The Apple Macintosh computer

Few computers – indeed, few consumer items of any kind – have generated such a wide range of opinions as the Macintosh. Criticized as an expensive gimmick and hailed as the liberator of the masses, the Mac is a potentially great system. Whether it lives up to that potential remains to be seen.

The Apple Macintosh

The Macintosh is not without its problems. Resources are tight – it needs more memory and disk space – and software has been slow in coming to market. Many have criticized its price ($2495). In fact, there are indications that Apple considered a lower price ($1995) and then rejected it. It doesn’t seem to have hurt the Mac’s market – people are still buying them faster than Apple can make them – but there’s the potential for backlash if the machine doesn’t deliver on all its promises.

Whatever its problems and limitations, the Mac represents a breakthrough in adapting computers to work with people instead of vice versa. Time and again, I’ve seen individuals with little or no computer experience sit down in front of a Mac and accomplish useful tasks with it in a matter of minutes. Invariably, they use the same words to describe it: “amazing” and “fun.” The question is whether “powerful” can be added to that list.

The Macintosh dot-matrix printer

The Display

The display is small (9-inch diagonal), but it has very high resolution (512 by 342 pixels). Every pixel is crisp. Several things make the display unusual. First, the Macintosh has no “text mode.” Instead, the display is always bit-mapped graphics. Second, the display is black-on-white rather than amber-, green- or color-on-black, giving it an ink-on-paper effect. Third, the pixels are equally dense both horizontally and vertically, eliminating the “aspect ratio” problem that plagues other graphic systems. (In other words, a box 20 pixels wide and 20 pixels high will be a square.)

A sample printout from the Macintosh using its printer and the MacWrite word-processing program. The printout was obtained using MacWrite’s high-quality output mode, as opposed to the draft and ordinary quality modes. The output here is shown at 100 percent of actual size.

The Mac’s display does create a problem. Computer graphics are memory-intensive, once you start drawing pictures, you start using up lots of memory. The video display itself consumes about 22K bytes (or about one-sixth) of the total RAM. Any off-screen manipulation (windows) or information (fonts) chews up additional memory quickly.

The Keyboard

The Macintosh keyboard.

All in all, I like the keyboard. I’m a fast touch-typist and occasionally I overrun the two-key “rollover” (the number of keys you can press down simultaneously), but I never lose characters because of buffer overflow. The keyboard’s layout is compact, so I can easily reach any key – well, almost any key. The Command key, located between the left Option key and the space bar, is in an awkward position. often hit the Shift key or Option key instead. I don’t like function or cursor keys and the mouse renders them fairly useless, so their absence doesn’t bother me at all. A separate numeric keypad is available for $99 (it plugs in between the keyboard and the Mac). This keypad has cursor keys on it, but I wonder how many applications will recognize them.

The Mouse

The rear of the Mac. Note the icon labels. The bottom row of connectors is for (from left) the mouse, second floppy disk, printer, modem and speaker.

Of course, the mouse isn’t always a perfect solution. Some commands can be tedious to perform via the mouse and pull-down menu. For example, deleting text to the right of the cursor in MacWrite can only be done with the mouse. This is a nuisance if you have only one or two characters to delete. I’d also like the mouse’s cord to be a little longer and sometimes I have trouble finding enough surface area to work the mouse, but these are minor complaints. The mouse is an excellent feature of the Macintosh.

User Interface

User interface Macintosh 1.1

In creating the Macintosh’s unique user interface, Apple has attempted to make the abstract seem concrete. Few things are as abstract as the data and programs stored and used on a computer. The Mac takes that abstraction and presents it as something familiar a desktop cluttered with pencils, papers manila folders, and even a wastebasket. Do you want to put a document in a folder? Pick it up with the mouse and put it in the folder. Do you want to throw something away? Pick it up and put it in the wastebasket. Abstractions take on real forms that we can understand and use without obscure commands or bizarre syntax.

Another important aspect of this user interface is the way in which the Macintosh makes commands available to the user. As I write this review with MacWrite, the top of my screen has an Apple symbol and six words (File, Edit Search, Format, Font, and Style) written across the top. If I point at any of the items with the mouse and press the button, a menu of options appears on the screen. When I release the button, the menu disappears. All available commands appear in the menus. I haven’t had to memorize or learn much; in fact, I opened my MacWrite manual only once or twice, briefly. The same is true at the “desktop” level. Any actions can be performed via the pull-down menus or by direct “physical” manipulation of the objects shown. The best feature of the Mac documentation is that I almost never have to refer to it.

My one complaint about the user interface is that it’s slow. Sometimes running a program or opening a file seems to take longer than it should. File copying on a one-drive system is also tedious.

A special disk-copy utility is now available that lets you copy an entire disk in just four swaps – not too shabby when you realize that this utility uses nearly 80 percent of the total RAM just to hold the data. Unfortunately, this utility won’t solve the problem of copying several files onto a disk that’s already formatted and in use. There is a simple solution: more RAM.

Memory Limitations

The top of the Mac with the cover removed. The disk drive and digital circuitry are below the cathode-ray tube; the analog circuitry is to its left.

So the question arises: why did the Macintosh design team so limit their machine? The most common reason I’ve come across is that the Macintosh team wanted to provide a standard environment for software developers and users (although the latter is less often cited). In other words, software developers know that a Mac will always have 128K bytes of RAM and users will never have to worry about software requiring more RAM than they have. The idea is sound, but it causes two problems. First, 128K bytes is not enough RAM for a standard, especially in the Macintosh environment, where graphics chew away at your free space. Second, there will be no standard for software developers when the 512K-byte upgrade becomes available. Many software developers are ignoring (or unable to use) the 128K-byte machine and will release the packages for 512K-byte machines only. Unless Apple plans a free update to all Mac owners, the standard environment will no longer be standard.

Another argument I’ve heard to support the concept of such limited memory is that the expansion slots were dropped to avoid power and cooling problems and to keep the user out of the machine. Again, this is a good idea if you provide sufficient resources in the unexpandable model. I have no complaints with Apple’s choice of two RS-422A ports, an external disk port, the mouse port, and audio output. External video would be nice, but it isn’t critical. But there’s just not enough memory.

Others argue that 128K bytes of RAM is enough because so much of the work is done for you in the 64K-byte ROM. The ROM toolbox (the optimized 68000 machine-language routines that handles all aspects of the user interface) is truly a marvelous thing, but it doesn’t change the fact that large, complex programs need lots of memory, especially if the displays are all graphical. A supporting argument points to MacPaint and MacWrite, saying, “See, these work fine!” Yes, they do, but both have easily reached limits. Furthermore, these programs were developed over a long period of time, concurrently with the Macintosh. The authors of these programs knew a lot about optimizing code for the Mac. Software developers with less time and more ambitious designs will find the lack of RAM a serious roadblock.

