Revolution in The Valley: The Insanely Great Story of How the Mac Was Made [Hardcover]

Andy Hertzfeld (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 13, 2004

There was a time, not too long ago, when the typewriter and notebook ruled, and the computer as an everyday tool was simply a vision. Revolution in the Valley traces this vision back to its earliest roots: the hallways and backrooms of Apple, where the groundbreaking Macintosh computer was born. The book traces the development of the Macintosh, from its inception as an underground skunkworks project in 1979 to its triumphant introduction in 1984 and beyond.

The stories in Revolution in the Valley come on extremely good authority. That's because author Andy Hertzfeld was a core member of the team that built the Macintosh system software, and a key creator of the Mac's radically new user interface software. One of the chosen few who worked with the mercurial Steve Jobs, you might call him the ultimate insider.

When Revolution in the Valley begins, Hertzfeld is working on Apple's first attempt at a low-cost, consumer-oriented computer: the Apple II. He sees that Steve Jobs is luring some of the company's most brilliant innovators to work on a tiny research effort the Macintosh. Hertzfeld manages to make his way onto the Macintosh research team, and the rest is history.

Through lavish illustrations, period photos, and Hertzfeld's vivid first-hand accounts, Revolution in the Valley reveals what it was like to be there at the birth of the personal computer revolution. The story comes to life through the book's portrait of the talented and often eccentric characters who made up the Macintosh team. Now, over 20 years later, millions of people are benefiting from the technical achievements of this determined and brilliant group of people.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Another blog-turned-book (see Hertzfeld's www.folklore.org), this set of remembrances chronicles the birth of the Macintosh from inside the lab. In 1978, Hertzfeld's world was rocked by his purchase of an Apple II; by the next year, he was working for the fledgling company on the nascent Mac as a software engineer, co-writing the Mac's operating system. Strictly for Silicon Valley-folk and Apple obsessives, Hertzfeld's short entries dwell on everything from mouse-scaling parameters to the eating habits of hardware engineer Burrell Smith. A plethora of color photos feature early screen shots and sedentary-looking Mac team members in tight t-shirts ("User Friendly!") and large glasses. Even aficionados may find their attention wandering at sentences like, "The most controversial part of the Control Panel was the desktop pattern editor, which I had rescued from its earlier standalone incarnation." But among the 90 entries, highlights include awkward-looking early demos of the Mac's operating system; competition and idea-swapping with Microsoft, Osborne and Xerox; and inside glimpses of Apple's unique, before-the-boom culture. Hertzfeld's earnest enthusiasm for the work that he and the team began 25-plus years ago is infectious enough to carry one through the rest.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

About the Author

Andy Hertzfeld was a graduate student in computer science at UC Berkeley in January 1978 when he purchased one of the first Apple IIs.
He quickly lost interest in grad school as he began writing programs for his Apple II, eventually leading him to join Apple Computer as a systems programmer in August 1979. He joined the Macintosh team in February 1981, and became one of the main authors of the Macintosh system software, including the User Interface Toolbox and many of the original desk accessories. He left Apple in March 1984, and went on to co-found three companies: Radius (1986), General Magic (1990) and Eazel (1999). In 2003, he developed web-based software for collective storytelling that he used to write the stories in this book. In 2005, he joined Google, and was one of the main creators of Google+.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: O'Reilly Media; First Edition edition (December 13, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0596007191
• ISBN-13: 978-0596007195
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 8 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (51 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #437,387 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

43 of 46 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Engaging, fun and inspirational, December 15, 2004

By 

Jack D. Herrington "engineer and author" (Silicon Valley, CA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Revolution in The Valley: The Insanely Great Story of How the Mac Was Made (Hardcover)

It's easy to get discouraged as a developer. Time, features, quality, these all turn the thrill of inspiration into the cool slog of a job. But sometimes the fire gets through. That's what happened at Apple with the birth of the Macintosh. And that's what Andy Hertzfeld, one of the primary team members on the first Macintosh, chronicles in this book.

The summation of the folklore.org site, this book is a set of about 100 stories. Each running about 3-4 pages on average. Starting with Andy's first day at Apple and ending around the time when Jobs' was ousted in a palace coup. The stories run the gamut from the deep technical to the interpersonal. They are well written and engaging.

A must read for those inspired by the original Apple Mac engineers.

32 of 34 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Great Read for those who started with Macs in early 1980's, December 18, 2004

By 

William Davies "Mac maven" (Sacramento, CA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Revolution in The Valley: The Insanely Great Story of How the Mac Was Made (Hardcover)

How wonderful is this book? That will depend on several factors. I've read a lot of books that claim to dish out the real dirt about Apple, and this book impressed me because Andy Hertzfeld didn't write all the anecdotes himself. Instead, he created a web site at www.folklore.org and encouraged any and all persons involved with the creation of the Macintosh to document their own recollections of how it all went down. Those essays, along with dozens written by Hertzfeld himself, are now the basis of this new book, mixed in with pencil sketches, historcal photos, and old ads. This book is not about grinding axes or settling grudges. It merely documents in an objective fashion how the whole team came together, and the many many ups and downs encountered in bringing this wonderful computer to life.

