Science Friday - When The ‘Personal’ Computer Turned 30

Episode Date: January 24, 2024

When Steve Jobs unveiled the Apple Macintosh in January of 1984, the visual user interface, all-in-one design, and mouse-controlled navigation were revolutionary. Design team member Andy Hertzfeld and industry observer Steven Levy look back on the early days of personal computing, and talk about how the Macintosh came to be.Transcripts for each segment are available on sciencefriday.com Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

What did it take to put the personal in personal computing? Hello, I imagine us. It sure is great to get out of that bad. 40 years ago today, the Apple Macintosh was unveiled. It's Wednesday, January 24th, but my calendar app says it's Science Friday. I'm SciFry producer Charles Burgst. When Steve Jobs unveiled the Apple Macintosh in January of 1984, the visual user interface, all-in-one design,

and mouse-controlled navigation were revolutionary. On the 30th anniversary of the Macintosh, Ira spoke with design team member Andy Hertzfeld, and industry observer Stephen Levy, about the early days of personal computing and how the Macintosh came to be. This conversation was recorded in 2014. 30 years ago this week,

Super Bowl viewers saw an ad that would become an icon, a commercial produced by Ridley Scott. On January 24th, Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh, and you'll see why 1984 won't be like 1984. And then 30 years ago today, the first of many showy on-stage product introductions for Steve Jobs. We've done a lot of talking about Macintosh recently. But today, for the first time ever, I'd like to let McIntosh speak for itself. Hello, I'm Macintosh. It sure is great to get out of that bag.

When I'm accustomed as I am to public speaking, I'd like to share with you a maximize all of the first time I made an IBM mainframe. Never trust a computer you can't with. Obviously I can't talk, but right now, I'd like to sit back and listen. So it is with considerable pride that I am sure. Produce a man who's been like a father to me, Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs promised that his new computer would be unlike any other, a computer for the rest of us. What made the Mac so different? How could it have created such a close-knit following that it divided the world into,

I'm a Mac, I'm a PC? That's what we'll be talking about this hour, and I'm delighted to have two guests who were present at the creation of the Macintosh. Stephen Levy, senior writer for Wired, author of the book, insanely great, The Life in Times of Macintosh, the computer that changed everything. Also, just out, the Macintosh is 30, and I was there for it. It's birth. It's on the wire.com. Welcome back, Steve.

Thank you. Also, where this is Andy Hertzfeld. He's a software engineer who was a member of the original Macintosh design team. He wrote the book, Revolution in the Valley, the insanely great story of how the Mac was made, sharing some of his behind-the-scenes stories of the development of the Mac. Welcome, Andy. Hi, glad to be here. Both joining us from Stanford University.

Were you guys at that first demo? Yeah, you bet. I wasn't. I finished my story for Rolling Stone. I was in New York sort of tracking it. Unfortunately, no one was live tweeting it. I was scared to death our demo was going to crash. Were you?

It was about 30 years ago exactly to this hour. it would have been going on Pacific time, right? Yeah. Yeah. You were scared it was going to crash. Yeah, as it did many times in rehearsal. So Steve was sort of afraid himself, or was he extremely confident after it was going to happen? Yeah, I'm sure he was quite nervous.

Steve, you're right that in Wired that the minute you first met the Mac, you knew it would change the lives of millions of people. How did you know that's right? Tell us about that. Well, you have to put yourself in a mind frame of where we were 30 years ago. And so many people use computers now. And, of course, they're not 30 years old even. But back then, it was the very primitive times. We were almost like cave people.

The computers we used, which weren't very popular of them. They were just popular among a small group of enthusiasts or hardcore IT people. And they had these green phosphorescent letters. It was very hard to control. You had to learn these incantations to make things happen. There were these things you had to worry about what modes. Am I in the editing mode? Am I in the writing mode?

And there comes Macintosh. And I remember very clearly the woman who gave me the first demo the day I visited the Mac team in November, 1983, pulled this beautiful thing out of the box. It was a computer you could lift and turned it on. And immediately it was like a published document. There was, you know, dark text on the screen. It started off with a smile.

And you could manipulate the texts like almost like a magical printing press. And I realized this is actually a natural way to do things. It was just easy to move things around. There were none of these complicated modes. And I said, I want one. And I think a lot of people are. And this is the better way to do things. Andy, how much of the success of Mac do you think was due to these little parts of the friendly image,

the icon that's mild when you booted up, the sad Mac face when something went wrong? Even the bomb, I remember. Sure. How much was that all due to its success due to that humanizing of the machine? Yeah, some of it was due to its personality and spirit. But really the main thing was we really loved the user. We cared about the user. We wanted them to have a great experience.

