The flag waved proudly over Bandley 3 for about a month or two, but one morning in late September or early October, I noticed it was gone. It turned out the Lisa team, with whom we had a mostly friendly rivalry, had decided it would be fun to steal the flag for themselves. I think they even sent us a ransom note. A few of us stormed over to the Lisa building to retrieve it, and Capps had to wrestle it from the grasp of one of the secretaries, who was hiding it in her desk.
The flag continued to fly over Bandley 3 for more than a year. It was even photographed for a magazine or two during the Mac introduction. But suddenly one day it was missing again. We never did figure out what happened to it.
Make a Mess, Clean It Up!
September 1983
Burrell’s unique approach to playing Defender
contributed by Donn Denman
Working 90 hours a week requires frequent and highly effective work breaks. In the center of the Macintosh work area in Bandley 3 we had a ping-pong table, a stereo system, and a Defender video game machine. We found that competitive play gave us a jolt of adrenaline and a refreshed mindset when we resumed work. We also learned a lot about our co-workers during competition. While playing Defender one day, I got a great insight into how Burrell’s mind worked.
Andy, Burrell, and I had an ongoing competition playing Defender. We’d challenge each other in two or three player competitions. Because we had to take turns playing, we could watch how the other player was doing. This gave us opportunities to refine our skills, learn the other guy’s technique, and show off our prowess.
The goal of Defender was to defend humans from abduction by aliens. The evil green aliens dropped down from the top of the screen, randomly picked up the humans, and tried to bring them back up to the top of the screen. You controlled a ship and had to shoot the aliens, either before they grabbed a human or during their rise up to the top of the screen. If an alien made it to the top with a human, the alien consumed the human and became a vicious mutant that attacked very aggressively. You started the game with 10 humans. If they all died, the aliens became mutants and swarmed your ship from all sides.
After a while, surviving the first few game levels was pretty easy, unless you had been up all night programming. The Defender machine was probably a pretty good objective measure of current mental capacity. “Gee, I can’t even get through level 2! I guess it’s time to get some sleep.” Better to put in a bad performance on Defender than mess up the current programming task, or start down the wrong path on some hardware design.
One day Burrell started doing something radical. Andy came by my cube and said, “You’ve got to come see what Burrell’s doing with Defender. He’s innovating.”
“How can you innovate with a video game?” I wondered. I’d seen Burrell and Andy innovate on all kinds of things, but I couldn’t image how Burrell could step outside the box of a video game where the machine controlled the flow and dictated the goals. How could you gain some control in that environment?
a screenshot of Defender, Burrell’s favorite game
We started up a new competition and Burrell did something that stunned me. He immediately shot all his humans! This was completely against the goal of the game! He didn’t even go after the aliens, and when he shot the last human, they all turned to mutants and attacked him from all sides. He glanced in my direction with a grin on his face and said “Make a mess, clean it up!”
From Andy:
The first Defender machine that got us playing regularly was at Cicero’s Pizza, directly across the street from Texaco Towers. We used to go there every afternoon around 4 P.M., for increasingly longer periods as Burrell’s skills improved. Shortly after moving into Bandley 3, we got the opportunity to buy a Defender machine for $300, so I paid for it myself and donated it to the Bandley 3 lobby. Randy Wigginton purchased a Joust machine at the same time, so we had two video games, side by side in the lobby. The only other thing to say about Defender is that Steve Wozniak is probably the best player I’ve ever seen. He is the only one who could ever beat Burrell. What does it mean that that the two best computer designers also rule at Defender?
He then proceeded to dodge the swarm of angry mutants noisily chasing after him. “Burrell’s not going to win this competition,” I said to myself. “He’s not going to last long with a screen full of mutants!”
Often a single mutant was enough to kill you. Mutants moved so quickly over small distances that they seemed to just jump on top of your ship. Your ship was faster, though, so you had to outrun them and establish a gap. Only then could you have enough room to safely turn and fire at them.
Burrell, however, had developed a technique for dealing with a whole mass of mutants. He circled around them again and again and gathered them into a densely clumped swarm. Then, while circling, he fired a burst pattern across the whole swarm, not needing to aim at individuals. He was doing really well, cutting through the swarm like the Grim Reaper’s scythe. Burrell was no longer attacking individual mutants; he was treating the whole swarm as one big target.
Burrell may have lost that game and the next few, but it wasn’t long before he was mastering the machine. Instead of avoiding the tough situations, he’d immediately create them, and then start learning how to handle the worst situation imaginable. Before long, he could handle anything the machine could throw at him.
I was beginning to see how Burrell was so successful with everything he did. Like many high achievers, Burrell enjoyed challenges so much that he actually sought them out or consciously created them. He seemed to aggressively set up challenging situations throughout his life.
Why intentionally “make a mess?” So you can get really good at “cleaning up!”
MacPaint Evolution
June 1983
Bill decides to leave out a very impressive feature
While Bill Atkinson was developing LisaGraf, the crucial, lightning-fast graphics package that was the foundation of both the Lisa and Macintosh user interface (it was renamed QuickDraw for the Mac), he was also working sporadically on a simple bitmap-based drawing program for the Lisa called SketchPad. SketchPad enabled mouse-based drawing with a selection of paintbrushes and patterns, and gave Bill a quick way to test out and show off new features or improvements as they were added to LisaGraf.
