley hills to help him incorporate RMaker into his system. When my reward arrived in October, I thought it was pretty cool to be the first on my block to have a LaserWriter, three months before it was officially announced.
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Quick, Hide In This Closet!
Steve forbid us to work with Sony
Date: August 1983
Author: Andy Hertzfeld
Topics: Hardware Design, Management, Lisa
Comments: 4
Rating: (4.74)
n 1980, Apple reorganized again, splitting off a new "Disk Division" headed by John Vennard, responsible for developing a hard disk code-named "Pippin" and a next generation floppy disk code-named "Twiggy". Both were intended to be used first by the Lisa project, and eventually across Apple's entire product line. At Rod Holt's request, I had written some early diagnostics for Twiggy using an Apple II, but I felt lucky that they asked Rich Williams instead of me to transfer to the disk division as their software guy, since focusing exclusively on disks seemed pretty limiting.
Woz's Apple II floppy disk design was way ahead of the rest of the industry, so Apple felt confident that it could continue to innovate to extend its lead. Twiggy was a fairly ambitious project, more than quadrupling the capacity of standard floppy disks by doubling the data rate (which required higher density media) and employing other innovative tricks like motor speed control, which slowed down the disk rotation speed on the outer tracks to cram more data on them.
The Lisa was designed to include two built-in Twiggy drives, so it made sense for the Macintosh to use Twiggy as well. Twiggy used a Woz-style disk controller, which created a problem for the Lisa designers, since that required exact timing from the microprocessor and therefore couldn't tolerate interrupts, which was perhaps OK for a simple system like the Apple II but was unacceptable for a more sophisticated system like Lisa. Instead, the Lisa hardware designers (Paul Baker, Bob Paratore and others) solved the problem by including a little Apple II, with its own memory and microprocessor (but clocked twice as fast), inside the Lisa to control the Twiggy drives.
The Lisa also supported an optional, external hard drive through a built-in parallel port. As the Twiggy designers encountered unexpected difficulties in achieving an acceptable error rate, Lisa came to rely on the hard drive instead. The Twiggy drive was also slower than expected, because of the high error rate as well as the way the variable motor speed trick increased seek times, since you had to wait for the speed change to stabilize. Besides, the Lisa operating system designers were used to working on systems that swapped memory from disk, which wasn't really feasible to pull off at floppy disk speeds. Soon, the hard disk became mandatory, upping the minimum price of a Lisa by more than a thousand dollars.
Lisa was announced to great fanfare in January 1983, but it still wasn't ready to ship. There were problems in a number of areas, but the biggest one was the low yield of the Twiggy drives, whose high error rate greatly limited production. Finally, Lisas were shipped to customers in June 1983, even though there continued to be production and reliability problems with the disk drives.
Meanwhile, the Mac team was beginning to panic. We were using a single Twiggy drive as our floppy disk, and we didn't have a hard disk to fall back on. It looked like the Twiggy drive was never going to be reliable or cost effective enough for the Macintosh, but we were stuck without an alternative. If we couldn't find a suitable replacement quickly enough, we'd have to slip the entire project indefinitely.
Fortunately, we were aware of Sony's new 3.5 inch drive that they started to ship in the spring of 1983 through Hewlett-Packard, their development partner. George Crow, the analog engineer who designed the Mac's analog board, had come from HP prior to working at Apple and was sold on the superiority of the Sony drives. He procured a drive from his friends at HP and proposed to Bob Belleville that we figure out how to interface it to the Mac as soon as possible, while we negotiate a deal with Sony.
The Sony drive looked really sweet, especially when compared to the Twiggy. It used the same data rate as Twiggy, but on smaller disks that could fit in a shirt pocket. Best of all, the media was encased in a hard plastic shell, making it much less fragile and more convenient to handle.
Steve Jobs was finally ready to acknowledge reality and give up on the Twiggy drive. When he saw the Sony drive he loved it, and immediately wanted to adapt it for the Mac. But instead of doing the obvious thing and striking a deal with Sony, Steve decided that Apple should take what we learned from Twiggy and engineer our own version of a 3.5" drive, working with our Japanese manufacturing partner Alps Electronics, who manufactured the Apple II floppy drives at a very low cost.
This seemed like suicide to George Crow and Bob Belleville. The Mac was supposed to ship in less than seven months, and it was preposterous to think that we could get a 3.5" drive into production by then, if we could do it at all, given the disk division's dismal track record. But Steve was convinced that we should do our own drive, and told Bob to cease all work on the Sony drive. He instructed Rod Holt, Bob and George to fly to Japan to meet with Alps to initiate a crash project to develop a workable 3.5 inch drive.