The Macintosh was really the first affordable computer that really cared about ease of use, that really tried to meet the user on their terms rather than making the user work on its terms. And Stephen Levy, how crucial was Steve Jobs to this? They basically synonymous here. I don't know, 100% synonymous there. In the Venn diagram, he covered a lot of shade, but not 100%. And, you know, when I did this story, I was writing for Rolling Stone documenting it. I found myself in the middle of this controversy that it occurred about the original person who started the Macintosh team had been forced out.

And he was unhappy about it. And I, you know, got an earful from him about it. And, you know, again, did discuss this with Steve Jobs. We finally had an interview. But I think it's undeniable that Steve Jobs was the impresar. He was the person who had the last word about what we saw. He was the person who drove Andy and the rest of them to the finish line on this. So I think he deserves a major, major share of credit for that.

Andy, how were you recruited and all the other people? How did you get to this project and did you seek it out? Yeah, I sought it out. The Macintosh was a tiny little research project at Apple when I started in the summer of 1979. The first thing was I met Burrell Smith, the hardware designer of the Mac. I became good friends with him, started helping him with some demos. I was jealous that it wasn't my job to work on the Macintosh. I was just helping him a little bit on the side. And then in February of 1981, there was a big management shakeup at Apple, where they fired my manager. And I took that opportunity

to ask, hey, maybe I could go work on the Macintosh with Burrell and Bud. And, and I, and And so that's how I got started. There's a story I tell in my book about when Steve finally decided. At first, when I met with Steve and he goes, are you any good? Are you good enough to work on the Mac? We only want really good people. And so then he decided I was good enough. And he came by my cubicle.

And he said, I'm taking you to start work on the Mac. And I said, well, just give me a day or two to finish up the stuff I was doing for the Apple too. And he said, no. And he unplugged my computer, causing me to lose the work I was doing and just carried it away. And what could I do but follow him? And I should add that Andy is really, really good. Steve made a great choice there. And he's had a great career at the Macintosh and afterwards.

Was Steve like that? Would it be a kind of guy who walk up to your desk and rip out your computer and get your attention that way? Yes. Steve was the master of dramatic gestures. Any others you could share with us? Oh, sure, all the time. I mean, one thing that's relevant now is he really foretold the future how he drummed into us, how important the work we were going to be doing.

We were all excited anyway because we love the Apple II and we saw a chance to bring the joy we found in the Apple II wasn't accessible to most people because it was just too complicated to use. So we thought we could be doing a really good. good thing for the world, but it was Steve who just hammered it into us how important it was, and that really made us work that much harder. But there's all kinds of stories about Steve doing amazing. Bruce Horn has a story when he started on the Macintosh. We needed a Lisa Macintosh's ancestor to develop software for the Mac, and he didn't have one. And so Steve told him to go get to take one, steal one right off the desk of John Couch, who was running the

Elicotine. Wow. And so, but this was a great leap of faith on jobs as part and your part, that something like this is a totally different way of doing things. Not really. We didn't think of it as the leap of faith. It was obvious to us once we got it going. It was so much a better way. So there were some risky aspects, but not really in the, in the core paradigm. It was better. We knew it. We knew it from the very beginning, we still believe in that. And, Steve, there's the mythology of Apple that the early days it was a computer club, it was made in a garage. Well, none of that is true.

No, that is true. Apple came out of the Homebrew Computer Club. Was designed the Apple to, not to make money as a product, but to impress his friends at the Homebrew Club. But by the time you got to the Mac, it was a, Steve, it had a lot more money in the company. It was not a garage company. That's right. It was a public company by then, and everyone wanted to see what Apple was going to do next. By that time, the IBMPC had been introduced, and that was very, very, very popular.

And it was threatened to eclipse the Apple 2? And, in fact, it did. And it really became a question of was Apple's next computer going to be able to compete with the IBM PC? And when I did my Rolling Stone story for the launch of the Mac, it was very clearly, this young team of designers against the big bad IBM. And when I interviewed Steve, he framed it in just that way. He said, if we don't stop IBM, no one is going to do that.

And that's why we saw that commercial, that commercial that, you know, the evil empire was clearly supposed to be IBM. And where did the phrase the computer for the rest of us? Was that Steve's idea? You know, I'm not sure who exactly thought it up. I think it was probably Steve. Hayden at Chiat Day. But certainly Steve and raised it.

