Andy Hertzfeld, a key member of the original Mac team and unofficial historian of the “computer for the rest us,” has published these early Mac videos, outtakes from 1983 interviews with himself, Burrell Smith, Bill Atkinson, Mike Murray and George Crow.
Snippets from interviews with members of the original Macintosh design team, recorded in October 1983 for projected TV commercials that were never used.
If you have seen any of these early Mac videos, it’s this first one, which brings together all five guys and has been viewed nearly 270,000 times.
Andy Hertzfeld
This next bit is just of Andy Hertzfeld, who created the original Mac OS, on how the “computer for the rest of us” would change the world.
I expect to be totally amazed at what people are going to do with Macintosh. Every person, unique individual, brings something to the machine, just as the machine brings something to them, and the interaction between the two makes amazing things happen. And I expect people to use Macintosh to totally blow my mind, two years out, you know the incredible energy that is going to be put into it is really going to do some amazing things.
Burrell Smith
The self-taught hardware engineer that designed the motherboard (a.k.a. logic board) inside original Macintosh who intuitively understood how the device should work — one of the more memorable characters in a team chock full of character.
Burrell was working in Apple’s service department when he helped Bill Atkinson add more memory to an Apple II computer in an innovative fashion. Bill recommended him to Jef Raskin, who was looking for a hardware engineer to help him with his newly formed Macintosh project.[1] Burrell actually designed five different motherboards during the course of Macintosh development, all of which used techniques based on Programmable Array Logic (PAL) chips to achieve maximum functionality with a minimal chip count — Wikipedia
Bill Atkinson
By and large, the creator of the Macintosh’s applications, including MacPaint, who went on to create HyperCard, a development environment that ordinary people (i.e. me) used to create their own software.
And, if you have some time, out Andy Hertzfeld’s Folklore.org, where he presents a anecdotes from the early days of the Mac. Learn who coined the phrase “reality distortion field” and the meaning behind the words, “Texaco Towers.”
Most of Hertzfeld’s anecdotes can be consumed in just a couple minutes — good, good stuff…
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