Bob and George grudgingly went along with the Alps program, but they were certain that the team would discover that we couldn't pull it off in the alloted time frame. They hatched an alternative plan to continue to work with Sony surreptitiously, against Steve's wishes. Larry Kenyon was given a Sony drive to interface to the Mac, but he was told to keep it hidden, especially from Steve. Bob and George also arranged meetings with Sony, to discuss the customizations that Apple desired and to hammer out the beginnings of a business deal.
This dual strategy entailed frequent meetings with both Alps and Sony, with the added burden of keeping the Sony meetings secret from Steve. It wasn't that hard to do in Japan, since Steve didn't come along, but it got a little awkward when Sony employees had to visit Cupertino. Sony sent a young engineer named Hide Kamoto to work with Larry Kenyon to spec out the modifications that we required. He was sitting in Larry's cubicle with George Crow when we suddenly heard Steve Jobs's voice as he unexpectedly strode into the software area.
George knew that Steve would wonder who Kamoto-san was if he saw him. Thinking quickly, he immediately tapped Kamoto-san on his shoulder, and spoke hurriedly, pointing at the nearby janitorial closet. "Dozo, quick, hide in this closet. Please! Now!"
Kamoto-san looked confused but he got up from his seat and hurried into the dark janitorial closet. He had to stay there for five minutes or so until Steve departed and the coast was clear.
George and Larry apologized to Kamoto-san for their unusual request. "No problem. ", he replied, "But American business practices, they are very strange. Very strange."
As predicted, a few weeks later the Alps team came back with an eighteen month estimate for getting their drive into production, and we had to abandon the project. When Bob Belleville revealed that he and George had kept the Sony alternative alive, Steve swallowed his pride and thanked them for disobeying him and doing the right thing. The Sony drives eventually worked out great, and it's hard to imagine what the Mac would have been like without them today.
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A Mac For Mick
We present a Mac to Mick Jagger
Date: January 1984
Author: Andy Hertzfeld
Topics: Marketing,Celebrities,The Launch
Comments: 4
Rating: (3.90)
he last couple of weeks before the Macintosh unveiling on January 24th were extremely hectic. The software still wasn't finished, and it wasn't clear if there was enough time left to get it into adequate shape. Meanwhile, the Apple PR machine was revved up to full speed, so there were also plenty of unusual diversions, like being interviewed and photographed for the national press.
The absolute deadline for finishing the software was when the factory opened at 6am Monday morning, on January 16th, eight days before the introduction. When I came into work on Friday, January 13th, I knew that I would probably stay there all weekend, along with the rest of the team, working as hard as possible to shake out the remaining bugs before Monday. Steve Jobs, Mike Murray, Bob Belleville and others were in New York city doing a press tour, so I thought we would be relatively free of distractions, and would be able to focus on bug fixing.
I came into work later than usual, around noon, since I had been at Apple until 3am the previous evening, and I wanted to get one decent night's sleep before the final push. As I went to sit down, I noticed that a handwritten note had been placed on my chair. It was from our software librarian, Patti King, who had taken a message from Steve Jobs' secretary, Lynn Takahashi.
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actual note
(click to enlarge) |
"Andy - Steve J. called - we can deliver a Mac to Mick Jagger tomorrow. You can fly out to meet them by tomorrow noon and bring lots of neat software. If you can come, make arrangements for the trip through Lynn. Steve will call back in a couple of hours, also, he'll be at the Carlyle Hotel tomorrow."
Wow! A chance to meet Mick Jagger was a once in a lifetime opportunity. But we still had three more days before the deadline, and I would be absent for at least 30 hours if I tried to go to New York, plus I would be relatively useless when I returned from all the flying. I called back Lynn to tell her to tell Steve that I couldn't make it. But I was curious to find out about Mick's reaction.
I found out from Bill Atkinson when he returned from the East Coast on Sunday afternoon, and I got more details from Steve and Mike Murray a bit later. Steve had apparently gone to a party on Thursday evening, where he was introduced to Andy Warhol. Andy got really excited about the Macintosh when Steve demoed it to him. "You must show it to Mick,", he proclaimed, and arranged for Steve and the Apple crew to go to Mick Jagger's townhouse on Saturday afternoon to present him with a Macintosh.
Steve Jobs, Mike Murray and Bill Atkinson got out of the cab in front of Mick's two-story brownstone townhouse, hauling along a Macintosh in its canvas carrying case. They knocked on the door at the address they were given, but there was no response for several minutes. Finally, the door was opened by two huge guys who were obviously bodyguards, who didn't seem all that impressed to be talking to the co-founder of Apple Computer and his entourage.
The Apple folk were led upstairs into an elegantly furnished room to wait for Mick. Bill set up the Mac and launched MacPaint, and started to fool around with it. Then, abruptly, Mick Jagger strode into the room, dressed casually in a T-shirt and blue jeans.