Public relations firm, yeah. No, they were the advertising firm who created the 1984 commercial as well as lots of other stuff. Did that phrase catch on immediately? I think so, but I'm not sure. I think it did. And sometimes, as things often do, when Apple didn't live up to that, it was thrown back in Apple's face.

Really? In what way? I've heard it called like the computer for the rich of us. Yeah, yeah. I see. It cost more than the, I think, Annie will confirm, the team wanted. And it costs more than Steve wanted to cost. The board, Apple's board decided to price it, you know, much higher than the competition because they said, well, it's better.

Old people will buy it. And initially, we're going to sell all we can make. But it was a start. It took Mac a long time. time to catch up in the marketplace. We'll be right back our number 844-724-8255. Talking with Stephen Levy, Andy Hertzfeld, about the 30th anniversary of the Mac. Stay with us. We'll be right back after this break. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. We're talking this hour about the creation of the Apple Macintosh 30 years ago announcement today. My guests are Stephen Levy of Wired,

Andy Hertzfeld, a member of the original Macintosh design team, our number 844-825. Andy, some people criticize Steve and Apple for what they see is taking credit for the main new introduction, the new feature of the Mac, which was the mouse, which was developed at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center Park. Is that being overly critical? Yeah, I think so. I mean, Steve never claimed to have invented the mouse or the basic underlying technology. What Steve deserves enormous credit for was realizing that it was the right way to do things, adopting. Also, one of the things that Apple does deserve credit for is going to the one button mouse. The Xerox software that we originally saw had three different buttons, which always created confusion. Well, which button should I use in this case?

We simplified it down to one button, so there was no question about what you needed to do. Let's go to the phones. Let's go to Dave in Pittsburgh. Hi, Dave. Hi, Ira, enjoy your show and enjoy your guests today. Back when I was a young teacher, I would go to these clubs, computer clubs, and people would bring Macs and Apple 2Es. And I did never afford either, but I borrowed one from school. Soon the buzz became, hey, there's this other system out there, the PC. My question is, how did IBM let the PC become public? And why did Apple keep their architecture private?

Can you answer that? Good, good questions. Thanks for calling. Yeah. Still to this day. Well, you know, there's degrees of openness. And the Macintosh sought third-party developers. It was open to the extent that anyone in the world,

if they wanted to, could write software for it. The reason we didn't make it open hardware-wise was we wanted the Macintosh to be simple and easy to use. And it gets very, very complicated if you allow people to add additional hardware, then you get into issues of configuring the drivers. I mean, I think sometimes in the PC world it's kind of a nightmare just to get everything working and keep it working. There was a brief period.

I remember building one when you could build a Mac on, you know, third-party hardware. Apple allowed this to happen. That's right. It didn't really go very far. It was awful today. Yeah, the stuff was, you know, it didn't really cost much less. And it was, it didn't work as well as the Apple ones. And when Steve Jobs came back to Apple in 1997, he pulled the plug on that program and went back to his original instincts that he had for the Macintosh.

and I think he did pretty well with that. Do you think the Mac and the OS7 are going to meet somewhere in the middle, your cell phone and your program? I think that, you know, we're in a really interesting time now. You know, the Macintosh was, I think, thrust this into this new world

of, you know, computing or it was visuals called the graphical user interface. And I think actually it lasted probably longer than a lot of people thought, maybe even too long, considering how much computers improve. And I think for the last few years, we're finally seeing an evolution out of that phase as we're excited about the new ways we control computers on devices like phones and

tablets. And what's happening is what Apple's doing is it's developing the Macintosh operating system by bringing in pieces of that device system, that iOS system, into it there. Similarly, Microsoft is devising its Windows system by borrowing from its phone system there. So I think we're seeing finally an evolution really based on people's mobile use of computers. Andy, tell us about

the time you had to demo the Macintosh to Bill Gates. Well, people forget it now, but Microsoft was a key partner of Apple in creating the Macintosh. We were counting on them to create many of the initial applications.

They were the first developer. I remember the first time we gave them a Mac, which was after we demoed it to it, I felt kind of wistful that it was leaving our nest, our little baby for the first time. Microsoft got the very first one. But anyway, I was actually, it turns out you needed at the time, which was July 1981, you needed a Lisa just to load programs for the Macintosh. But the Lisa group did not allow Bill Gates, did not want Bill Gates to see. to Lisa. The Lisa was still an unannounced product. And Apple for the Lisa was taking a different

strategy of writing all the applications themselves. So we had a 25 foot long cable going from an office with a closed door with the Lisa to the Mac. And I was running back and forth, hitting keys on the Lisa to download the software and then back to the Mac and show it. But when we were demoing the Mac, Bill asked a question about how the cursor worked. And it actually, it Actually, Bill Gates, in my observation, didn't like to be told things. He wanted to figure it out and get us to confirm it. And so he asked what kind of hardware do we have to drive the cursor because he assumed that the hardware was doing the work, but really it was the software.