I also have heard that the upgrade to 512K bytes will eliminate all such problems because there will be more than enough RAM for any application. Again, I disagree. You can never have enough RAM. I think it’s no accident that the Commodore 64, with 64K bytes, has dominated the low-end market over machines that have (or had) 8K, 16K, or 24K bytes. Apple gave the IIc, which uses an 8-bit 6502 chip, 128K bytes of RAM. Why the company limited the 68000, a 32-bit chip, to the same initial amount of memory is beyond me. Even the fourfold upgrade is too limiting. Apple delights in stating how much better the 68000 is than the 8086/8088 chips used in the IBM PC and compatibles, yet most of those systems can use more RAM than the Mac. Where’s the advantage?

Obviously, I think that 128K bytes is not enough RAM to make the Macintosh a truly powerful machine. My attempt to run the Sieve of Eratosthenes benchmark on the Mac provides one indication of its RAM limitations. Once BASIC was loaded into the Mac, there was too little space left in memory for the Sieve program. To fit the program into memory, I had to declare all variables integer. This will, of course, speed the execution time considerably. Thus, the speed of the Mac Sieve is not commensurable to the other two systems. (If you are curious, the modified benchmark took 96.4 seconds on the Mac.) The upgrade to 512K bytes will help considerably, but it’s still an inexcusable limit. I am convinced that this limited RAM has held up the release of Mac software. As I write this, it has been three months since the Macintosh was released, and all the Apple dealers in town have only three software packages for the Mac besides MacPaint and MacWrite, which are still bundled. Mac should have had at least double the initial and upgrade RAM, i.e., 256K bytes and 1 megabyte, respectively. It may be that Apple will release yet another upgrade when 1-megabit chips become available in mass quantities, or they may just release a new machine.

Although the RAM is a limitation of the Macintosh, the ROM is a tremendous strength. In what is undoubtedly one of the marvels of modern programming, the Macintosh design team crammed an unbelievable amount of power into the 64K bytes of ROM in the form of tightly written, highly optimized machine code. In doing so, the team provided standard user interfaces, so that most application programs on the Mac will be used in similar forms. I tried some prerelease programs with no documentation and I was able to use them almost immediately. Try that under CP/M or MS-DOS. The ROM toolbox is a vital facet of the overall amazing nature of the Macintosh.

The Macintosh also lacks adequate mass storage. At first, it doesn’t look bad: it consists of one single-sided 3½-inch built-in disk drive (made by Sony) holding 400K bytes. Having only one disk drive can be a nuisance, but it’s acceptable if the drive holds enough data and if you can copy it easily. However, the system files on a Macintosh disk take up over 200K bytes, or half the disk. Even with trimming, you only have about 220K bytes of usable space on a bootable disk. If any other company marketed a CP/M or MS-DOS system with a single disk drive with only 220K bytes of free space, no one would buy it. It takes a lot of time and disk swapping to copy files or to back up a disk. The Mac’s only saving grace on this point is that it automatically ejects the disk and prompts you for a new one.

The 128K-byte Macintosh with one single-sided drive is not a powerful machine. You can do useful work with it, and the user interface beats all other cold. But for the same price or less you could go out and buy, for example, a Compaq with 256K bytes of RAM and two 360K-byte disk drives. And I could get lots of software for it – programs that can handle larger, more difficult tasks than the Mac currently can. The upshot is this: a $3000 Macintosh with 128K bytes of RAM, a 400K-byte disk drive, and an Imagewriter printer, is an amazing machine but not really a powerful one. A 512K-byte Mac with two 400K-byte disk drives is both amazing and powerful, but it is also expensive ($3500, including printer and not counting any cost for the RAM upgrade). In the two-and-a-half months that I’ve owned my Mac, I’ve often wondered if I should have bought one so quickly. However, the arrival of MacFORTH (see the text box “Software for the Mac” on this page) has done much to quell my reservations. I can now create my own windows, graphics, and pull-down menus, and the “fun quotient” of my Mac has made a quantum leap. Besides, I suspect that by the time this sees print, prices will have dropped and the software base will have expanded considerably.

Conclusion

You won’t find another machine that’s as easy to use or as much fun as the Macintosh. In the right configuration, it can do as much as any microcomputer on the market. However, you should go for a 512K-byte system with two disk drives and a printer. Anything less and you’ll find yourself frustrated by the machine’s limits.

I have no doubt that I would have bought a Macintosh sooner or later, and I have no intention of getting rid of the one I own. The Mac’s a gem – rough, slightly flawed, but a gem nonetheless.

by Bruce F. Webster

Bruce F. Webster (7909 Ostrow St., Suite F, San Diego, CA 92111) is vice-president of FTL Games and Oasis Systems. He received his B.S. in computer science from Brigham Young University and did graduate work at the University of Houston. His hobbies include reading and war-gaming, especially science-fiction and fantasy war games.

At a glance

Apple Macintosh Review Byte

Manufacturer
Apple Computer Inc.
20525 Mariani Ave.
Cupertino, CA 95014
(408) 996-1010

Components
Size: 13.5 by 9.7 by 10.9 inches (main unit)
2.6 by 13.2 by 5.8 inches (keyboard)
Weight: 19.5 pounds
Processor: Motorola 68000 (7,8336 MHz)
Memory: 128K bytes of RAM; 64K bytes of ROM
Display: 9-inch built-in monitor; high-resolution bit-mapped display (512 by 342 pixels); adjustable
Keyboard: 58 keys, detached, standard layout, no function keys, software-mapped
Mouse: single button, mechanical tracking, optical shaft encoding
Mass storage: built-in single-sided 3½-inch Sony drive (400K bytes)
Sound generator: four-voice sound
Interfaces: two RS-422A serial ports (230.4K bps transfer rate); external-disk interface for second (optional) disk drive; mouse interface; synchronous serial keyboard bus

Operating System
Proprietary unnamed

Optional Hardware
Imagewriter dot-matrix printer: $595
Numeric keypad: $99
Carrying case: $99
Modem (300 bps): $225
(300/1200 bps): $495
Security Accessory Kit: $49
Second floppy-disk drive: $495

Optional Software
See text box

Documentation
160-page user’s manual

Price
$2495 ($2990 with Imagewriter)

Apple Macintosh Review Byte - Benchmark 1

Apple Macintosh Review Byte - Benchmark 2

* The Sieve benchmark couldn’t be run on the Mac (see text for details).
** The new Disk Copy program was not available at press time.

Few computer enthusiasts or professionals can look at the machines of today without wondering: What’s next?

The Alto: a Personal Computer

In 1972, Xerox Corporation decided to produce a personal computer to be used for research. The result was the Alto computer, whose name comes from the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center where it was developed. The Alto was the result of a joint effort by Ed McCreight, Chuck Thacker, Butler Lampson, Bob Sproull, and Dave Boggs, who were attempting to make a device that was small enough to fit in an office comfortably, but powerful enough to support a reliable, high-quality operating system and graphics display. Their goal was to provide each user with a personal computing facility capable of meeting all individual needs and a communications facility that would allow users to share information easily.

In 1978, Xerox donated a total of fifty Altos to Stanford, Carnegie-Mellon, and MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology). These machines were quickly assimilated into the research community and rapidly became the standard against which other personal computers were judged.