Soon after the Lisa was announced at the 1983 annual shareholders meeting, Bill switched from working on Lisa system software to writing a killer graphics application for the Macintosh. Steve Jobs thought he should work on a structured drawing program, something like Mark Cutter’s LisaDraw, but Bill thought structured drawing was too complex and wanted to create something that was simple, elegant, and fun to use.
He began by dusting off his old SketchPad code and got it running on the Mac as MacSketch. SketchPad used menus to select patterns and styles to draw with, but Bill replaced them with permanent palettes at the bottom of the screen and added another large, prominent palette on the left that contained a variety of drawing tools. More tools would be added over time, but the basic structure of MacPaint was there from its earliest stages.
One of the problems with early graphics programs was that as you dragged a shape or image across the screen, it had to be erased from its old position before being drawn in the new one, which caused a distracting flicker. Bill completely eliminated this flicker by composing everything in an offscreen memory buffer, which was transferred to the screen in one fell swoop, so the interim states were never visible.
In fact, despite the Macintosh’s limited memory, he used two offscreen buffers, each the size of the document window, with one containing the current pixels of the document, and the other containing the pixels of its previous state, before the most recent operation. This made it very easy to implement Undo by just copying the old buffer to the new. It also enabled fast drawing because it was very easy to access the original state of the document in the second buffer as an object was being modified.
After getting basic updating working well,
Bill started adding more tools to the palette. He added a rectangular selection tool that allowed the user to perform operations on a subset of the document. The selection rectangle was depicted by inverting the pixels beneath it. It worked well enough over solid areas, but was confusing and hard to see when the underlying image was complex, such as a digitized picture. Bill knew he had to find a better way to do it.
He was thinking about the selection problem one evening when he went to dinner at an old beer and hamburger joint in Los Gatos, the kind of place where decades worth of initials are carved into the wooden tables. He ordered a beer, looked around the bar, and noticed a Hamm’s beer sign. The sign featured an impressive animated waterfall, with the water seeming to flow down the waterfall into the lake. Bill figured out the animation was accomplished by a mask layer moving beneath the surface of the sign that varied which portion of the image was visible below it.
He suddenly realized that an animated border—animated with a technique similar to the waterfall—could solve the graphical selection problem because it would always be easy to spot no matter what the background. He raced back home and implemented the animation by using an alternating sequence of patterns that produced the illusion of continuous motion, just like the beer sign. It looked great, but he didn’t know how to refer to it. A couple of days later, he showed it to Rod Perkins on the Lisa applications team, who told Bill the effect resembled “marching ants.” Bill liked this name, so that’s what he called it.
Around April 1983, Bill changed the name of the program from MacSketch to MacPaint. He began to hit his stride and started adding new features to MacPaint on a daily basis. One of the most important was “Fat Bits,” a mode that magnified a small section of the document by a factor of 8, allowing the user to easily manipulate individual pixels. It was implemented by scaling the offscreen buffer as it was transferred to the screen, so all of the other tools and effects kept working in Fat Bits mode.
Another key improvement came when Bill implemented the Paint Bucket tool, which allowed the user to simply click once to fill an entire area of the screen with the selected pattern. It used a “seed fill” algorithm to find all the neighboring pixels of the matching color, which was difficult to implement because of our stringent memory constraints. Bill ended up implementing a few different seed fill algorithms before he settled on one that was both fast and memory efficient enough. The seed fill routine eventually migrated from MacPaint into QuickDraw as part of the 128K ROM.
Rectangular selection was useful, but users also needed a way to manipulate an arbitrarily shaped area of an image. To solve this Bill, came up with another selection tool he called the “Lasso” because it contracted around its target. It was hard to control the mouse with pixel-level precision, so the Lasso tool allowed you to roughly outline the area of interest. When you let go of the mouse button, it would automatically tighten, skipping white pixels to cinch tightly around the target. The Lasso feature sort of fell out of creating the Paint Bucket, since the seed fill routine was exactly what was needed to cinch the Lasso properly.
The Lasso allowed an arbitrary area of pixels to be selected, so it required a third offscreen buffer the size of the document window that contained a mask to indicate which pixels were part of the selection. The mask buffer allowed fast graphical operations on large, irregular areas, such as dragging an image around the screen or making the Lasso selection shimmer with the marching ants effect. The first two offscreen buffers were allocated statically, but the mask buffer needed to be de-allocated when it wasn’t being used so its memory could be employed for other purposes. MacPaint was good at drawing text and allowed the user to specify characters at any position, with any font, size, or style. But once the text was instantiated, it just became pixels like everything else; you couldn’t go back and edit it as text. In June 1983, Bill thought he could do something about that.
