Revolution in the Valley |
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introduction by Steve Wozniak O'Reilly: Sebastopol, California: 2004 |
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296 + xxiv pages; profusely illustrated | May 2008 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
The insiders' view for the rest of us Revolution in the Valley is an insiders' view of the creation of the epochal Apple Macintosh computer. Andy Hertzfeld was one of the central insiders; he began writing anecdotes for his Macintosh folklore collection which developed into this excellent and very readable history. There is some overlap and duplication as the focus shifts, but that's all right. The book's subtitle is: The Insanely Great Story of How the Mac Was Made. Insanely great is Steve Jobs' visionary target for what Apple Computer's Macintosh development team should be striving for: not a good product, not even a great one, but something insanely great that would change the world. And it was insanely great, and it changed the world. Revolution in the Valley has the flavor of a memoir and photo album. Yet there's a lot of more-or-less technical stuff here. Perhaps the most appropriate readers outside those involved at Apple Computer would be: curious or reminiscent owners of Macintoshes, especially early models; historically-minded programmers; anyone interested in human usability design, particularly the graphical user interface; students of the history of technology; or students of the psychology of how teams and enterprises function. — I happen to be somewhat representative of all these groups, so I may be one of the more ideally targeted readers. But if you fit into any of the groups, you should find plenty to enjoy in the book. This is very much a history of people, with lots of portraits of bright folks dealing with interesting challenges: Steve Jobs of course; Bill Atkinson, Steven Capps, Donn Denman, Joanna Hoffman, Bruce Horn, Susan Kare, Larry Kenyon, Jef Raskin, Burrell Smith, Randy Wigginton, and a few others. And some who were perhaps more stumbling blocks than visionary builders.
There's a nice discussion of the famous Macintosh 1984 television commercial. Some managerial walking-dead ideas keep rising from the grave, however often they're staked. I've run into this foolishness myself more than once: The first computer I ever liked One early program that I do not see mentioned is ResEdit, Apple's resource editor. After I'd had my Mac a while, I began ordering ResEdit and other Mac goodies from the Berkeley Macintosh User Group. ResEdit allowed one to alter icons, fonts, and menus, and tweak other operating system internals. Meddling with the live System running your computer was strongly discouraged, and this was graphically emphasized in ResEdit's own icon, which was a jack-in-the-box with crosses for eyes — indicating a dead System was the likely result of using it. This was appropriate. Doing assorted ad hoc customizations over the next few years, I crashed the Mac System plenty of times. Fun, though. There are lots of illustrations in Revolution in the Valley: people, sketches, designs, screen shots, prototypes, publicity. Some of the illustrations allow me to re-breathe the freshness of those times. Lots of little icons, now old-fashioned and obsolete. The cover of the first issue of Macworld magazine, which I bought in a store; I sent in to start my subscription with the second issue. Many, many more. Revolution in the Valley is a unique history, and very much a book to enjoy.
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© 2008 Robert Wilfred Franson |
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