It is unlikely that a person outside of the computer-science research community will ever be able to buy an Alto. They are not intended for commercial sale, but rather as development tools for Xerox, and so will not be mass-produced. What makes them worthy of mention is the fact that a large number of the personal computers of tomorrow will be designed with knowledge gained from the development of the Alto.

The Alto consists of four major parts: the graphics display, the keyboard, the graphics mouse, and the disk storage/processor box. Each Alto is housed in a beautifully formed, textured beige metal cabinet that hints at its $32,000 price tag. With the exception of the disk storage/processor box, everything is designed to sit on a desk or tabletop.

The Graphics Display

The graphics display is the most striking feature of the Alto. It looks somewhat like a television screen that has been turned sideways (see photo 1). It is a raster-scan display, and the physical dimensions of the screen are 8 inches (horizontal) by 10 inches (vertical). The black-and-white display allows the user to address an area 808 pixels (picture elements) vertically by 606 pixels horizontally. This results in resolution of about 80 points per inch.

The method of display used is called bit-mapped raster scan. This means that every point on the display is addressable as a bit in memory. Although this method can take up a great deal of memory, it has the advantage of making the display veryfast. Bit mapping also provides the user with a convenient method of screen access and the ability to easily look at the current contents of the screen.

In terms of displaying text, the screen can hold 60 lines of 90 characters (assuming the characters are equivalent to the typical 7 by 9 dot character commonly found on most video terminals). Character generation is not done in hardware on the Alto. A character set may be created by a user and displayed on the screen. Mixed fonts are allowed so that text of various sizes and shapes may be simultaneously displayed on the screen.

Since each dot on the display corresponds to only one bit in memory, there is no facility for grays or intermediate intensities. Due to the large number of points per inch, however, various combinations of points can be displayed to form a “texture” that gives the impression of varying shades of gray. This is exactly the same method used to reproduce pictures in a newspaper.

The Keyboard

Superficially, the Alto keyboard resembles a typical typewriter keyboard with the addition of a few special keys. The keyboard is detachable, and quite comfortable for typing. It has the unique property of being entirely unencoded. Each key has its own signal line in the keyboard interface, which allows a program to take advantage of the possibility of “chord” commands, where the user holds down one or more keys. For example, Shift-Control-E is as easy for the Alto to read as A-B-C (see photo 2). Another advantage is the ability to determine how long a key has been held down. For example, the pinball game program in photo 3 determines the force of a shot by measuring how long a key is held down on the keyboard. There is, of course, software to allow a program to read the keyboard in the typical manner.

The Graphics Mouse

The mouse is a small box with three buttons on the top and several ball bearings on the bottom. A slender cable connects the mouse to the Alto keyboard (see photo 4). The buttons are named red, yellow, and blue, although the physical buttons are all black. The mouse is typically held in the user’s right hand and rolled along the table on a soft piece of plastic that provides traction for the ball bearings.

Movement is detected by the motion of one of the ball bearings. The mouse reports changes in position to the Alto. From this, a cursor on the Alto display can be positioned. The physical position of the mouse on the table is unimportant, since only the change in position is reported. The mouse graphics interface is considerably more flexible and comfortable than a bit pad, joystick, or trackball. Many Alto programs can be controlled with the mouse alone, independent of a keyboard.

Disk Storage/Processor Box

The processor and disk storage for the Alto are contained in a rack about the size of a waist-high filing cabinet. Each Alto has two 3-megabyte disk drives. The drives themselves resemble small pizza ovens and are often referred to in this manner.

The “brain” of the Alto is a 16-bit custom-made processor intended to resemble the Data General Nova 1220. The processor is made entirely of small- to medium-scale TTL (transistor-transistor logic) ICs (integrated circuits). The processor operates at a speed of approximately 400,000 instructions per second. Each Alto has an address space of 64 K 16-bit words, including the graphics bitmap. By using a technique called bank selection, the Alto may expand its available memory in 64 K-word increments up to 256 K words. An Alto with 256 K words is known as a wide-bodied Alto.

Quite a bit of the magic of the Alto is performed at the microcode level. The Alto can run up to sixteen tasks concurrently, and all of the scheduling and I/O (input/output) for this multiprocessing is done in microcode. The user has direct control over only one task, however. The user task is the lowest priority and must, if necessary, relinquish processing cycles to the other tasks that control the display, disks, keyboard and mouse I/O, and Ethernet connections. The user has direct control over the microcode and may rewrite it according to individual taste.

The Software

The Alto has the interesting property of using software (often microcode) to perform many tasks, such as keyboard encoding and character generation, that are typically done in hardware. This approach leaves the Alto with an occasionally cumbersome but highly flexible architecture.

Each Alto has a ROM (read-only memory) that contains just enough software to “bootstrap” an Alto into the local network (see textbox on this page). By keeping a bootstrap program in ROM, the user will always have a “safety net” to fall back on in case some other portion of the system software is not working. All of the Alto software can be retrieved from across the network.

The Alto Operating System (OS), a program which provides a set of basic facilities for control and communication with the Alto, is written in BCPL, a language very similar to C. Most programs, BCPL or otherwise, run under the direction of the Alto OS. Since the address space of an Alto is small, a technique called a “Junta” is used to permit BCPL programs to shed unwanted sections of the Alto OS during execution. If those portions are needed later, they may be restored by performing a “Counterjunta.”

One BCPL program that runs on top of the operating system is called the Alto Executive (see photo 5a). This program speaks to the user directly and makes facilities available for file manipulation and program execution. An interesting feature of the Executive is that of escape expansion and file-name completion. Typing a partial file or program name followed by an escape, in the same fashion that an ESC (escape) or ALT (alternate mode) might be sent from an ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) terminal, causes the Executive to complete the typing of the name on the screen. Thisallows a programmer to name a file in a descriptive manner (such as Gatewaylnformation.press), rather than typing in a long name. The Executive program will recognize it as soon as it has read enough characters to determine the file uniquely. By typing a question mark instead of an escape, the Executive will list all file names that are valid matches for the string typed thus far.

The Alto has a highly flexible and rugged file system. Unlike many file systems (eg: Digital Research’s CP/M or Radio Shack’s TRSDOS) that limit names to six or eight characters with a three-character extension, the Alto file system permits file names of up to thirty-one characters in length. When a file name is entered for the first time, the file name is stored exactly as typed, even with regard to upper- and lowercase. Since the file names may be very long, this permits a programmer to use upper- and lowercase to improve readability. LongFileName.BigExtension is much easier on the eyes than LONGFILENAME.BIGEXTENSION. After the creationof a file, case is ignored when the user is speaking about the file, so either of the two names in the previous examples, as well as longfilename.bigextension, would be valid.

Alto files are divided into pages. Each page contains a small header that describes the current page, tells what file the page belongs to, and points to the places on the disk that contain the next and previous pages for the same file. This makes the file system almost indestructible. A program called Scavenger can automatically rebuild a broken file system.

