You might think that impossible schedules and uncompromising perfectionism would lead to an oppressive work environment. But most of the time, the ambiance of the Mac team was spontaneous, enthusiastic, and irreverent. Jef Raskin had a playful management style, encouraging a workplace teeming with toys and semi-organized games (see “Good Earth” on page 14) that carried over to the Jobs era. Most of the early team members were around the same age, in our mid-20s, and we enjoyed each other’s company. We increasingly hung out together as the project demanded ever-greater chunks of our time, abandoning the distinction between work and play. Despite the incessant pressure, we loved what we were doing.
Given Steve’s autocratic tendencies, the Mac team was surprisingly egalitarian. Unlike other parts of Apple, which were becoming more conservative and bureaucratic as the company grew, the early Mac team was organized more like a startup company. We eschewed formal structure and hierarchy in favor of a flat meritocracy with minimal managerial oversight. Steve Jobs would sometimes issue an unreasonable edict or veto something that everyone else wanted, but at least he would relent when he saw he was wrong (see “Quick, Hide In This Closet!” on page 158). At our third retreat in January 1983, Steve reinforced our rebel spirit, which was waning as the team grew larger, by telling us, “it’s better to be a pirate than join the navy” (see “Pirate Flag” on page 166).
Enthusiasm is contagious, and a product that is fun to create is much more likely to be fun to use. The urgency, ambition, passion for excellence, artistic pride, and irreverent humor of the original Macintosh team infused the product and energized a generation of developers and customers with the Macintosh spirit, which continues to inspire more than 20 years later.
How the Book Came to Be
A Look into the Publishing Process at O’Reilly
When I began to write stories for the Macintosh Folklore site (http://www.folklore.org/index.py) in June 2003, I had no intention of trying to publish them in book form. I was excited by the idea of developing a website to facilitate collective historical storytelling, where a group of participants could collaborate to recollect an interesting event. I chose the format of numerous interlinked anecdotes because it seemed natural for the Web and better suited to a collaborative effort than a single, continuous narrative, allowing a tale to be elaborated indefinitely without compromising the voices of the individual authors.
After I got the initial site running in August 2003, with about 20 stories, I began to show it to various original Mac team members, and others, to gather feedback and encourage participation. When I showed the site to Tim O’Reilly, I was surprised he suggested that his company publish it as a book. At first, I thought conforming to a book format might compromise my goals for the site, but I soon realized that the site’s anecdotal structure could work in book form, and I got excited about the idea. After all, I own dozens of indispensable O’Reilly books, so I was thrilled at the chance to become one of their authors. Without showing it to other publishers, I signed a contract with O’Reilly in December 2003, promising a finished draft by June 2004.
Tim introduced me to the talented team at his company, including my editor, Allen Noren, who specializes in O’Reilly’s more humanistic efforts (his previous two books were Dan Gillmor’s We the People and Paul Graham’s Hackers and Painters). Allen guided me through the laborious process to transform the raw material of the Folklore site into a beautiful book.
After completing the writing phase in June 2004, we embarked on the editing and layout process. The first step was copyediting. All 90 or so of the stories had to be thoroughly edited, in batches of 10 at a time. Most of the changes involved fixing grammatical errors and punctuation, and removing unnecessary verbiage, chopping up my Proustian run-on sentences (like this one), but they occasionally involved additional writing to provide more explanation or clarification. My editors also wanted to delete many of the most technical passages, fearing they would alienate nontechnical readers. After editing was completed on a batch, I had to accept or reject each individual change. I accepted all the grammatically oriented ones, figuring my editors knew better than I did, but 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. Sometimes we’d argue about the merits of particular changes, but it usually wasn’t that hard to reach consensus. I decided to keep the original text on the site, so you can compare it with the book if you’re interested in seeing what changed.
The next step was working on the layout. We decided to maintain the basic format of the site, but we divided the stories into five parts at natural breaking points, to give the reader a chance to rest. We decided to use an unusual trim size, eight inches square, which seems simultaneously large and small at the same time. I was delighted when Allen told me they wanted to print it in full color on high quality paper without increasing the price.
Unfortunately, I discovered that it’s a lot harder to publish images in a book than on the Web. On the Folklore site, I didn’t have to worry too much about obtaining permissions, since if anybody ever complained, I could easily remove an offending image. But once published, a book is immutable, and my contract required that I obtain formal rights for every image in the book. Some photographs require multiple layers of permissions (from the subjects, the photographer, and the original publication); with 20-year-old photographs, it’s difficult to track everything down. That kind of work is not my forte, but luckily Allen introduced me to a consultant who was willing to obtain permissions for $50 per image. To make matters worse, the printed page still has much higher resolution than a computer display, so we needed to procure higher resolution images than the ones on the site.
Before unveiling the site publicly in January 2004, I gathered up my courage and showed it to Steve Jobs. He was fairly enthusiastic about it, but as usual, he had some complaints. “I like what you’ve done with the site,” he told me, “but the quality of some of the scans you’re using is terrible! Can’t you do better than that?” When I complained that it was hard to find pristine copies of decades old material, he suggested that I could probably access Apple’s corporate marketing archive to find better versions of lots of the images.