And so I was about to tell him that where Steve didn't like me telling that. So he just yelled out, shut up at the top of his voice to drown me out. And Bill knew something was going on there, but not quite what. You know, that's true that people do forget that Microsoft supplied the first really useful writing tools and calculus tools and the office sort of sweep to the map. That's right. To this day, if you talk to Bill Gates, he will not let you forget it. He says, you know, repeatedly says, we had more people working on Macintosh software than Apple did. I don't know if that's true or not.

Well, we wanted to keep our software team as small as we could because we cared so much about the quality. quality. And so, you know, we had about 10 people. I don't know how many he had. But of course, Apple had more people working on the total Macintosh because software was only part of it. Who was responsible for the whole look and feel of the screen, those, you know, the faces and bombs and all that kind of stuff? It was a team effort, but Susan Kerr was the artist. She was my friend from high school. I knew we were developing a graphical computer. And so we needed some graphical talent. Susan has a tremendous sense of humor. She's incredibly bright. So she was a perfect, perfect match for us. She started in 1983 and designed all the icons and fonts for the Macintosh.

But what I would say is the overall look and feel was a consensus of the team. Steve Jobs played a huge part at being the ultimate decision maker. He was the one who tell us it was good enough or not. More often, it wasn't good enough. But then Bill Atkinson, you've got to mention him. He was really the key visionary and designer of the basic user interface, mainly for the Lisa. He was on the Lisa team. But we took almost everything Bill did for the Macintosh.

And Andy had a big role in that, too. One of the delights that I had the first day I met the Macintosh was meeting Andy and Bill there. And it was later to learn about their tremendous impact they had on it. Andy's one of, Andy's one of those rare engineers that, you know, fits out Steve Jobs' model of liberal arts meeting engineering there. You know, he gets both sides. It sounded like, you know, that your network of close friends was open for the taking, for job-wise. You know, people, small company. Sure, sure.

But they had to be good enough. And no one could work on it because they were your friend. but if they had the right talent and could help us, sure. Steve, does Apple still have the McIntoshness, the Appleness from those early days, do you think? Well, that's a great question. I think, look, it's a much bigger company now, but I think they really do try to cultivate that specialness there in what they do. You know, that's really what distinguishes them from other companies there. for a long time

it's kind of funny Apple's sort of tried to distance itself from its most rabid fans they thought well we're a serious company and you know

we're not going to cater so much to these people and Apple they didn't really develop the game market for Macintoshes and other things there and I think that though Apple now reaches a much

bigger audience there I sense that they do do try to make the most of the intense interest of them. And you see, leading up to every introduction, there's just elaborate dance between the rumors, places, and Apple there, which I think benefits both sides. Does Apple, does the Mac still have an advantage with this new interface that had brought on like it did years ago?

Certainly that is not something that's exclusive to the Mac anymore. Well, Windows, you know, was, I think, emulated a lot of what happened. and the Macintosh, you know, from Bill Gates point of view, we said they were both borrowing from Xerox. So what's the difference? But I don't think, you know, you would have seen Windows developed the way it was if it wasn't for the Macintosh there. But I think, you know, Apple tries in its way to get things, you know,

just right and present that delight to what it does. And Apple retains the original advantage of making both the hardware and software in concert. Microsoft's model was successful in a business sense, but not as successful in a product sense because it was much harder to innovate when you had to coordinate many different companies and achieve consensus with them,

whereas Apple is still in control of the whole thing, the hardware, the software, the marketing, and can make an integrated, beautiful experience. It seems to me that the, both the iPhone and the iPad, incredibly successful today, but they're the culmination of the Macintosh. They are on that same line. They really didn't even start with the Macintosh. In my mind, it started with the Apple II and that certain amazing spirit of the Apple II. And I see that in the iPad, and I expect to see it in future Apple products years from now.

Well, why didn't Steve Jobs just continue with the Apple II line? What was the impetus to say, I've got to try something totally different? Something in... The technology. The Apple 2 had an 8-bit microprocessor that could only address 64K bits of RAM. It was bound to be obsolete in just a few years because of the unrelenting progress in the underlying silicon. That's what's really so exciting about the technology industry is everything needs to be reinvented every decade or so. And was that the insane, you both in both of your books, you use the phrase insanely great? Is that what, what was the insanely great part if you could sum that up?