Of course, no Alto is an island, so software is needed to deal with the Ethernet network. Some of this software appears in the form of the NetExecutive (see photo 5b) and FTP (file-transfer program). The NetExecis a program that appears to be very similar to the Alto Executive, but it loads programs from across the network rather than from the local disk. This means that a user need not keep infrequently used or large programs locally. Instead, these programs can be loaded through the network (at an apparent speed of approximately 800,000 bits per second) only when needed. FTP performs similar feats of file manipulation, but in a considerably more flexible manner.

Although a great deal of software written for the Alto is in BCPL, there is a new contender for software development called Mesa. Mesa is a Pascal-like language that is incompatible with BCPL because of differences in their respective microcodes. Mesa is expected to be the programming language for the successors of the Alto (see photo 5c).

BCPL and Mesa are the system languages for the Alto, which means that the system utilities and many applications programs are written in them. Other languages are available on the Alto, however. Much of the research work done on the Alto at Xerox is written in Smalltalk, an object-oriented language that is both easy to learn and highly powerful (see the special August 1981 BYTE issueon the Smalltalk language). Another supported language is LISP, a list-processing language that is very popular in the artificial intelligence research community.

Using the Screen

A system with the advanced graphics capability of the Alto will make extensive use of those facilities. The screen may be broken up into windows, and each window may be accessed in a different manner, ifdesired. Many Alto programs use only the mouse and screen windows for program control. For instance, the Neptune program is used for managing the contents of the Alto’s local disks (see photo 5d). A file may be deleted simply by touching the file name with the cursor, then touching the Delete spot on the screen with the cursor. As the cursor enters a new window, it may change shape, perhaps appearing as an arrow in one window and a paintbrush in another.

Since the Alto is used extensively for research in the office automation field, a good text editor is an obvious requirement. Bravo is a text editor and formatter widely used on the Alto. In the tradition of screen-oriented editors, the current state the user’s file is always shown on the screen. Bravo is controlled partly by keyboard commands and partly by mouse commands. It allows a user to open windows into one or more files. Text may be added or deleted by pointing at the desired location on the screen (see photo 5e) with the mouse cursor, and giving a command via the keyboard or mouse. Bravo supports many different fonts and allows the user to change easily from one font to the next. In addition, Bravo remembers the changes that have been made to a document and allows the user to reverse any or all changes.

Bravo allows the user to edit and format text, but often a person may wish to include illustrations in a document. To do this, a program called Draw is used. Draw is an interactive sketch-pad program that provides a variety of tools for creating and manipulating pictures made from lines, curves, and text. Draw divides the screen into a number of windows (see photo 6). The left side of the screen contains a menu of commands and a variety of brushstrokes that can be selected. The top of the screen contains an area for text commands and messages from the program. The middle of the screen is the picture workspace. Curves can be drawn by moving the cursor directly, or by selecting several points and allowing Draw to mathematically fit a curve to those points. Once an object is defined, it can be repainted using a number of brushstrokes. Since this is very similar to the techniques used by artists and calligraphers, quite a bit of artistic expression is possible. An object can be duplicated, rotated, stretched, or shrunk, by means of a small set of commands and mouse gestures.

The Network

Each Alto is assigned an Ethernet address that identifies it uniquely onthe network. A typical Ethernet address might be 50#100, which is meaningless to most people. To permit an easily remembered distinction between Altos, each is assigned a name. For instance, the Altos at Stanford are named after rivers and mountains in California State parks; Altos at CMU are named after jewels, and Altos at Xerox are named after people. This leads to such interesting names as Cypress, Turquoise, or Machiavelli, which are considerably easier to remember than 50#100.

Alto networks do not consist entirely of Altos. Several other devices are connected to the Ethernet network. One type is called a server. Servers are userless Altos that are dedicated to some specific function. A server might be connected to a printer. Thus, printing a file would actually consist of sending the proper messages to a Printing Server. One common type of server is a File Server. These machines support extra-large disks and are repositories for programs and files that are too large or too infrequently accessed to make storage on individual machines worthwhile. The Stanford File Server is named Lassen.

Due to the design of the network and the Altos, a new Alto can be wheeled in, plugged into the network medium (standard coaxial cable), and, with a blank disk pack fresh from the factory, become entirely functional with a full set of software in a matter of minutes. An Alto can also be disconnected, moved to another port in the coaxial cable, and reconnected without affecting either the performance of the network or the Alto.

Several programs exist that take advantage of the distributed processing capabilities inherent in the Ethernet network. Of all of them, the most enjoyable are the games. Trek is a multiplayer “spacewar” game that is controlled primarily by the mouse (see photo 7). Mazewar is a multi-player romp through a realistic labyrinth (see photo 8). The unique feature of these games is that large numbers of users can join or leave the game as they please without affecting the play of the others. Since all the Altos can listen to the same packet (block information on the Ethernet) at once, the game program is never running on any single coordinating machine. Instead, it is running independently on every participating Alto.

The Future

A stand-alone Alto is usable, but the best configuration is a group of Altos connected by an Ethernet system. Since the Ethernet system is a local network, a special device called a gateway was developed to allow local Ethernet networks to speak to other Ethernet networks or packet networks of other types. Many companies are researching network schemes that would allow packet transmission across cable-television lines. Since these cables are currently installed in many homes and buildings, it is not difficult to imagine a city with an “information grid,” analogous to the electric-power grid that exists today. Combined with an electronic mail system (a prototype called Laurel is used on Altos today) the possibilities are staggering.

The Alto has been around for several years. As research tools go, it is covered with moss and gathering dust. But new products will be appearing on the market based on the expertise gained in producing and using the Alto. The next few years should show a dramatic increase in the quality of personal computing and the ability to interconnect personal computers. And the Alto is one of the first personal computers that satisfies the needs of the computer scientist as well as the secretary or businessman.

by Thomas A Wadlow; 5157 Norma Way Apt 226, Livermore CA 94550

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Dr Brian Reid and Mark Roberts of Stanford University for their time and helpful comments; also Sandy Lanzarotta of Xerox and Cindy Pavlinac for their help and support.

References

1. Lampson, B W and E Taft. Alto User’s Handbook, 1979.
2. Metcalfe, R M and D R Boggs. “Ethernet: Distributed Packet Switching For Local Computer Networks.” Communications of the ACM 19,7, July 1976, pages 395 through 404.
3. Shoch, J F and J A Hupp. “Measured Performance of an Ethernet Local Network.” Communications of the ACM 23,12, December 1980, pages 711 through 721.
4. Thacker, C P, E M McCreight, B W Lampson, R F Sproull, and D R Boggs. Alto: A Personal Computer. Tech Rep CSL-79-11. Palo Alto CA: Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, August 1979. (To appear in Computer Structures: Readings and Examples, Second Edition. Siewiorek, Bell, and Newell, editors.)