I didn’t even know that Apple had a marketing archive. It took a few months to track down the right people, since I didn’t want to bother Steve about the details, but I eventually found Sue Runfola, who works on rights and permissions in Apple’s Legal Department and who introduced me to Del Smith Penny, who maintains Apple’s marketing archive as a part-time job. The archive is just a single room in a nondescript building a few blocks away from the main Apple campus, stuffed to the gills with maybe 40 long file cabinets. There were stacks of cardboard boxes on top of the cabinets that Del told me were acquired from Mike Markkula’s garage, containing marketing material from Apple’s first four years that no one had time to examine yet.
Some of the material in the archive was indexed in a Filemaker database running on an old Mac, but Del admitted that much of it still wasn’t indexed at all, since he barely had time to keep up with the new stuff coming in. But he was willing to help me search for everything I asked him about, and by the end of the afternoon, Del and I were able to locate a treasure trove of around 30 high-quality slides of relevant product and publicity photos, including some that were never published before. We also uncovered a rare videotape of potential TV commercials shot in October 1983 featuring the Mac design team that were never aired, but that’s another story.
Allen introduced me to Michelle Weatherbee, an award-winning book designer who had just been hired to work full-time as O’Reilly’s art director; my book was her first project as an O’Reilly employee. Michelle had me bring lots of my old Macintosh relics to O’Reilly headquarters in Sebastopol, including my design notebooks, which she borrowed for a few weeks to scan. I worked with Michelle and layout artist Melanie Wang to match the images to the proper stories. Michelle and
a few others at O’Reilly helped choose other relevant images from commercial image clearinghouses like Corbis.
Allen told me that I needed a foreword for the book and suggested that I ask Steve Jobs to write one, but I didn’t have the courage to ask him to do something like that. I suggested Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak instead, who told me that he loved the site and had even contributed a few comments to some of the stories. Woz was enthusiastic about writing the foreword, which he thought he could get done in a few weeks. We told him we needed it by the end of June.
I warned Allen that while Woz always had the best intentions, he often was a notorious procrastinator. If he didn’t do something right away, it had a tendency not to get done indefinitely. Predictably, the foreword wasn’t finished by the end of July and Allen began to send Woz emails to remind him about it every few weeks. Woz always replied promptly, promising to make room in his busy schedule to get it done soon.
Finally, in September, while I was meeting with Allen and the team in Sebastopol to finalize the layout, he told me that he had some bad news. He had finally given up on Woz’s foreword, because Woz hadn’t responded to an email Allen had sent a few days earlier informing him the final deadline was approaching. I laughed and told Allen that was actually good news, because not responding to the email meant that Woz was probably actually writing it, and sure enough I was right. A few days later, Woz sent Allen an eloquent, stirring foreword that was a perfect start for the book.
I assumed the title of the book would be Macintosh Folklore, just like the website, but while I was working with Michelle and Melanie on the layout, I noticed them referring to the book as Revolutionaries. I asked Allen what was up and he told me that the sales department didn’t think my title was appealing enough, and that sales honcho Mark Brokering had renamed the book Revolutionaries in the Valley, but they were waiting to tell me until they had the cover art finished. I cringed, because I wanted to be modest and avoid hyperbole, but Allen insisted I’d love it once I saw the cover.
The next time I visited Sebastopol to work on the layout, Michelle showed me a mockup of the cover, which used a black-and-white Norman Seeff photo that was taken for Rolling Stone magazine in January 1984, the one where Norman told us not to smile. They had colorized the Macintosh and added a bright red background. I liked the photo but disliked the red color, and was surprised to learn that my opinion didn’t matter all that much. The O’Reilly team was adamant, telling me that I wasn’t in a good position to judge, since it was supposed to appeal to young people, a group to which I no longer belonged. Eventually they wore me down and today I even sort of like it. At least I was able to get them to change Revolutionaries to Revolution, which I thought seemed slightly more modest.
My biggest disappointment with the book has to do with the story links. We decided to keep the story links in the book, even though you can’t click on them. To compensate, they were supposed to include the page number of the referenced story, but apparently that was too much for O’Reilly’s layout system to cope with, given that page numbers changed frequently as edits were made. I hope we’re able to improve this in subsequent printings.
Now that the book is complete, it’s interesting to compare it to the website. Once I finally got a finished copy of the book in my hands, I was amazed at how much better it seemed than the website for continuous reading, in terms of ease and enjoyment, even though most of the content was crafted for the site instead of the book. Computers still have a long way to go before they match the ease of use of books. The website has some compensating strengths, though, and is better than the book for only reading stories about a particular character or topic.
But by far the main advantage of the website over the book is that it’s a living document, capable of correcting itself and growing indefinitely. That might seem ironic, given the moribund state of the Folklore site since I finished writing in June 2004. But there’s a (somewhat feeble) reason: I didn’t want to write new stories while the book was in production, because I knew that I would want to squeeze them into the book, and I didn’t want to delay it. Hopefully, this essay helped to shake off some of the rust, and I will start adding new stories soon, probably at the rate of around one per month.