Well, that phrase was Steve's phrase, but the insanely great part was here was a computer that with very little preparation or effort you can figure out to use just sitting down in front of it with no instruction. I think also it says something about, you know, Steve Jobs and the demands he made. on his team there. He said to me, he said, well, you know, other people, they do things they try to be great, but we have to be insanely great. It shows the, you know,

the standard he set was a standard that, you know, maybe even, you know, some people in the team thought they couldn't even reach. But that's what he demanded. So they worked up to it. What's also interesting about the MAC, even the original Mac, is that it was made to be networked.

It was made to be hooked up on a network where the original PC was supposed to sit there in your laptop, right on your desktop. And whose decision? What kind of design decision was that? Was that purposely put there to make it a business environment? To say the Mac? No, not. Not it for. Well, that was really Burrell Smith, the hardware designer for the Macintosh. We discovered this serial communications chip that gave us the serial ports that we needed to talk to printers and modems. But the cool thing about that chip is you could also do a local area network with it. And so we incorporated that chip. It took us another year or two to develop the networking software. But a guy named

Sedu had a great team in 1984 and 1985 and developed Apple Talk, the first zero configuration local area network. And it took off from there. I'm Ira Plato and this is Science Friday from PRI, Public Radio International. Talking with Steve Levy and Andy Hertzfeld. Steve is the author of the book Insanely Great, The Life and Times of Macintosh, the computer that changed everything. You're coming out with a new edition, Steve, I understand. Yeah, today I decided to append the transcript of the interview I did with Steve Jobs

when I was doing that Rollingston story on the eve of the launch. It's about 11,000 words. And it really is a fascinating look into the way he was then, And in some respects, he had a very consistent design philosophy, which he kept, you know, really for the rest of his life. In other senses, he was still learning how to deal with the public there. And, you know, in some sense, that's wrong. He talks about his personal life in a way that I think he would have been more circumspect about later in life. He had an interesting dinner with him back.

Yeah, it was fascinating. He told me if the Maccandosh didn't work out, maybe he would go to Italy and race motorcycles or something. and how can we get a copy of is that just a part of your new book that's going to be issued? Yeah, just today, you know, I'm still figuring out how to get all these places to update it. So today it's available in the Kindle edition, and it'll be available to the other E version soon,

and whenever, you know, Penguin gets to implement it, then you'll see it in dead trees. Andy, is Revolution in the Valley, the insanely great story of how the Mac was made. Is that still in print available? Yeah, there's a paperback that came out in 2011 that's still in print. And, of course, on the Kindle or the iTunes Bookster. Is there one myth about the Mac that we have a couple of minutes left that, Steve,

that people think that you go around dispelling all the time? Or is that the biggest myth? I think people don't understand that the Mac was almost a failure, in part because of the price, in part because the team was so ambitious that they outran, really, the capabilities of the hardware initially. There was a period, and I was an early Macintosh user, where you had to do a lot of disk swapping to do very simple things, and there was a lot of waiting. And you had to pay a price for being a pioneer there.

And also the IBM, the alternative, was so much less expensive that a lot of people didn't take advantage of the Mac. So it really went by the skin of its teeth to get through that period where Apple can make more powerful versions that caught on. But even so, it wasn't a market leader, really. Andy, anything come to mind? I'm not sure about a myth, but the Macintosh that we're celebrating today isn't really the same computer than the one we created. It's had two different processor family switches, which are very, very, very. very difficult to pull off in a software base, switching to the power PC CPU and then the

Intel CPU. Right. And a big operating system change when it's really the Macintosh you buy today isn't the system that I helped create it. It was, although that's still part of it, and it's certainly in the DNA. What are they selling on, what are they selling for these days? If you want to pick up an original Mac? An original Mac?

You know. I don't know. I haven't looked. I would guess pretty cheap. Yeah. Just because there were a lot of them in the world. Yeah, I know that if you really want a collector's item, what you want is the one with the original limited memory,

128K memory. About six months later, they offered an upgrade, which, you know, people like me just gobbled up because... We're going to go look for them today online. Stephen Levy, Andy Hertzfeld. Thanks for joining us today. And that's it for today. That was Apple design team member Andy Hertzfeld

and industry observer Stephen Levy in a conversation from 2014. Next time, I'll look at how modern AI is helping researchers recreate a land bridge digitally and search for archaeological artifacts. I'm sci-fi producer Charles Bergquist. Thanks for listening. We'll see you soon.