Steve Jobs and Bill Atkinson (Photo: Norman Seiff)

Part I – click here

Jobs: Another thing is that you can run RS-422A twisted pairs, which means I can run these things for several hundred meters. I can string lines if I have a laboratory and a computer on my desk, do whatever I want to do. They aren’t DB-25s. We’ve been living with giant connectors now for years but using only a few of the pins. So, again, we tried to save a little bit of space in the back because the connector space we have is limited. We tried to cut down the cost to the customers again, and so, for connecting to devices like printers and modems, which we offer and which are the most prominent, we just supply the cables. We also will supply cables from one of these things to a variety of DB-25s – for the modem version, the printer version.

Atkinson: Lines 2 and 3 are switched on a modem versus a printer, so you just use a modem cable or a printer cable.

BYTE: From a very early time you knew that you wanted to take advantage of Lisa’s software technology, and you also had the goal of making that possible at low cost. When did you have a consensus on exactly what this hardware would have to be to achieve that goal?

Smith: In 1981 we started looking at the Lisa. I came up with a proposal that said it ends up costing $14 more to use a 68000 with 64K bytes of memory than it does with 6809-based machines, if you count power supply. It turns out that it’s actually easier to interface memory to a 68000 than to a 6809. So in January we started really looking at the 68000 and the work that Bill was doing.

In June of 1982 we finally decided on what we thought was enough video. It turns out that the original machine had 384 by 256 pixels. We chose that because we thought we had a shot at squeezing the machine down into 64K bytes, and we didn’t want to throw away a quarter of the memory just for the screen.

Atkinson: The thing that drove us is the 80 columns. In a word processor, we really wanted the lines to break on the screen at the same place they break on the printer. There are two kinds of word processors. There are the ones where you just have a string of characters and you see them however they wrap on the screen. Screen wrap is a function of the screen, and how characters wrap on the printer is the printer’s doing. Then there are word processors where what you see is what you get. You lay out a line and you know it’s going to break at the same place on the printer as the screen, so you can do columns and tabs and a couple of columns of numbers. Then you have to have enough pixels to generate a full printer line across. We thought we could do it with 384, and we tried it with real live documents – and we couldn’t do it. You could do it with 512, but you couldn’t do it with 384.

Smith: The diagonal lines look better, too; the jaggies are removed somewhat, and things like that. So, with that, we said, OK, what’s that going to mean? And we ended up with 128K and…

Atkinson: 22K bytes on the screen, and in a 64K-byte machine you couldn’t have afforded it. That drove us to 16 RAM chips instead of 8. Hertzfeld: By then, we knew we were going with 128K bytes anyway, to run the applications.

Jobs: I just thought I’d show this to you. This is the IBM video board; it’s only video, nothing else. It’s 69 integrated circuits, more chips than an entire Macintosh, and it basically does nothing. And it doesn’t even do that very well.

Espinosa: Forty percent more chips than the Mac.

Jobs: So that sort of gives you a feeling. And again, that just has the video on it. Macintosh, in addition to having video that’s far higher in resolution and far faster, has a 32-bit microprocessor, 128K bytes of RAM, 64K bytes of ROM, two serial ports, the mouse, the serial, keyboard, and mouse interface, the incredible sound, the clock calendar, the disk controller…

Smith: We rolled the whole disk controller into one chip.

Hertzfeld: And it has Lisa’s graphics and user-interface software built into every board.

Jobs: Andy was sort of the software technical leader behind the project, from its inception. As Andy puts it, software sometimes stands on its head to get rid of a chip in the hardware. And so, with a system as powerful as this, we wanted to take advantage of all the features, for instance, in the serial chip and the disk and stuff. We really wanted to be able to have the serial ports reading while the disk is spinning, while the mouse is moving, while it’s making sound. You know, all with that single board.

BYTE: What were the roots of that operating system?

Kenyon: When we started, of course, we were looking at the work Lisa was doing, and the Lisa group was rolling its own operating system, and it just didn’t seem appropriate. We took the graphics software, which was perfect for our machine.

Capps: The Lisa’s operating system took a lot of the user interface. For the window manager, even the memory manager, we started with what Lisa had.

Hertzfeld: It turns out that Quickdraw is built on top of what Lisa would call the intrasegment memory manager. You relocate little objects. We took that because Quickdraw required that support, and we sort of turned it into our system-wide memory manager. Even the Lisa group uses it only for the intra-application memory manager. Someone mentioned a neat way to do a file system, and we thought about it and said, “Gee, that’s a good way of doing it,” and so we did. A lot of it was experience on the Apple II, knowing what was sort of bad there – what we wanted to do great here. That at least was the conception of the asynchronous I/O. I knew from the Apple II that when you make a disk request it waits there for a whole second, a million microseconds, just waiting for the disk to come up to speed. We should be able to do other useful work while that’s happening. On the Apple II if you want to make a beep, the whole processor, the entirety of the machine, is devoted to making a beep. And when you’ve got all the horsepower of the 68000 there, you don’t want to waste it all on making sounds.

Atkinson: We still make a beep with the processor.

Hertzfeld: But we time-slice the processor such that you can be doing other things. It happens on the interrupt level instead of being dedicated. Macintosh uses the processor for everything, just like the Apple II does. In terms of the disk, we have the same disk-controller architecture as the Apple II, but we are just a little more sophisticated in how we use interrupts. We give the time back to the applications while the I/O is going on.

BYTE: Can you say more about the custom disk controller?

Smith: Sure. A long time ago we sort of figured that everybody who was doing designs at Apple with disks loved what Woz [Steve Wozniak] had done on the Apple II. Ill never forget, the first time I looked at the Woz controller I said, “OK. Well, this must be the interface disk controller. Where’s the disk controller?” I never found the disk controller. And we’ve just been in love with the way that that’s done. It’s used to modify group code. One of the things we knew, though, was that disks would be going faster in the future. So we initially designed this chip so the whole company would be able to have an ultra-low-cost way of using Wozniak’s disk technology for every product. But we knew that we weren’t just going to be going at 4 microseconds per bit, that twice that would become an industry standard … at least an Apple internal standard. So we built in a mode, a high-speed mode, so that it can go twice as fast.

Atkinson: While you’re getting input from the serial port at 19,200 bps, you can be writing to the disk and not missing a beat. It’s not the buffer that’s doing that. It’s Larry Kenyon. Every 4 nibbles, you look to see if there’s something on the port, because in one sector’s time, 24 bytes go by.

Jobs: After we reexamined everything, including the disk format, we said, “Do we want to go to MFM [modified frequency modulation]?” And the more we reexamined it, what became clear was that the original idea that we had for a disk in 1978, which we are still using, is great.

Atkinson: We get 400K bytes on this thing, while most people get only 270.

Jobs: As an example, our scheme has twice the margin of MFM. In other words, when you’re shipping a mil- lion or two million computers a year, which we intend to do, when people are buying media from 10 different sources and they expect to take disks out that were recorded in Alaska in really cold weather and stick them into machines in Florida in a heat wave and have them work, that margin is really important. If you want to equate that to reliability, we are significantly more reliable than any other disk system on the market, while having higher capacity. So that was the key decision, to stick with the same encoding format and the same scheme that we’ve used since 1978. So, while everyone else is running at roughly the same rates as Apple II, the IBM PC, and everything else, we doubled it on Macintosh. We set a new internal standard with the 3V2-inch disk and this new single-chip controller. And every new 32-bit product at Apple will use that new standard. The media, the sector format on that media, the disk controller, and the routines and everything to drive them is a new Apple 32-bit standard that you’ll see com- ing out in every future product that we do in that family.