What I like about this book can be summed up in two phrases. First, none of the essays exceeds five pages (roughly the length of my attention span), so I easily breezed through ninety pages of historical material without losing interest. I found myself laughing outloud at times. Second, because of the way Hertzfeld collected these stories, I truly believe that this book is not an attempt to re-write history so as to exalt himself as the God of Macintosh. While I have seen reviews of this book describe it as a coffee table book, I don't view it as a coffee table book. The essays cover technical details about how the Macintosh was prototyped and debugged, and these technical details will be above 95 percent of the people who pick up this book. Not to mention there is a lot of text.

The anecdotes in this book read quite true to me. We follow Hertzfeld from his initial hire at Apple through to his maneuvers to get himself onto the Macintosh development team. Because the anecdotes come from a variety of sources, the book really seems to fairly depict each person's role in the development of the Macintosh. For example, we've all heard Jef Raskin claim that he was the creator of the Macintosh, but this book reveals that the form factor of the computer envisioned by Raskin was nothing like the 128k Mac that ultimately arrived at retail stores, and that Raskin was put on a forced leave of absence from Apple before the machine even shipped.

Having said all these great things about the book, who is the target market for this book? I happen to have been a Mac owner since the 128k Mac was released (I passed on the 128, and waited for the 512), so this book brought back many fond memories of how the Mac changed my life and of the adventures I have had with it since its introduction. But as the foreward of this book acknowledges, most people today are computing with Windows machines and in a sense "everyone is basically using a Mac," because all the concepts implemented by the Mac team are now available in one form or another on the Windows operating system. But I don't think a Windows user would find this book of interest, as they typically don't care how the computer works or what mountains had to be moved to make the graphical operating system happen.

The book concludes with Steve Jobs removal from the Macintosh team in 1985. It provides no insight on whether the "new Apple" after Jobs' return is anything like the "old Apple" chronicled in this book. This is, of course, due to the fact that Hertzfeld was only at Apple from 1979 to 1984, so here we are, twenty years later, still reminiscing about what it was like to invent the original Mac. Hertzfeld's departure from Apple came after a six-month leave of absence, and the magic he had felt before his leave had gone away (or "grown up") by the time he was scheduled to return. So he left amicably, and went on to found three separate companies in the years that followed. Revolution In The Valley is a wonderful book to read, but I'm thinking the only people who will want to read it are those who were Apple devotees in the early 1980's, or MBA students studying where Apple went wrong with its multiple reorganizations and management shakeups. I find the anecdotes in this book fascinating, and I can't put it down. Programming geeks or budding electrical engineers will find this book fascinating. These stories are the words of real ex-employees, many speaking out for the first time, and detail the day to day travails of the people who made it all happen. But I honestly don't think my wife or my sister would spend much time with this book at all. It's just too much of an insider's look at a company that is struggling to remain relevant in a world that is very different than the world in 1984. But if you are one of the people who bought into the whole Macintosh culture in the 1980's, I would definitely recommend this book.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A coffee-table book for nerds, January 16, 2010

By 

Dr. Bojan Tunguz (Indiana, USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Revolution in The Valley: The Insanely Great Story of How the Mac Was Made (Hardcover)

Macintosh computer is the most iconic computer of all time, and probably one of the most significant consumer electronics products ever. The successors of the original Macintosh have remained aspirational products ever since, and Mac fans are oftentimes known for their cult-like admiration for their computers. One name that immediately comes to mind when Mac is mentioned is that of Steve Jobs, Apple cofounder and a mercurial and controversial visionary that has shaped Apple products for the most of company's history. However, Jobs is a strange bird - a head of a technology company without any concrete technological skills. The bulk of the work on the original Apple computer was done by the other company cofounder (Steve Wozniak) and the team that actually built Mac was composed of largely unknown engineers and technicians who worked on the computer over many years with the utmost passion and dedication. This book is a tribute to that creative and dedicated team. It is written in a form of many anecdotes of crucial events and developments in the process of creating the first Mac. Most of the stories are told from the point of view of Andy Hertzfeld, but there are numerous contributions by other team members as well. The book is filled with images of old hand-written designing notes, pictures of the team members, various Polaroid screen-shots of the development of Mac's GUI, and many, many more moments that elicit a form of nostalgia for those early days of the computer industry. The whole book is in fact a tribute to those more innocent days when idealism was a much more potent motivator than money and stock options. It also paints a picture of Silicon Valley when it was possible for young fresh-out-of-college engineers to find meaningful work and live in places like Palo Alto. Whether you are a Mac fan or someone with a curiosity about the first-hand accounts of the early personal computer industry, you will find a lot in this book to keep you interested. It's a homage to the real nerd inside of all of us.