Bill decided to try to turn pixels back into characters when you selected them with the Text tool. He wrote a lot of elaborate code, probably as much as for any other MacPaint feature. First, he wrote assembly language routines to isolate the bounding box of each character in the selected range. Then he computed a checksum of the pixels within each bounding box and compared them to a pre-computed table that was made for each known font. It only had to perform the full, detailed comparison if the checksum matched.
Bill got his character recognition routines working well. Compared to the earlier MacPaint, it seemed like magic to recover and edit previously placed text. It wasn’t perfect, because it would fail to recognize a character if a single dot was out of place, but it was still very useful. Everyone loved the feature and congratulated Bill for pulling off another miracle.
I was surprised a few days later when Bill told me he decided to remove the character recognition feature from MacPaint. He was afraid that if he left it in, people would actually use it a lot, and MacPaint would be regarded as an inadequate word processor instead of a great drawing program. It was probably the right decision, although I didn’t think so at the time. I was amazed Bill was able to detach himself from all the effort he’d put into creating the discarded feature; I know I probably wouldn’t have been able to do the same.
MacPaint was essentially finished by October 1983, long before our other key applications. The last part of finishing MacPaint involved dealing with out of memory problems, since it was really pushing the limits of the 128K Macintosh by using the three large offscreen buffers. In the worst case, there were only about 100 bytes free in MacPaint’s heap. Most of the bugs we encountered when running MacPaint turned out to be bugs in the underlying system, which were exposed by running so close to the edge of available memory.
It’s interesting to note that MacPaint was a rather small program by today’s standards, but it had to be to run in the Mac’s one eighth of a megabyte of memory. The finished MacPaint consisted of 5,804 lines of Pascal code, augmented by another 2,738 lines of assembly language, which compiled into less than .05 megabytes of executable code.
Bill Atkinson in 1987
part four
He can who thinks he can, and he can’t who thinks he can’t.
This is an inexorable, indisputable law.
Pablo Picasso
Steve Wozniak University
September 1983
Burrell’s educational credentials
After numerous delays, the launch of the Macintosh was finally scheduled for January 24, 1984, so we had to start doing publicity for it in the fall of 1983. Steve decided to anoint some of the engineers plus a few others as the official “Macintosh Design Team,” which meant we had to prepare to be interviewed by the press. Because some magazines have lead times of more than three months, interviews were scheduled as early as October.
As part of the preparations, our publicity gurus, the Regis McKenna press liaisons (known as the Rejettes), asked each of us to fill out a questionnaire. The standard questions were asked, such as date and place of birth, degrees, etc. Our answers would be used as the basis for a fact sheet that would be handed out to the press.
Burrell, who never attended college, didn’t know how to answer the “College Attended” question. But, true to form, it took him only a moment to come up with the perfect answer: “Steve Wozniak University.” I think you could say that, in some fashion, we were all graduates of Steve Wozniak University.
The official Macintosh design team. Left to right: George Crow, Joanna Hoffman, Burrell Smith, Andy Hertzfeld, Bill Atkinson, and Jerry Manock.
The Mythical Man-Year
October 1983
Steve estimates the effort that went into QuickDraw
In October of 1983, we had our first encounter with the press, in the form of a group interview with Byte magazine. The article was set to run concurrently with the launch of the Mac in January of 1984.
Byte was one of the first PC hobbyist magazines, written for a fairly technical audience of computer enthusiasts. Two Byte editors were quizzing five
or six of us, including Steve Jobs, when one of them asked how long the Mac’s graphical user interface software had taken to develop.
“How many man-years did it take to write QuickDraw?” the reporter asked Steve. QuickDraw, the amazing graphics package written entirely by Bill Atkinson, was at the heart of both Lisa and Macintosh.
Steve turned to look at Bill. “Bill, how long did you spend writing QuickDraw?”
“Well, I worked on it on and off for four years,” Bill replied.
Steve paused for a beat and then turned back to the reporter. “Twenty-four man-years. We invested twenty-four man-years in QuickDraw.”
Obviously, to Steve, one Atkinson year equaled six man-years. I think that was a modest estimate.
September 1983
The famous 1984 commercial is nearly canceled
The folks at Apple always had a flair for marketing. Mike Markkula, Apple’s third co-founder and a former Intel marketing executive, believed that a fledgling venture needed to act like a successful company if it wanted to become one, at least in terms of external perception, and Steve Jobs always insisted on the highest possible production values, even while Apple was still in the garage. The Apple II was featured in an expensive, 2-page spread in the September 1977 issue of Scientific American, for example, even though Apple had less than 20 employees and minimal sales at the time.
Apple’s advertising agency was Chiat-Day, founded by Jay Chiat in 1968. Jay was compulsively innovative, brash, and irreverent, much like an older version of Steve Jobs, and the two hit it off really well when they were introduced in 1981, just before Chiat-Day acquired Regis McKenna’s advertising operations. Jay and his talented team, featuring Creative Director Lee Clow and star copywriter Steve Hayden, crafted Apple’s first TV commercials, recruiting talk show host Dick Cavett as a spokesperson, and created the campaign that launched the Lisa, including a TV commercial that starred a then-unknown Kevin Costner.
Revolution in The Valley [Paperback] Page 17