[Ham-Mac] Andy Hertzfeld's website on the making of the Macintosh

[Richard Rucker]

I recently read Andy Hertzfeld's book, "Revolution in the Valley,"  
published by
O'Reilly, December 2004; it was hard to put down.  It led me to his  
website at
http://www.folklore.org, another great place to learn more about "How  
The Mac
Was Made."

"Folklore.org is a web site devoted to collective historical  
storytelling…"

"The site is structured as a series of projects containing related,  
interlinked
stories. The stories are indexed by their characters and the topics  
they cover,
and may be sorted by various criteria. Readers can rate the stories,  
and add
comments, or other stories."

"Currently, the Folklore site only supports a single project, about the
development of the original Macintosh, but that will be changing…"  
according to
a posting by Andy dated Jan 04.  As of Jun 05, the Mac "project" is  
still the
only one on the site, but this one has grown to 118 interlinked  
stories, of
which some 90 were published, at least in part, in his book.

You can read more about the site and how it is evolving here:
http://www.folklore.org/about.html

"The code behind the Folklore website is a set of CGI scripts written  
in Python
by Andy Hertzfeld. The Folklore scripts are free software, and will  
be licensed
under the GPL, so anyone can use and modify them."

"This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License" the  
specifics of which
you can find here:  http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/1.0/


Some stories not in the book worth noting are:

Story #110: "The story of how this site turned into a book."
-----------
"When I began to write stories for this site in June 2003, I had no  
intention
of trying to publish them in book form. I was excited by the idea of  
developing
a web site to facilitate collective historical storytelling…"

When developing the book, "I fought to keep most of the technical  
detail, since
I thought it was an important part of the story, although we did  
eliminate a
few of the most technical stories entirely…  I discovered that it's a  
lot
harder to publish images in a book than on the web…"

The website has a number of photos not in the book; of those, I'll  
note two
posted by Andy that tickled me:

   "My Apple Badge"  in story #97

   "Woz playing Defender in Bandley 3"   in story 74



Of the more technical stories not found in the book (with one exception,
"Switcher"), I found these worth more careful reading, along with the  
comments
posted at the bottom of each.  Unfortunately, only a few of these  
comments made
it into the book. This is one reason why perusing the website  
complements the
book and doesn't seem redundant.

QuickDraw & other GUI topics
----------------------------
   #101:  Andy Hertzfeld on "Font Manager Redux"
   # 73:  Andy Hertzfeld on "Cut, Paste, & Crash"
   # 88:  Bruce Horn on "A Floppy named Isadkfjalhkjh"

Resources, Finder, & the Xerox PARC influences
-----------------------------------------------
   # 27:  Bruce Horn on "The Grand Unified Model (1) - Resources"
   # 55:  Bruce Horn on "The Grand Unified Model (2) - The Finder"
   # 60:  Andy Hertzfeld on "RMaker"
   #116:  Bruce Horn on "On Xerox, Apple and Progress"

Switcher
--------
   # 98:  Andy Hertzfeld on "Switcher"
       Though in the book, I cite it because the following weren't  
published:

        Photo of a Jan 85 letter from Bill Gates addressed to "Andy  
Hertzfield"
          telling Andy how very excited he got playing with Switcher.

        More details on Switcher and lots of other good Mac  
historical info at
           http://www.mac512.com

        The home page lists this story as one of the five top-ranked  
favorites.

Other
-----
   # 19:  Daniel Kottle on "Macintosh Prototypes"
   # 90:  David Craig on "3rd Party Developers & Macintosh Development"


There are some good personality stories in there as well.  Here's my  
favorite
that didn't make the book:

   # 71:  Tom Zito on "Close Encounters of the Steve Kind"

          Be sure to read the first comment attached to this one.


I found this site a thought-provoking and exciting adventure, and I  
wonder if
anyone else has had a similar reaction.  As an avid Mac user ever  
since buying
a 128K Mac in April 1985, some of the stories brought back memories;  
e.g.,

   # 84:  Steve Capps on "Disk Swapper's Elbow"

Dick Rucker, KM4ML