Mick was polite, but he didn't seem to have heard of Apple Computer, Steve Jobs or the Macintosh. Steve tried to strike up a conversation, but he wasn't very successful. Steve told me that Mick couldn't seem to put together a coherent sentence. "His speech was slurred and very slow", Steve described it later, "in fact I think he was on drugs. Either that or he's brain-damaged." After a few minutes, it was clear that Mick had absolutely no interest whatsoever in Apple or the Macintosh, and an awkward silence ensued.
Fortunately, Mick's twelve year old daughter Jade had followed Mick into the room, and her eyes lit up when she saw MacPaint. Bill began to teach her how to use it, and pretty soon she was happily mousing away, fascinated by what she could do with MacPaint. Even though Mick drifted off to another room, the Apple contingent stayed with Jade for another half hour or so, showing off the Macintosh and answering her questions, and ended up leaving the machine with her, since she couldn't seem to part with it.
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Real Artists Ship
The final push to finish the software
Date: January 1984
Author: Andy Hertzfeld
Topics: Management, Software Design,Allnighters
Comments: 2
Rating: (4.25)
 y the fall of 1983, we had committed to announcing and shipping the Macintosh at Apple's next annual shareholder's meeting, to be held on January 24th, 1984. The failure of the Twiggy disk drive almost caused us to be late (see Quick, Hide In This Closet!) , but it seemed like the new Sony 3.5 inch drive solved all of our problems, and the rest of the hardware was ready to go. The Macintosh ROM was frozen in early September and sent out for fabrication. All that remained was finishing the System Disk, and our two applications, MacWrite and MacPaint.
The software team worked hard over the Christmas break of 1983. The Finder still wasn't finished, and there were lots of performance problems, especially when copying files between disks, which seemed interminable. There was lots of integration testing to do, like cutting and pasting between applications, or applications interacting with desk accessories. As the New Year rolled around, it was clear that we were running out of time.
By the first week of January, the software team was working around the clock, testing and fixing problems that were found. Every employee in the building was drafted as a tester, and we held a series of dinners where Apple bought catered food for anyone who stayed late to test [story:90 Hours A Week And Loving It].
Finally, the deadline for finishing the software was less than a week away, and it seemed obvious that there were still too many bugs for us to ship it. Late on Friday evening, we convinced ourselves that we needed an extra week or two to fix the remaining problems. Steve Jobs was on the East Coast, along with Bob Belleville and Mike Murray, doing press for the introduction, so we arranged for a conference call early Sunday morning to tell him about the slip.
Jerome Coonen, our software manager, spoke for the team, as we gathered around the speakerphone. We were exhausted, and progress was slow. There were still bugs that we hadn't gotten to the bottom of yet, and it didn't seem possible that we could make it in the time remaining. Jerome proposed that we ship "demo" software to the dealers for the introduction, and update all the customers with final software a few weeks later. We thought Jerome was pretty persuasive as we held our breath waiting for Steve to respond.
"No way, there's no way we're slipping!", Steve responded. The room let out a collective gasp. "You guys have been working on this stuff for months now, another couple weeks isn't going to make that much of a difference. You may as well get it over with. Just make it as good as you can. You better get back to work!"
We did manage to wrangle an extra couple of days, by virtue of working the weekend and moving the deadline to 6am Monday morning, when the factory opened, instead of Friday afternoon. We agreed to go home and rest up, and then come into work on Monday ready for the final push.
The final week was one of the most intense I ever experienced. Steve wanted Bill Atkinson and myself to fly to New York to present a Mac to Mick Jagger, but I decided that I needed to stay in Cupertino to help with the bug fixing. Some of us were pausing work to get photographed for magazines like Newsweek and Rolling Stone, which made others on the team feel terrible that they were being left out. At times, the atmosphere got pretty tense.
Friday finally rolled around and it was clear that there were still too many bugs in both the Finder and MacWrite. Randy Wigginton brought in a gigantic bag of chocolate covered espresso beans, which, along with medicinal quantities of caffeinated beverages, helped us forgo sleep entirely for the last couple of days. We starting doing release cycles that were only a few hours apart, re-releasing every time we fixed a significant problem.
When a new release was ready, we would all grab it and start testing again. At one point, around 2am on Sunday night, I stumbled across a bug in the clipboard code. I thought I knew what it might be, but I was so tired that I didn't want to deal with it. I tried to pretend that I didn't see the problem, but Steve Capps was watching my expression and knew there was something wrong. I also was too tired to sustain a pretense; he grilled me about the problem and then helped me craft a fix, since I was too tired to do it on my own.
Around 4am, we had a release where everything seemed to go wrong - even MacPaint was crashing, which was usually rock solid. But our final release, around 5:30am seemed to be much better; the worst problems seemed to have receded and we thought we might actually have a decent release candidate.
