Andy Hertzfeld about the magic of Apple and Apple II computer

Below is the text of the letter written by the programmer Andy Hertzfeld Apple in late 1988 for MacWeek magazine. The publication called "The Spirit of Apple». It was about magic, which the author found in the Apple II, and that, so engineers were able to move it for Macintosh.

Best buy in my life occurred in January 1983. I spent $ 1295 on the Apple II computer with 16K of RAM. The more I understood, the more joy and happiness received from him. More and more of my free time was spent on the Apple II. And then everything took longer this free time that was spent on the study of the technical aspects of the system. I really liked the monitor, decorated in a crazy, whimsical style. It was clear that here worked passionate designer. As a result, I became so obsessed with the Apple II, which was supposed to go to work there, where it was created. Rejecting the graduate school, I took a system programmer position at Apple in August 1979.

Despite the fact that the Apple II was excellent, not only technically, but also in terms of marketing, the most important has been laid upon him. It was never released as a product in the usual sense of the word, because every employee is put into the Apple II a part of himself. Steve Wozniak, for example, tried just to impress your friends. This unique spirit was taken up by third-party developers. They were literally nowhere and pleased innovative applications.

When large companies have realized the enormous potential of personal computers, this area began to develop very quickly. 1980 Apple II industry standard to which many were equal. By that time, the industry tried to hook all and sundry. They all want to earn as much money as possible. I started to be disappointed when Apple started hiring a lot of professional managers, not appreciating the magic of Apple II. Many of these people would have been happy selling refrigerators. I was thinking about leaving, if not stumbled upon the tiny motherboard made by young technician Burrell Smith from the service department.

Burrell worshiped the Apple II. He redid the charge in his peculiar style, based on the design of Steve Wozniak. A new kind of chip was crazier than before. It was used a lot of clever tricks that have helped save functionality on a smaller area. Anyway, on this motherboard smelled thereby Apple spirit, and I immediately knew I had to work on this project.

Steve Jobs was also fascinated by the board Burrell and quickly took over the leadership of a tiny group of engineers, moving them to a remote part of the building, inspiring us with his great vision. Apple II broke through an important price barrier, making this a personal computer affordable for ordinary consumers. But its use in the technically illiterate person still caused great difficulties. We thought that with the Macintosh, we have a chance to create the first low-cost and affordable to learn the computer, which will be useful for everyone and can thus truly change the world.

Macintosh team drew inspiration from developments Steve Wozniak, changing some design principles and design to fit your needs. Despite the fact that Apple has been quite a big company, the unique position of Steve Jobs has allowed him to maintain our unit though separately from Apple. Macintosh was released in January 1984 and eventually became quite a successful product.

via Folklore