Smith: There were some voices within the company that said, “Oh, you guys ought to go with standard formats and things like that.” We looked at doing that and it turns out that it takes more chips to interface to a standard floppy-disk controller, and we have…

Jobs: Well, I can go get the IBM floppy board. It looks to have about 45 to 50 chips on it…

Espinosa: I’ll come and help you carry it.

Jobs: .. .including an LSI [large-scale integration] disk controller – far less performance, far less capacity, far higher cost.

Atkinson: And less reliability.

Jobs: Oh, far less reliability. Larry’s software senses the disk speed, and Burrell’s hardware can adjust to one of four hundred speeds. So if it’s written on something that’s a little out of whack, we can just adjust right down to the necessary speed and read it. Everything on the Macintosh board – the serial timing, the disk timings, the microprocessor timings, the video timings, the sound timings – comes from one crystal oscillator and is synchronized from one source. And, again, it’s better, of course, technically to do it that way. Everything works much better, but it also saves parts, and we can offer this thing cheaper to customers. And most of this stuff customers will never ever realize or care about anyway. I mean, who cares how many crystal oscillators you have? But you do care about how big your computer is. You do care about how much it costs, and you do care about how well it works.

Atkinson: If you ever drop your computer you find out quickly how many crystal oscillators you have.

BYTE: So with the variable speed in the disk drives, I guess there’s no problem having two drives that are 3 percent different in speed.

Jobs: We read it and adjust it so that the speed is accurate relative to that crystal. That crystal on the board is superaccurate. We can adjust the disk drive relative to that superaccuracy.

Atkinson: You force all the disks to go at exactly the same speed by having the software constantly monitoring the speed and saying, “Ah, it’s running a little slow; jack it up a little bit,” so that each disk doesn’t have to be adjusted at all. You switch disk drives, and the new one will run at exactly the same speed because you force them all to.

Smith: It turns out that the speed variations occur partly because you plug in a new cassette that loads the motor down in a different way and also because of temperature variations that cause very long-term drifts in the disk speed. Using a little bit of the processor to fix that doesn’t cost us any performance at all on the system.

BYTE: What about the display electronics?

Atkinson: Where is the display controller?

Hertzfeld: It’s hidden.

Jobs: If you bite into that IBM display board, it’ll totally flicker if you do it at the wrong time. You’ve seen that, right? Woz just came up with this really brilliant way to do the Apple II. He realized that memory was about twice as fast as the microprocessor needed it and twice as fast as the video needed it. So he put the microprocessor over here and he put in essence the video over here, and he put some multiplexers in the middle. He shared the exact same memory between the two in a way such that this one thought it had all the memory all the time and this one thought it had all the memory all the time, yet they shared the same memory! All this thing had to do was write into certain memory locations and, magically, it would appear on the screen. The microprocessor never even had to think about the screen. All it did was look at memory locations.

Atkinson: And there was no way to glitch the video because accesses were mutually exclusive.

Jobs: Right. And so it turns out that, try as we might, we have never been able to find a better way to do it.

Atkinson: At the same time that the processors have gotten faster, memory’s gotten faster; the memory is still twice as fast as the processor.

Jobs: And so, again, it gives you greater performance, because you don’t have to write only at special times and slow yourself down. It cuts the chip count way down because you don’t need two banks of RAMs, so the customer’s not paying for these extra chips, and it just makes a more elegant product.

BYTE: How far does the similarity extend between the Apple II video and the Mac’s video?

Smith: We have a three-part memory architecture on Mac. We have a DMA window for sound, video, and CPU… shared by three devices. Also, what we do that is a little more sophisticated than Apple II is return memory cycles to the processor during horizontal and vertical retrace. And with the analog design we’re able to lengthen the horizontal retrace interval, which gives us more performance for graphics by making more time available to the processor from memory and giving the analog electronics more time to retrace the beam. On the Apple II, Woz sort of designed this logic board and the power supply was kind of added. On Mac, we really designed the entire system as a complete system from the ground up, so we used different constraints. I would say there’s not much similarity. The great thing about Mac as a product is that it really wasn’t designed as just this piece over there and this piece over there and this other piece… All of it was designed in parallel, everybody knowing what everyone else’s job was.

BYTE: How did you decide on the appearance of the machine?

Manock: Our goal in the beginning was portability. We actually had this cardboard model that looked amazingly like the Osborne. And that was way before the Osborne came out. As I said, portability was primary here, and this version had an attached keyboard that had a sort of rubber boot around it that would fold up and give you protection over the screen. Steve really changed the emphasis of the product one day when he said that we didn’t want portability to be the primary aspect of this, but we did want it to take minimal desk space. With that goal in mind, we realized that the keyboard didn’t have to be exactly the width of the computer.

Jobs: To use the earlier design you had to have some sort of arrangement to tilt it up. And what we noticed was, well, fine, what if you just lift the back up here like this? Then, because you have all this space underneath, you could put the floppy disk underneath. So you make a unit that’s more vertical, has a smaller footprint.

Atkinson: It has to be up enough so your eyes can see it anyway; you need the height.

Manock: Steve thought, too, I think – in a gut reaction sort of way – that everybody was going low profile and wide, and we never have wanted to be a “me, too.” I think our vertical format is correct when you think of human factors.

Hoffman: Jerry, you might want to turn the back around. We made it truly international. I think it’s one of the few products aside from Lisa that is completely usable anywhere you care to take it.

Manock: Did you see the icons on the back?

Hoffman: We started out with the case and went from the outside in, trying to make it more and more international the more we thought about it. And Jerry was just great as soon as he realized that we really did want to bring it to the whole world. He had marvelous ideas on how to eliminate every word of text, take everything off the package so that we don’t have to be an American product anywhere that we go.

Jobs: In Mac, there’s no English on the outside of the case. Everything’s iconic. And there is absolutely no English in the ROM. It is universal in nature. When the thing comes on it puts a few icons on the screen. If something goes wrong, it can’t boot or something, it puts a frowning Mac on. If it’s booting it puts a happy Mac on. It loads all the languages, all the country-specific stuff, off the disk. So, because the keyboard is detachable and mapped anyway, to localize Mac all you do is change the keyboard, manuals, and the disks. Nothing in the box has to change.

And another real breakthrough is this thing called Resources that Bruce Horn invented.

Hertzfeld: The data is factored out from the code. You know, most programs are a mixture of control logic and just raw code.

Atkinson: The virtual-memory architecture on the data parts of the program allows us to factor it out so that, without rewriting a program at all, without recompiling or relinking the program, I can take a copy of Mac Paint and in 15 minutes make a German version.