Afterword for the New Edition
Andy Hertzfeld, September 5, 2011
When we were writing the stories for this book, it wasn’t clear where we should stop, since the Macintosh never stopped evolving. At first I thought it should end with the catharsis of the intro at Apple’s annual shareholder’s meeting in January 1984, which was the emotional high point of the story. But eventually I realized that there was a lot to be learned from the denouement that unfolded in the following year and a half, as the team went their separate ways. It became clear that the natural place to break was when Steve Jobs got involuntarily separated from the team in June 1985—I called that sad story “The End of An Era.”
Here, in September 2011, I’m feeling wistful because the end of another era is upon us, since Steve Jobs stepped down as CEO of Apple on August 24th. After spending more than a decade estranged from Apple, Steve returned as reluctant CEO in July 1997, and quickly resuscitated Apple’s original values, which had slowly atrophied during his absence over the previous decade. Apple once again began to produce imaginative, innovative products, starting with the first iMac and its courageous, stunning industrial design.
The iPod, released in October 2001, re-imagined music players. With its elegant user interface and prodigious capacity, the iPod quickly became a beloved, colossal hit, fueled by the ground-breaking convenience of the iTunes store. But the most impressive part was how Apple developed the discipline to relentlessly improve it, year after year, making it ever more elegant and useful while pushing the previous year’s model into obsolescence before the competition could even copy it.
But Apple and Steve were just getting started. In 2005, it was obvious that multi-purpose cell phones would eventually subsume music players, and that the iPod would have to evolve into a phone. Most companies would have done it by extending their popular, existing UI. Apple, however, once again re-imagined the device, ditching the scroll wheel for a large, multi-touch screen with numerous sensors and a brilliant new UI optimized for fingers. The following year, the launch of the App Store and the SDK unleashed the creativity of 3rd party developers and completely transformed the industry.
Today, Apple is by far the most successful consumer electronics company on the planet. Its products are widely imitated but rarely surpassed. The iPad is upending the traditional PC industry, by stripping away the hated complexity that was inflicted on consumers for decades, and offering a great experience for most common applications for a reasonable price. Steve is leaving the company in excellent shape, and it’s likely they will prosper for the foreseeable future.
Many of the stories in this book offer illustrations of Apple’s unique core values, which Steve applied relentlessly to create the foundation of their prior and current success: design featuring simplicity, elegance, artistry and extreme cleverness, combined with a strong dose of rebellion and an impatience with the status quo, harnessed to a sense of urgency and humor and an unwillingness to compromise, all in the service of making something you want for yourself more than anything else in the world. Even with Apple’s immense success, these values continue to be all too rare in the corporate world. It will be interesting to see how well they flourish in the absence of their promulgator—here’s to hoping they are still in full force as you’re reading this.
Acknowledgments
Like the Macintosh itself, this book resulted from the efforts of many talented individuals. I’d especially like to thank my friends and original Mac team members Steve Capps, Donn Denman, Bruce Horn, and Susan Kare for contributing their stories to the book. I’d also like to thank Eric Barnes, William Donelson, Scott Knaster, Dan Kottke, Jerry Manock, David Ramsey, Caroline Rose, Paul Tavenier, and Tom Zito for contributing stories to the Folklore.org web s
ite, where this book originated.
Thanks to original Mac team members Bill Atkinson, Steve Capps, Jerome Coonen, George Crow, Donn Denman, Joanna Hoffman, Bruce Horn, Brian Howard, Steve Jobs, Susan Kare, Larry and Patti Kenyon, Scott Knaster, Dan Kottke, Jerry Manock, Caroline Rose, and Bud Tribble for unearthing artifacts and sharing their memories from twenty years ago.
Apple Computer generously allowed me to rummage through their corporate image archive to obtain photographs for the book. Thanks to Donna Dubinsky, Nancy Heinen, Steve Jobs, Del Penny, and Sue Runfola for helping to make that happen.
The hardest part of turning the Folklore web site into Revolution in The Valley was obtaining permission to use dozens of photographs. Thanks to Sara Nickles, Robin Rossi, Michele Filshie, and Terry Bronson for helping to obtain image permissions, and Mike Stern for legal advice.
I showed Tim O’Reilly my Folklore web site in October 2003, and he suggested that his company publish it as a book. I’d like to thank Tim for initiating the project and introducing me to everyone at his amazing company.
My original title for the book was Macintosh Folklore. I’d like to thank Mark Brokering, the associate publisher at O’Reilly, for coming up with Revolution in The Valley.
The design and layout of the book was done by a talented team at O’Reilly, including interior designer Melanie Wang, cover designer Ellie Volckhausen, and art director Michele Wetherbee. Other folks at O’Reilly who helped include illustrator Rob Romano, photographer Derrick Story, production editor Philip Dangler, proofreaders Mary Brady and Marlowe Shaeffer, and product manager Betsy Waliszewski. A special thanks is due to my editor, Allen Noren, who shepherded this novice author through the publishing process.
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