Unsung innovators: Andy Hertzfeld, technical lead for the original Macintosh system software

Andy Hertzfeld says he’s as rocked today as he was on January 24, 1984, the day Steve Jobs unveiled the original Macintosh.

“It was incredible, like watching your baby come into the world and watching the world react like it did,” says Hertzfeld.

Hertzfeld was the technical lead for the Macintosh system software and was the second programmer to join the project, after Bud Tribble. Hertzfeld was responsible for the overall architecture of the system and wrote a substantial portion of the system code himself, while helping the other programmers to integrate their parts.

He did a lot of the early grunt work, too. In 1981, he designed and implemented the initial device drivers and entire I/0 system. In 1982, he implemented the so-called “User Interface Toolbox,” the code including windows, menus and buttons, among other graphical items.

He ported all these items from the Apple Lisa to work on the Mac’s Motorola-made 68000 processor and the Mac’s smaller memory footprint. In 1983, he designed and implemented most of the original desk accessories — for example, the scrapbook and control panel.

There is not a hint of arrogance in Hertzfeld’s voice when he says, “I really feel I helped change the world for the better.”

In particular, that change meant “helping make computers easy and fun for ordinary non-technical users and taking the amazing spirit” of the Apple II, “which I worshipped, and porting it to the Macintosh.”

Andy Hertzfeld, original Mac hardware leadIt was a project “full of ups and downs,” remembers Hertzfeld, pointing out that the Mac was an unpopular project among employees in the Apple II and Apple Lisa groups at the time it started up. In the early 1980s, the Apple II was responsible for most of the money coming into Apple and, like at most companies, insiders preferred to work on the most successful product team instead of on an upstart nobody could be sure would fly in the marketplace.

For its part, the Apple Lisa — an expensive product that also featured a Xerox PARC-inspired interface — was selling poorly. But Steve Jobs believed in the Lisa, the first Apple computer ever to sport a GUI. And the plan was for the Mac to be the follow-on to Lisa, the “Apple II for the 1980s,” Hertzfeld says.

Hertzfeld didn’t always have his eye on being a computer design wizard. He’d thought he’d be a college professor, and was in fact teaching computers at U.C. Berkeley when Apple fever hit.

“I loved the Apple II and I was a hobbyist. [On the side], I’d built a little program that would allow the Apple II to show lower-case characters. One of my students, Barney Stone, saw it, and said, ‘Don’t give it away, sell it.’ At the time, I was giving all my programs away; that was all I knew how to do then.”

Not long after, Hertzfeld was meeting with Steve Jobs, who agreed to buy the program — firmware for a ROM chip to fit in one of the Apple II’s two ROM sockets — at the price of a dollar a chip.

Two weeks later, though, Jobs changed his mind, saying he needed that extra socket for a floating-point processor. But Hertzfeld got a job offer out of it of it.

Hired in August 1979 — and unfortunately missing one of two of Apple’s historic four-for-one stock splits — he became employee no. 435. By Feb. 1981, he was recruited to work on the Mac project, then located in what Apple called “the Texaco building,” named for the gas station that employees viewed from their windows.

Unpopular at first — “it was just a tiny, tiny project” — Hertzfeld had his work cut out for him. “We knew the real challenge was to make the computer happen, even if people didn’t believe.”

Getting Lisa’s giant software ported to the Macintosh was a huge challenge; the Mac had just 128K in memory compared to the 1MB in the Lisa. But as the years went by, Apple — and Jobs in particular — got more and more excited about the project. And in 1984, Hertzfeld got to see his dreams come true.

It was an unlikely turn of events for the son of a real estate developer and an elementary school teacher turned college professor, but this Philadelphia native would have it no other way.

He recalls Microsoft Windows’ first release in the late 1980s and remembers not being too concerned. “It seemed inferior. Windows 2.11 was lame. It copied the Mac but it did that incredibly crudely, right down to every desk accessory. It was a giggle for us,” he says.

But Apple employees weren’t laughing for long. When Windows-based PCs outsold Macs just a few years later, Hertzfeld says it was hard to believe.

“But Apple had an elitist attitude; it didn’t really understand. I think the Mac got overtaken because Steve [was demoted and later resigned] and our company lost momentum.”

When asked if he’d have done anything differently in the original Mac, Hertzfeld, like many engineers, has no shortage of answers. He wishes he’d implemented the I/O system to accommodate hard disks, implemented memory handling differently and thinks that the closed architecture of the Mac made it difficult to keep up with the rapid changes in computing then. The closed architecture was a good idea at the time, he says, because everyone could have identical, easy-to-use Macs, but the industry’s growth path has made him regret that decision in later years.

Nevertheless, Hertzfeld feels incredibly lucky for being part of such a major chunk of personal computer progress.”I’ve started three companies since then [Radius in 1986, General Magic in 1990 and Eazel in 1999], but to this day, it’s clear to me that my Mac work was the most important and fun thing I ever did in my life. Even when I look at the new Macs, I see the spirit of it. And that feels great.”