Macintosh Design

Bruce Tognazzini in 2000 on the evolution of the Mac’s interface.

A couple of UC Berkeley kids took the bus down to Apple to show the core Mac team a Mac Plus running MacWrite. We were not impressed. We’d seen MacWrite before. But when they shrank the MacWrite window that filled the screen, suddenly we could see the Finder running beneath. Apple’s best and brightest gawked, gasped, and then broke into excited chatter. We’d never thought of such a grand illusion. When the two students returned to Berkeley late that afternoon, it was in the back of a stretch limo, and today’s MultiFinder was born.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again:

Today’s tools allow software developers to get really creative with their creations. The tools back in 1984 meant that software developers had to be really creative to ship a product.

(via @gruber)

This site is an overview of the software that ran on pretty much every Apple computer from 1976 to 2004. It goes into technical details in all the right places — the development of Mach, the way that the Carbon and Cocoa APIs came together from OPENSTEP, and the 1988 red/pink/blue index cards brainstorm to plan features for future Mac OS releases.

Nice interview with Dan Smith, a Software Engineer from Apple in 1986.

Signal: Is there any hope for a true, Lisa-like, multi-application desktop environment on the Macintosh?

Smith: There certainly is.

(WARNING: This pdf file is 1284 pages long and 18MB in size.)

From wiki:

Inside Macintosh is the name of the developer documentation manuals published by Apple Computer, documenting the APIs and machine architecture of the Macintosh computer.

If you want to get your nerd boner on, read some of this stuff. I have the real-life version of Volume I, and it’s like stepping back into 1985.

This is a transcript of a really long lecture (I’m not even all the way through it yet), but there’s so much great stuff here that it’s worth going through. Tesler and Espinosa talk the audience through the history of the Macintosh UI, from Smalltalk at Xerox PARC to the Lisa to the Mac. Great stuff.

On October 14, 1983, the design team for Apple Computer Inc.’s new Macintosh computer met with BYTE Managing Editor Phil Lemmons at the company’s Cupertino, California, headquarters. In the dialogue that followed, Bill Atkinson, Steve Jobs, Andy Hertzfeld, Larry Kenyon, Joanna Hoffman, Burrell Smith, Dave Egner, Chris Espinosa, Steve Capps, Jerry Manock, Bruce Horn, and George Crowe discussed the evolution of their brainchild.

Love this interview. You’ve got most of the key players of the Macintosh software team (plus Steve Jobs) all in one place.

If you haven’t read Andy Hertzfeld’s Macintosh Stories already, you’re in for a treat.

Some of my favourites:

• Busy Being Born
• Desk Ornaments
• MacPaint Evolution
• Real Artists Ship

If you’re at all interested in the history of the Macintosh, you’ll love the site.