Hertzfeld: Because all the text is kept in a well-known, well-defined place.

Horn: Until December, people didn’t really know what the resource manager was, because they really hadn’t had any contact with it, besides me. I knew what I wanted from it because I had to do Finder and all that other stuff. Andy just looked at it over time and figured out what you could do with it. And I was trying to say, well, this can do this and this… It was really Andy having the biggest view of the system saying that this could really be a great thing for a lot of stuff.

Hertzfeld: Another thing to ask Bruce about is the Finder, which is our most important application, the first thing that comes up on the machine. That’s the program with all the little icons, the desktop manager, I guess we’re calling it. That’s Bruce’s conception and communication.

Hoffman: There are numerous subtleties with this. Picture a dialogue box, for example. A dialogue box, when you put English text in German, starts overflowing its limits and starts looking very different. You have a button that says, “Put this away.” In German, that takes a paragraph and overflows the box… But Resources lets us change not only the text but also the physical look of those dialogue boxes, or anything, through something called Resource Editors.

Jobs: Otherwise, you’d have to get into the source listing. You’d have to change not only the languages, as Joanna said, but also the geometries of the dialogue boxes and make them bigger. It would take you awhile; it’s not something that’s impossible, but it’s something that never gets done. And it’s certainly something that you have to be the originator of the program to do. What we’ve done by pulling all the language-specific stuff out, through this beautiful mechanism called Resources, is write these other programs called Resource Editors. By running a Resource Editor, you could, if you knew German, simply run a program on the program, get in there – literally on the screen – and just stretch the boxes bigger. You could select a text and retype it in. German and move things around if you wanted. You can examine every icon, every dialogue box, every alert box, every pull-down menu, everything, without being a programmer, without getting the source code, and very quickly, too, using the user interface of the Macintosh.

Atkinson: Anything that XYZ software company put together, even though the company didn’t think about Taiwan, will run in Taiwan.

Jobs: But do we want it to run in Taiwan?

BYTE: Are you going to market it aggressively in Japan?

Jobs: Yes.

Hertzfeld: My favorite thing about Resources, being selfish, is that the same facilities that allow us to translate English into 7, 10, 20, a million different languages are the same facilities we use to translate technish to English in the first place.

Hoffman: The other component of this is that it allows us to not just introduce products that feel to the native user like a native machine, natural to them, but also that we can start coming very close to making simultaneous product introductions. The software that is developed in the U.S. can fly over there for them, for the fragmented markets in Europe, for example. Europe does not allow for the same kind of development of software houses as the U.S. because the markets are all so fragmented you can’t amortize development of the software over as large a user base. But given that the Europeans now have the capability of using a localized, globalized software, if you will, their market grows because each individual software developer in France now can view the whole world as a market. We feel that it will give an impetus to the development of software developers, third parties, in Europe, and in more fragmented markets as well.

Smith: An international power supply, too, so the exact same unit basically can be used anywhere in the world.

Egner: It doesn’t care whether it’s 50-Hz input.

Manock: Just one additional thing on these: the icons on the back are from the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC). We didn’t invent all these ourselves.. .wherever possible we used symbols that already existed – for example, AC line power – that are world standards. Where we didn’t have symbols that existed, we used the IEC’s closest symbol as best we could and then added what we thought made sense. For example, we needed a symbol for a modem, so we started with IEC’s telephone symbol. We tested them to make sure there was good recognition. Well submit these new icons to the IEC to have it suggest that they be the standards added to its encyclopedia of symbols.

BYTE: What is this machine going to make possible that other comparably priced machines have not made possible? How will it change the personal computing scene?

Jobs: Right now, as you know, when you use a word processor, it will do two or three things. The first thing Macintosh will do is make the existing types of applications an order of magnitude easier and more approachable for people. Therefore the available market for this machine is going to be giant compared to the available market for the people who are willing to invest 40 to 100 hours learning to use their computers. That’s the first thing.

The second thing is that there are going to be new types of applications available that could not be available on the current generation of personal computers – it is technically impossible to do. The perfect example is Paint. Paint is impossible to do on an Apple II or an IBM PC or any of the other first-generation products. You can do a mockery of it, but you can’t really do it. And there are going to be lots of applications like that. You’ve seen Lisa Project. That, of course, will be running on Mac. And we don’t even know the kinds of applications that are going to come out in six months to a year. As an example, well be able to laser-print output from this thing by next June, and that is pretty exciting to us. So, if we sell these on a university campus, you’ll be able to take your disk into the library and get output off a laser printer, which will be approaching typeset quality. That’s the kind of stuff we’re doing; you just can’t do that on a current-generation personal computer.

And then the third thing is what Burrell and Larry and Andy and the other software people have done. When we shipped the Apple II, we fundamentally shipped about 2K bytes of ROM with system code. The IBM system’s got 8K bytes, but it’s really kind of loose as a goose; it’s about 4K bytes by our standards of code. Mac has 64K bytes of the tightest, most elegant code that this company’s ever written. Most of the computers now are basically shipping a file system and a few drives, but what’s really interesting is that on top of that, we’ve layered on memory management and on top of this is Quickdraw.

Jobs: Mac’s a completely open machine – we’ve got a book called Inside Macintosh that tells all the secrets of it. But we’re going to try to get a little uniformity through the carrot rather than the stick. And the carrot is that there’s a finite amount of RAM in this machine, and we’ve done all these things for you in ROM. Now, you can do them yourself, there’s nothing that says you can’t do them yourself, but if you do, you’ve got to write them, which is going to take time and means you’re going to be slower to get to market; you’ve got to chew up precious RAM space, and the chances are pretty good that we did a better job than you’ll do. So we’re going to try through the carrot to get a little bit of uniformity in the user interface in some of the ways the things are done.

Hertzfeld: See, we’re really a 192K-byte machine, and if the programmers want to throw away 64K, then they’re doing a dumb thing.

Jobs: We’re a 192K-byte machine that deep-freezes 64K.

Hertzfeld: Highly timed, tested, debugged, highly compact, very fast, very high-quality consistent code.

BYTE: What are all the factors in this that make it go so fast?

Hertzfeld: Sweat.

Jobs: Burrell, Andy, Larry, Bill – how long did you work on Quickdraw?

Atkinson: Four years.

Hertzfeld: All of us care a lot about performance. Surprisingly, that’s unusual. A lot of people don’t care if their system’s…

Atkinson: Like Quickdraw. I won’t even count the first runs in Pascal, but the first runs in assembly language were running 160K bytes, before I added a lot of the new features. It’s now down to 24K bytes with lots more stuff in it. Character-drawing speed is one you look at for drawing an arbitrary size character, an arbitrary starting pixel clipped to an arbitrary area. We were running, when it was being developed on Lisa, about 1000 characters per second the first time. Well, I got that up to 4000. Mac is running about 7000. That’s seven times 9600 baud. This is typical of all of our software packages here. You go through, get the best algorithms first, get the stuff right. Then crunch it down, make a first pass in Pascal, get the algorithms right, find the cleanest algorithms, find all the corners, and make sure they’re tested. Then I translate it into loose assembly language to get down into assembly language and get it working. Then I’ll go through and get all the bugs out again, and I’ll go through and do fine register alloca- tion to figure out what’s the most important thing. This little baby, the 68000, has sixteen 32-bit registers sitting there, and the way you get performance out of that is to keep them full. Keep the registers full of important stuff all the time. That’s the way you make this processor sing. So you go down and you do register alloca- tion, and then you don’t stop. Then you feed it back, you get your people to use it.