We all focused on testing the final release as much as we could until 6am, when Jerome would have to leave to drive it to the factory. It looked pretty good, but soon someone found a potential show stopper - the system seemed to hang when a blank disc was inserted during MacWrite - the disk didn't start formatting like it should. I realized that it was probably hung up waiting for an event, so I reached out and tapped on the space bar, and formatting commenced. Jerome thought the bug was bad enough to hold up the release, but he left to drive it to the factory anyway, figuring they needed to start duplication even if it was just going to be a demo release.
The sun had already risen and the software team finally began to scatter and go home to collapse. We weren't sure if we were finished or not, and it felt really strange to have nothing to do after working for so hard for so long. Instead of going home, Donn Denman and I sat on a couch in the lobby in a daze and watched the accounting and marketing people trickling into work around 7:30am or so. We must have been quite a sight; everybody could tell that we had been there all night (actually, I hadn't been home or showered for three days).
Finally, around 8:30 Steve Jobs arrived, and as soon as he saw us he immediately asked if we had made it. I explained the formatting bug to him, and he thought that it wasn't a show stopper, which meant that we were actually finished. I finally drove home to Palo Alto around 9am and collapsed on my bed, thinking that I'd sleep for the next day or two.
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Leave Of Absence
I didn't know how to deal with my bad review
Date: March 1984
Author: Andy Hertzfeld
Topics: Quitting,Management,Lisa Rivalry,Personality Clashes
Comments: 3
Rating: (4.33)
didn't know how to deal with the bad performance review that I received from Bob Belleville in February 1983 (see Too Big For My Britches) . Up to that point, I had loved my job at Apple, and was devoting myself to working on the Macintosh, which I passionately believed would change the world significantly for the better. But it was clear that Bob was out to get me, for reasons that I only partially understood.
Jerome Coonen had recently started as the new software manager, so at least I didn't have to interact with Bob directly very often. In fact, Bob seemed to want to avoid me even more than I wanted to avoid him. My initial instinct was to quit, but I believed in the Macintosh too much to leave until it shipped, which was at least six months away, so I resolved to keep working hard while I thought about what I should do.
It seemed like the main problem was that Bob and I had very different views concerning the organization. I worshiped at the altar of the Apple II, and romanticized my work, seeing it more as a calling than a job. I was much more enthusiastic about the computer that we were creating than the engineering organization that was creating it, and I was difficult to manage because I was self-righteous and immature (although I didn't see it that way at the time) and thoroughly disrespected organizational authority.
On the other hand, Bob Belleville saw his job as rescuing the Mac team from the chaotic development process that I thrived in, instilling a modicum of order and predictability, which was necessary to scale the organization. He saw my lack of respect for lines of authority as undermining the organization, which was unacceptable to him. I think that the negative review was intended as a wake-up call, to compel me to change my style to fit his vision of the organization, but he was surprised that I took it as hard as I did.
There didn't seem to be any way to reconcile with Bob, since I never received a written review and he disavowed saying the worst things he told me during our conversation. Besides, I didn't think I wanted to work in the type of organization that he was trying to establish anyway. I decided that I still wanted to work for Apple, but I didn't want to work for Bob, even indirectly. Perhaps the Macintosh team had to eventually mature into a cumbersome organization, but I thought that Apple would still need small teams and people like me to get the ball rolling on something new.
When Bud Tribble left the Mac team to return to medical school at the end of 1981 (see Gobble, Gobble, Gobble) , I considered leaving, too, but Steve Jobs persuaded me to stay, partially by promising to protect me from authoritarian managers. But when I tried to discuss the situation with him over the next few months, he was usually dismissive, belittling the problem and telling me that I didn't have to love Bob to work for him. Sometimes, he would cryptically hint that he had some solution in mind, but nothing ever materialized.
As 1983 drew to a close, I was swept up in the monumental effort to finish the software (see Real Artists Ship) , and then the blissful joyride of the product introduction (see The Times They Are A-Changin') in January. But by the middle of February, things had calmed down and I knew it was time for me to make a decision about my future at Apple.
My relationship with Bob Belleville had worsened, if that was possible, after he went on a tirade in his staff meeting in December 1983 when he found out that I had assisted Burrell Smith and Brian Howard by writing some diagnostics when they asked for help with the LaserWriter prototype they were working on. Everyone on the software team was exhausted from the high pressure marathon effort to finally complete the software, and tension with Bob made it hard to be enthusiastic about the future.
In February, Apple decided to merge the Macintosh and Lisa groups together, after laying off a quarter of the Lisa people, putting the Mac people in all of the top positions. Steve had always promised us that the group would never exceed 100 people. But now, when combined with more than 200 Lisa folk, it would be over 300 employees strong.
I watched as Steve stood up in front of the assembled Lisa team and announced the merger and layoffs, telling them that they had screwed up and were B or C players. "So, today we are releasing some of your fellow employees to give them the opportunity to work at our sister companies here in the valley," he declared in classic Steve Jobs style.
