CONVERSATIONS

Oral History Collection

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_By Len Shustek

For many years the Computer History Museum has had an active program to gather videotaped histories from people who have done pioneering work in this first century of the information age. These recordings are a rich aggregation of stories that are preserved in the collection, transcribed, and made available on the web to researchers, students, and anyone curious about how invention happens.

The oral histories the Museum collects are conversations about people’s lives. We want to know about their upbringing, their families, their education, and their jobs. But above all, we want to know how they came to the passion and creativity that leads to innovation.

Here, as an example, are excerpts from an interview conducted by Grady Booch on June 8, 2004, of Bill Atkinson and Andy Hertzfeld, who were major contributors to the creation of the Apple Macintosh.¹

The early 1980s were the Gold Rush days for the personal computer. We want to learn about the atmosphere of the time. There was, everyone says, something different about Apple.

HETZFELD: The first computer I owned was an Apple II, serial number 1708, which I bought in January 1978. I wanted my own computer and checked out the Altairs and the IMSAIs, but I wasn't handy enough with a soldering iron. When the Apple II happened, I knew it was for me. I was a grad student at UC Berkeley, but it quickly just took over my life.

I wasn't an Apple employee then. I was one of those people who were led to Apple like a moth to the flame; the Apple II attracted me to Apple. I started at Apple in August of ’79.

ATKINSON: The thing that drew me to Apple was this notion that you can do something with your life. Making a dent in the world is what Steve Jobs used to call it. You can have an impact for the positive if you are where things are being created.

I came to Apple in 1978. I was hired as the application software department, because there wasn't one. Actually, at the time I was a little better at pushing chips than software, but that’s what they needed. So, okay, I can do that.

There is a famous legend that the Apple team visited Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center) and carried away the user-interface ideas. What really happened?

ATKINSON: In 1979, when the Lisa team went to visit, we got to see the Alto and the Smalltalk System and I think the Bravo text editor. What people misunderstand is that we didn't just copy what we saw. It gave us great inspiration and gave us great confidence that, yes, we did want to do windowing, but then we had to go incrementally, evolutionary-wise, and develop this user interface a piece at a time by a lot of trial and error and a lot of stupid mistakes.

What really helped us was user testing. Larry Tesler was big on this. We wanted a beginning person to walk up and be able to figure it out. We’d give them tasks and say, “Here, edit this document and save it,” and asked them to mutter a stream of consciousness. What are they thinking about? That was very important because why they do something is just as important as what they do. Thousands of these kinds of tests where you find that people made mistakes are what led us to the user interface.

The Mac project was run very differently from—and almost in competition with—the Lisa that had been started years earlier.

HERTZFELD: The Mac design did not flow out of the Lisa hardware. It was more like the Apple II, where you had a crazy genius coming up with very unorthodox techniques not used anywhere else. Burrell Smith, who designed the Macintosh digital board, really learned from Woz. The Apple II was the immediate predecessor of the Macintosh hardware, not the Lisa.

Lisa had seven different applications all developed by Apple, which was another way the Lisa team diverged from the Apple II. One of the characteristics of the Apple II was the third-party market. With Lisa the idea was that all the applications would be written by Apple. But you get a different spirit. The Mac brought it back home. It combined the Apple II spirit and a thriving third-party community. And Burrell and Woz are similar-type designers: the crazy genius instead of the conservative committee.

ATKINSON: The goals of the two were very different. We were designing the Lisa for an office worker, and since we weren’t office workers ourselves, it was kind of hard to know exactly what they wanted. When the Mac was designed, I think we had a pretty clear picture of a fourteen-year-old boy using this thing, and we knew what they were like.

Every company has a unique culture for writing software. What was the Mac culture?

HERTZFELD: Freewheeling. Bill was really the center of coming up with the user interface, but he worked at home so he would come in maybe two or three times a week, usually when he had discovered something new. We would all gather around and talk about it and give him feedback.

ATKINSON: I’d get good suggestions from other people and say, “Oh, that’s a good idea.”

HERTZFELD: It was very loose. In the Lisa group there were a lot more philosophical arguments about what is the best way to do it in the abstract. With the Mac, it was much more, “Try it out and see how it feels,” every step of the way.

But creating software is about more than writing programs that work.

ATKINSON: It’s an art form. It’s not just practical: “Does it do the job?” But is it clean inside? I would spend time rewriting whole sections of code just to make them more cleanly organized, more clear. I'm a firm believer that the best way to prevent bugs is to make it so that you can read the code and understand exactly what it’s doing.

That was a little bit counter to what I ran into when I first came to Apple. There were a lot of people who prided themselves on how this little piece of code does something magic. I found that if I spent time going over the code, cleaning it up, making it sometimes tighter, but also making it so that it was straightforward for another person to follow in my footsteps, then I would feel proud of it.

Just as famous as the Apple visit to Xerox was Bill Gates’s visit to Apple. Did Bill get it?

HERTZFELD: Well, he didn't get every detail, but definitely when he saw the Mac and the graphical user interface, he believed in it. He put a lot of resources on it, and Microsoft was really helpful in tweaking some of our rough edges. For a while they had almost as many people on the Mac as Apple did.

We always end by asking for advice for the next generation of innovators, in this case for software developers.

ATKINSON: If you want to get it smooth, you’ve got to rewrite it from scratch at least five times. Do a lot of user testing, because you can’t see the things that you can’t see. Don’t try to ship that first prototype; hold off, and let it incubate in privacy. Don’t tell the marketing

people you’re done when you’ve got the first fifth of it done! The thing that makes software smooth and useable is user testing, user testing, and user testing.

HERTZFELD: Pick things to work on that you really, really want to use yourself. You can close the loop with the user testing, but if you are one of the users, you can just iterate in your head.

Of all the things you can work on, work on the thing that isn't in the world that you want to make be in the world. Then you can be both user and creator. There is real power in that. To some extent, that’s the secret of the Mac’s success. We all wanted the Mac more than anyone else. So much so, that we had to make it.

Follow your heart. You have to do work each day that you believe in.

And that, my friends, is advice that applies to more than just writing software.

1. Oral histories are not scripted, and a transcript of casual speech is very different from what one would write. I have taken the liberty of editing and reordering freely for presentation. For the original transcript, see: archive.computerhistory.org/ search/oh.