Quickdraw was designed by “pull” from applications rather than “push” from the design team. You provide a facility, watch the applications group try to use it, understand where they misunderstood something – maybe you’ve got a bad model, you want to make it simpler and cleaner – or where they don’t have enough performance. And then you go back and you measure, measure, measure, measure. Optimization without measuring is wasted time. Find out where the application’s really spending time and go whump on that code. And any other cases they’re very seldom using, squeeze them down in size, and stretch the other ones. There’s always a trade-off between size and speed. Stretch out the common cases, let them be bigger and much faster, and then keep the generality by squeezing down the infrequent cases. So play your odds. People draw characters in OR mode a whole lot, and OR mode is about twice as fast as the other modes, so 95 percent of all characters are drawn in OR mode. Statistical measuring of the use of the thing allows you to get much more performance on your average throughput than you can if you don’t go back and measure.

I think we all believe that system software should be done in assembly language at this stage of the game because high-level languages can’t give you the performance and the code density that you can get out of assembly language.

BYTE: So far, it has seemed that with all the systems that have mice, all those that are on the market, you pay a great price in terms of performance to get ease of use.

Atkinson: You make a responsive system; it isn’t just draw some characters out there. It’s also, remember where you put them because if the guy touches on them you want to light them up. There’s a lot more guts in that application.

Jobs: It’s not just systems that have mice. What’s happening is there are a whole bunch of things that go with the mouse. It’s not just hanging a mouse on a first-generation personal computer and using the same old, fixed-pitch text and things like that, just replacing four cursor keys. What we’ve done here is take a quantum leap, where, in addition to having the mouse be the major pointing device, we’ve gone to full proportionally spaced fonts, totally software-painted on the screen, any size, any shape… totally new architecture for displaying things to the user.

Atkinson: But the responsiveness is where the code goes.

Jobs: The responsiveness and the fact that there isn’t a mouse-based system out yet that uses a 68000. We’re obviously using the power of the 68000 in addition to this code.

Smith: There are some tricks we played in the hardware, too. For example, we knew that the ROMs would have real important things in them. So we made the ROMs sort of read-only cache memory, whereas the RAM has to contend with video and sound for access, so we cut that down to the bare bones, but the code that’s in ROM, like Bill’s graphics and the other stuff, can run as fast as you can run a 68000.

Jobs: If you look at the really great applications, even on first-generation personal computers, most of them are written in assembly language – Visicalc, 1-2-3 – it’s like if you’re going to sell a million of something, it pays to handcraft it in assembly. If you’re going to sell 10 of something, it prob- ably doesn’t. If we’d written this in Pascal, we would have been able to fit a fourth as much code in the ROM or would have to have four times the ROM, and you wouldn’t have had the performance. Because we’re going to sell 10 million of these things in the long run, it pays to super-handcraft it; we only have to do it once. Every time these ROMs are burned, it doesn’t cost us any more engineering. . .it’s all been done up front.

Capps: Because we cared enough to do it as well as we possibly could.

Jobs: We took a 12K-byte Pascal program running on a Lisa and we said we want to do this in 2K and make it faster. But we had that extra year to do that. And we also had the motivation, of course.

Atkinson: When you’re writing assembly, you know each instruction is going to take 2 microseconds, it’s going to take 4 bytes of memory. In Pascal, you’re removed from that, so you don’t concentrate on performance as much. When I’m doing I/O stuff in assembly language I look at the theoretical maximum speed you can run at. Why not do it as fast as you can possibly do it? Especially when you’re doing disk I/O stuff. How fast can you get into an interrupt and out?

BYTE: Andy, let’s talk about the early days, after it had become Macintosh.

Hertzfeld: I don’t know, there’s something that makes a job a little more fun to work on when the odds are against you. And that’s sort of how it was in the early days. I was maybe the fifth or sixth person to come work on it. Steve took me over to this little building separate from everywhere else, where there were these incredibly great people working on this little wire-wrap PC board. All it could do when you turned it on was write “hello” on the screen about 80 times. And everyone was incredibly excited to see it write “hello” on the screen because it meant that the central processing unit was there and all that potential was there to be mined. I spent my time mining that potential.

The very first time we got an early version of Quickdraw running, and we got the mouse going – that’s just an incredible thrill. Or getting back the first PC board – we all went out for pizza on Friday night. We got the boards in about four o’clock Friday afternoon, and Steve said, “Well, if you get these done before midnight, we’ll take you for pizza,” and we stayed there…not because we wanted the pizza, but because we wanted to see that board working. And I think that none of our Mac PC boards have ever had to have a wire run to fix something, which is pretty amazing. That’s the attention to detail that you just can’t get people to do for money. We do it for love.. .this is the most important thing in our lives .. .to make that great computer.

It’s fun for me because I like operating on a systems program where I can operate in an environment where there’s not that much support. In the early days when I first started here, the first thing I did was come in and write all kinds of crazy demos, stretching things around on the screen and making balls bounce, and one reason to do it was that I didn’t want to write the system code until I was good at writing 68000 programs. So I just wanted to learn by having fun, and the other reason is that it gets people excited about it. Just this raw hardware sitting there doesn’t do too much, but once you start making this fun thing happen and that fun thing happen, the excitement starts getting generated. You get to attract other good people, and one by one we picked up on more and more people. We were very, very selective; it was very hard to find people to work on Mac software, because on one hand we had the very high goals of doing this research, Xerox PARC-like stuff with uncommon, high technical standards. On the other hand, we had a very inexpensive, limited-memory machine. So all the Xerox PARC-type guys who came and interviewed said, “Oh, you don’t have 2 megabytes? Forget it, I don’t want to work on this thing.” They’re all used to their Dorados. But gradually we found great people like Larry and Bruce who were turned on by the dream, and they came and joined our band, and I guess we reached critical mass.

Atkinson: Most of the early people were recruited from Apple.. .and we have a pirate’s flag that we sometimes put on the roof. The idea is we’re pirates and we go around and try to steal the best we can from anywhere we can get it, and mostly that’s been from Lisa. A lot of it’s been from Lisa, but it’s true in initially putting together the team, too; we try to get the best people we can from anywhere in the company.

Hertzfeld: One of the slogans Steve came up with when we had a retreat in January was “Let’s be pirates,” the idea being that we were mavericks out to blow people’s minds and overturn standards, create new standards, not do things like everyone else.

Atkinson: There was always the thrill that this was going to be the one project that was probably the most amazing thing you were going to be doing in your life.

Hertzfeld: And the other slogan was “The journey is the reward.”