Someone suggested the alternative of going on a "leave of absence", instead of quitting entirely, which sounded better to me, since I would retain my badge and the prerogatives of an employee when I visited Apple and could more easily return if things seemed better after they settled down. I decided to take a six month leave of absence, starting on March 1st, 1984.
I told Steve Jobs about my leave of absence plans, which he said he regretted, but he didn't offer me any alternative that was acceptable to me. I proposed that we spin off another small team that could work directly for him, now that the division had over 300 people, but he wasn't interested. With the Macintosh finally shipping and the divisions combined, Steve felt he needed managers like Bob Belleville to manage the huge battalion of employees, much more than creative types like myself. Also, he told me that he was sure that I'd be so bored in a month or two that I'd come back from my leave early.
A couple of days before my leave commenced, Steve came into the software area escorting a surprise guest. They came over to my cubicle and Steve introduced me to Apple's newest employee, Alan Kay (see Creative Think) , who had recently departed from Atari and had just signed on as an Apple Fellow. Alan Kay was one of my heros, and it made me even more depressed than I already was to know that leaving would mean that I wouldn't get to work with him.
At the end of my last day of work, the software team held a farewell dinner for me, at a small, fancy continental restaurant called Maddalena's on Emerson street, which was around five blocks from my house in Palo Alto. Now that my last day had actually arrived, I was really sad about leaving all my friends at Apple. I walked over to the restaurant with Burrell Smith, who lived in the house next door to me, wondering if I would be able to survive the dinner without bursting into tears.
Most of the software team came to the dinner, as well as Steve Jobs. I was in a sort of daze as the elaborate dinner was served, followed by some toasts, where people said how much they liked working with me, while I only had sporadic success at holding back tears. Bill Atkinson said that he had no idea of what I would work on next, but he knew that he would be amazed by it. Steve Jobs said that he would miss me, and that he hoped that I would hurry back from my leave. But then he said something strange, apparently commenting on my emotional state: "The thing I like best about Andy is that it's so easy to make him cry".
Finally, the dinner was over and I walked back home with Burrell, still feeling numb, as if I didn't want to think about my conflicted feelings just yet. When I awoke at my usual time the next morning, I had to fight the urge to drive down to Apple as usual. It took a week or two before it stopped feeling strange to not go into work.
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Things Are Better Than Ever
My leave of absence was drawing to a close
Date: September 1984
Author: Andy Hertzfeld
Topics: Quitting,Personality Clashes,Reality Distortion
Comments: 3
Rating: (4.00)
oward the end of August 1984, my six month leave of absence (see Leave Of Absence) was drawing to a close, and I still hadn't decided whether I would return to Apple. I continued to feel very close to the company, so it wouldn't be easy for me to turn in my badge, but I didn't see a reasonable alternative.
Either way, I was sure that I would continue to write software for the Macintosh, which was still brand new and overflowing with exciting opportunities for innovative applications (see Thunderscan) . I was confident that I could earn more money working independently than Apple was willing to pay me, even if you counted the appreciation of stock options, but financial matters were not my paramount consideration.
The main issue was that I wanted to be able to continue to make a difference in the Mac's evolution and I felt that no matter what I did on my own, it could only have a small fraction of the impact of work done for Apple. Even though things had gone relatively well so far, the Mac's long term success was far from certain, and it was entirely dependent on the moves that Apple made to evolve the platform.
Many of my closest friends were still working on the Mac team, so I heard a lot about what was going on at Apple. I usually drove down to Cupertino to visit them once every week or two, hanging out in the Bandley 3 fishbowl (see Spoiled?) , tentatively at first, but growing more comfortable when I saw that I was still welcome there. I lived next door to Mac hardware designer Burrell Smith, in separate houses on the same lot near downtown Palo Alto, so I heard about Burrell's trials and tribulations at work on a daily basis. Unfortunately, the news wasn't very encouraging.
The Mac team had merged with the Lisa team in Feburary 1984, a few weeks before I started my leave, creating a single large division. At the time, Steve Jobs claimed that the merger would help to transform the rest of Apple to be more like the Mac team, but to me it seemed like the opposite had occurred. The idealistic version of the Macintosh team that I yearned for had apparently vanished, subsumed by a large organization of the type that we used to make fun of, riven with bureaucratic obstacles and petty turf wars.
The core software group was still recovering from the intense effort to ship (see Real Artists Ship) and hadn't done very much all spring and summer, suffering from a classic case of massive post-partum depression. The LaserWriter printer was the current main focus of development, along with the AppleTalk network required to support it, and the core software team didn't have much to do with either. No one had set a compelling new goal for the team, and now it was just drifting.
Burrell Smith had completed the LaserWriter digital board and moved on to work on the "Turbo Macintosh", a new Macintosh digital board featuring a custom chip that supported 4-bit/pixel gray scale graphics and a fast DMA channel to interface an internal hard drive. But Burrell frequently complained of sparring with engineering manager Bob Belleville and others on his staff over trivial design decisions. He thought that Bob didn't really want to add a hard drive to the Mac, favoring the development of a Xerox style "file server" instead, and was therefore trying to surreptitiously kill the Turbo project. I didn't think that Burrell would put up with it much longer; as he phrased it, he was "asymptotically approaching liberation" from Apple.
The one saving grace was that Bud Tribble had finally completed his six year M.D./Ph.D. program at the University of Washington and decided to forgo practicing medicine in favor of returning to his old job at Apple as Macintosh software manager, working for Bob Belleville. In July 1984, he moved into a spare bedroom at Burrell's house in Palo Alto, next door to mine, so I got to see him frequently. I still had the highest respect for Bud, and I loved to show him whatever I was working on because he always managed to improve it with an insightful suggestion or two.
I had mixed feelings about returning to the lumbering Macintosh division, but Bud was a strong link to the good old days and I thought that perhaps we could establish a little outpost in the large organization where the original Macintosh values could prevail. But that didn't seem possible if Bud worked for Bob Belleville, my nemesis whom I blamed for many of the problems. The only solution I could think of was for Bud to work directly for Steve Jobs instead of working for Bob. Bud was all for it, but only Steve could make it happen. I called Steve's secretary Pat Sharp, and arranged to have dinner with Steve and Bud to discuss my possible return to Apple.
We met in the lobby of Bandley 3 and walked to an Italian restaurant on De Anza Boulevard a few blocks away. Steve seemed a bit preoccupied, and I was nervous about how he would react to what I had to say, because I had to implicitly criticize him to make my case. After we ordered dinner I cleared my throat and tentatively plunged ahead.
"As you know, I care a lot about Apple, and I really want to return from my leave of absence. I'd love to work for Bud again, but things seem really messed up right now." I paused for a moment as I gathered my resolve. "The software team is completely demoralized, and has hardly done a thing for months, and Burrell is so frustrated that he won't last to the end of the year..."
Steve cut me off abruptly with a withering stare. "You don't know what you're talking about!", he interrupted, seeming more amused than angry. "Things are better than ever. The Macintosh team is doing great, and I'm having the best time of my life right now. You're just completely out of touch."
I couldn't believe what I was hearing, or tell if Steve was serious or not. I looked to Bud, who communicated his bewilderment with an apologetic shrug of his shoulders, but I could see that he wasn't going to corroborate my views.
"If you really believe that, I don't think there's any way that I can come back," I replied, my hopes for returning sinking fast. "The Mac team that I want to come back to doesn't even exist anymore."
"The Mac team had to grow up, and so do you," Steve shot back. "I want you to come back, but if you don't want to, that's up to you. You don't matter as much as you think you do, anyway."
I saw that we were so far apart that there was little point in continuing the conversation. We finished dinner quickly and walked back to Apple without further discussion.
Actually, quitting was easier than I thought it would be; I just called up Apple's HR department and let them know that I wouldn't be coming back. I didn't even have to sign any paperwork or turn in my badge, which I still have today, almost twenty years later. I had thought it would feel devastating to finally resign, but instead I actually felt relieved for the situation to be resolved, and optimistic about writing Macintosh software on my own.
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The End Of An Era
The Mac division undergoes an inconceivable reorganization
Date: May 1985
Author: Andy Hertzfeld
Topics: Management,Personality,Personality Clashes,Quitting
Comments: 7
Rating: (4.66)
he original Macintosh enjoyed robust sales following its spectacular launch in January 1984 (see The Times They Are A-Changin') . Steve Jobs defined success as selling 50,000 units in the first 100 days, which was a high hurdle for a brand new computer with only a handful of applications available. In fact, Apple was able to sell more than 72,000 Macintoshes by end of April, and continued to ramp up to sell over 60,000 units in June 1984 alone.
I travelled to the 1984 National Computer Conference show in June 1984 with the Mac team, sharing a hotel room with Burrell Smith, even though I was on leave of absence (see Leave Of Absence) . Apple had assembled over a dozen small software developers who had written cool applications for the Macintosh, to display them at the trade show. Steve Jobs was ebullient, and thought that the sprouting applications and blossoming sales meant that we had turned the corner. When I ran into him on the floor of the show, he put his arm around my shoulder and exclaimed, "Look at all these applications! We did it! The Macintosh has made it!"
High sales spurred even rosier predictions for the upcoming holiday season. But as summer turned into fall, Macintosh sales began to decline. For a couple of months, the University Consortium (see What's A Megaflop?) kept volumes high by selling tens of thousands of low cost Macs to college students, but by Thanksgiving 1984, sales had slowed significantly. The marketing team forecast selling over 75,000 Macs per month for the important holiday season, but actually they didn't even break 20,000 units per month. In December 1984, the Apple II still accounted for about 70% of Apple's revenues.
As the new year dawned, Steve Jobs seemed oblivious to the slowing sales, and continued to behave as if the Macintosh was a booming, unqualified success. His lieutenants in the Macintosh division, which had swelled to more than 700 employees, had to deal with a growing reality gap, reconciling the ever-changing audacious plans for world domination emanating from their leader with the persistent bad news from the sales channel.
Meanwhile, the Macintosh engineering team had not been very productive. The Mac was crying out for an internal hard drive, and some kind of high bandwidth port to attach it to, but there weren't any significant upgrades on the horizon, even though the basic hardware hadn't changed (except for additional RAM) for a year. In the fall of 1984, Steve Jobs tried to rally the remains of the original Mac team around the "Turbo Mac" project, featuring a new digital board with custom chips and fast I/O for an internal hard drive to be designed by Burrell Smith. But Burrell felt that engineering manager Bob Belleville was flinging lots of gratuitous obstacles in his path, and it eventually became so frustrating that he quit the company in February 1985 (see Are You Gonna Do It?) .
The only upcoming new product was the LaserWriter printer, based on Canon's 300 dots/inch laser printing engine, with a digital board designed by Burrell Smith and software written by Adobe, a new company founded by Xerox alumni John Warnock and Chuck Geschke. Like the Macintosh itself, Adobe's Postscript software at the heart of the LaserWriter was years ahead of its time, and was capable of producing exquisitely beautiful pages. Unfortunately, the LaserWriter had one major flaw: its retail price was over $7,000, almost triple the cost of a Macintosh.
Joanna Hoffman, the Mac team's original marketing person, transfered from international marketing back to the main product marketing group in early 1985, to help deal with the growing crisis. At the first sales meeting that she attended, she was surprised to see that the sales forecasts for the upcoming quarter were unchanged from six months ago, when things were still looking good, and were almost four times what they were currently selling. Everybody was informally assuming more realistic numbers, but no one had the heart to cut the official forecast, because they were afraid to tell Steve about it. Joanna immediately slashed the forecasts, to the relief of the sales and manufacturing team.
The weak sales were beginning to put pressure on the relationship between Steve Jobs and John Sculley for the very first time. They had gotten along fine when everything was going well, but hitherto they never had to deal with much adversity. Unfortunately, in early 1985 the personal computer market was descending into one of its periodic downturns, and even Apple II sales were starting to falter. Steve did not take criticism very well, and sometimes reacted to suggestions for improving Macintosh sales as if they were personal attacks. Their relationship began to sour as John put pressure on Steve to address the Macintosh's problems.
Steve Jobs had never suffered fools gladly, and as the pressure mounted, he became even more difficult to work with. Employees from every part of the company began to approach John with complaints about Steve's behavior, including some of Steve's direct reports in the Macintosh Division. John felt especially strongly about building more compatibility bridges with the IBM PC, an approach which Steve disdained. John began to view Steve as an impediment toward fixing Apple's problems, and the board of directors were urging him to do something about it.
Steve had often professed that he preferred working with small teams on new products, and that he didn't really want to run a large organization with hundreds of employees. Apple's board felt that he should hand the reins of the Macintosh division over to a professional management team, and return to his core strength as a new product visionary.
Steve had recently met an interesting character named Steve Kitchen, who was introduced to him by Steve Capps. Steve Kitchen was a fast talking, enthusiastic entrepreneur who had developed a couple of successful Atari video games. He claimed to have recently invented a revolutionary flat screen display technology that could facilitate portable computers. Steve Jobs was intrigued by the prospect of developing a lightweight portable computer, years ahead of its time, and he considered having Apple buy the technology and start a research organization called "Apple Labs" to develop it. But he seemed ambivalent, sometimes enthusiastic about starting Apple Labs, but other times he seemed determined to prove that he could manage the large division.
The conflict came to a head at the April 10th board meeting. The board thought they could convince Steve to transition back to a product visionary role, but instead he went on the attack and lobbied for Sculley's removal. After long wrenching discussions with both of them, and extending the meeting to the following day, the board decided in favor of John, instructing him to reorganize the Macintosh division, stripping Steve of all authority. Steve would remain the chairman of Apple, but for the time being, no operating role was defined for him.
John didn't want to implement the reorganization immediately, because he still thought that he could reconcile with Steve, and get him to buy into the changes, achieving a smooth transition with his blessing. But after a brief period of depressed cooperation, Steve started attacking John again, behind the scenes in a variety of ways. I won't go into the details here, but eventually John had to remove Steve from his management role in the Macintosh division involuntarily. Apple announced Steve's removal, along with the first quarterly loss in their history as well as significant layoffs, on Friday, May 31, 1985, Fridays being the traditional time for companies to announce bad news. It was surely one of the lowest points of Apple history.
I was shocked when I heard the news that morning from a friend at Apple, and immediately drove down to Cupertino to see what was going on, and commiserate with my friends. I was aware of the problem with Macintosh sales, but it was still inconceivable to me that the board could oust Steve Jobs, who was clearly the heart and soul of the company, difficult as he may sometimes be. It was almost impossible to imagine the Macintosh team without him at the helm. I thought that perhaps I wasn't hearing the whole story, and that something would emerge to help it make more sense.
I arrived at the Apple campus soon after Sculley's communication meeting finished, where he explained the nature of the reorganization and the accompanying layoffs. The way that people were milling around listlessly reminded me of Black Wednesday four years earlier (see Black Wednesday) , when Mike Scott unexpectedly purged the Apple II group. A few folks from the Apple II division who resented Steve's superior attitude seemed elated, and a few others saw the shake-up as an opportunity for personal advancement, but most of Apple's employees were sombre and depressed, feeling sad and uncertain about the future.
Lots of people had varying stories about what had actually happened. I thought that maybe it meant that Steve had decided to pursue AppleLabs, and that maybe I could come back to Apple to work on a small team again. I was anxious to talk to Steve himself, and find out his take on it, and I wasn't the only one. Bill Atkinson, Bud Tribble, Steve Capps and myself arranged to visit Steve at his house in Woodside for dinner on Sunday evening, two days after the reorganization was announced.
I had never been to Steve's house in Woodside before. It was a 14-bedroom, 17,250 square foot Spanish colonial style mansion built in 1926 that Steve had purchased around a year ago, in 1984. We knocked on the door and waited a few minutes before Steve appeared and led us inside. The massive house was almost completely unfurnished, and our footsteps echoed eerily as he led us to a large room near the kitchen, with a long table, one of the few rooms that had any furniture.
We stood around the kitchen chatting, as Steve prepared some food. His girlfriend Tina was there, who I had met a few times before; I was impressed by her mix of kindness and intelligence. Bill started chatting with Tina as I finally got a chance to ask Steve about the reorganization.
"So what really happened at Apple?", I asked him, even though I was scared to bring it up so directly. "Is it really as bad as it looks?"
"No, it's worse", Steve replied with a pained expression. "It's much worse than you can imagine."
Steve was adamant about blaming John Sculley for everything that had happened. He felt that John had betrayed him and he had little faith that Sculley or anyone else could manage Apple without him. He said that his role as chairman was completely ceremonial, and it left him with no actual responsibilities. In fact, Apple had already moved his office from Bandley 3 to Bandley 6, a small building across the street that was almost empty. The new office was so remote from day to day operations that it later was nicknamed "Siberia".
We had a pleasant dinner, huddled around one end of the long table, mainly reminiscing about the good old days developing the Mac but occasionally engaging in grim speculation about Apple's future. Steve had arranged for some gourmet vegetarian food to be delivered, and we drank some excellent wine. Dessert consisted of handfuls of locally grown Olson's cherries, grabbed from a large wooden crate that Steve kept in the kitchen.
After dinner, we retired to another room that had an expensive stereo system and an elaborate model of the mostly underground house that Steve planned to build to replace the one we were standing in. I had brought along a copy of Bob Dylan's new album with me, "Empire Burlesque", which was just released earlier that week, because I knew that Steve, like myself, was a big Bob Dylan fan, although Steve thought that Dylan hadn't done anything worthwhile since "Blood on the Tracks" a decade ago. I placed the album on a hi-tech turntable that seemed to be mounted on aluminum cones and played the last song, "Dark Eyes", which was slow and mournful, with a sad, fragile melody and lyrics that seemed relevant to the situation at Apple. But Steve didn't like the song, and wasn't interested in hearing the rest of the album, reiterating his negative opinion of recent Dylan.
Later, when it was time to leave, we lingered outside under the beautiful summer night sky. We were all pretty emotional by then, especially Steve. I tried to convince him that the change wasn't necessarily so bad, and that I would be excited about returning to Apple to work with him on a small team again. But Steve was inconsolable, and more depressed than I had ever seen him before. As we left, I thought that it was lucky that he had Tina there to keep him company in the cavernous mansion.
It took a while for me to understand the consequences of the reorganization. The best news for me was that my nemesis Bob Belleville had resigned from Apple, because he had sided with Steve during the recent infighting and burned too many bridges to continue. Most of the rest of Steve's staff stayed on to work for Jean-Louis Gassee, who replaced Steve in the reorganized division, although Mike Murray resigned soon thereafter. Steve Jobs spent most of the summer traveling, trying to figure out what to do next. He was still the chairman of Apple Computer, but he was so at odds with the rest of its leadership that it was hard to see how he could remain there much longer.
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