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Review
Book: Revolution in the Valley
Issue: 3.5 (May/June 2005)
Author: Marc Zeedar
Article Description: No description available.
Article Length (in bytes): 3,563
Starting Page Number: 8
RBD Number: 3502
Resource File(s): None
Related Web Link(s):
http://www.oreilly.com/
Known Limitations: None
Full text of article...
Regardless of your platform choice, the history of the creation of the Macintosh is fascinating and educational. Though many such books have been written, there is no better perspective than that of the engineers who designed and built the system, and that's what we've got in Andy Hertzfeld's Revolution in the Valley.
This book is a collection of brief -- one to four pages -- tales in the history of the Macintosh. There are humorous and insightful social-oriented stories about Steve Jobs' and other luminaries' personalities, technical stories about the development of specific technologies, and personal stories from Andy about his trials and tribulations working "90 hours a week and loving it."
The stories in the book are freely available on Andy's folklore.org website, but they are much easier to read in book format.
Some of the stories are funny, such as "-2000 Lines of Code," where Bill Atkinson (who, as the author of QuickDraw, is the true heart and soul of the Mac) rebels against the draconian process of having to judge programming progress based on lines of code completed by writing down "-2000" for his weekly report after brilliantly speeding up QuickDraw by eliminating 2000 lines of code.
Other stories are revealing, such as "I Invented Burrell," where Burrell Smith (creator of most of the Mac's unique hardware) playfully imitated the late Jef Raskin (who had a habit of claiming he'd invented your idea years earlier) by saying, "Well I invented Burrell!" when challenged that Burrell had invented the Mac.
Many of the stories are enlightening as to exactly how the Mac was developed. My favorite was "Round Rects Are Everywhere" in which Steve Jobs successfully convinces Bill Atkinson that QuickDraw really needed routines to draw boxes with rounded corners by showing him how many real world objects (such as stop signs) use them.
For tech geeks, there are some highly technical stories, such as "Monkey Lives" and "Disk Swapper's Elbow."
The great thing about this book, however, is that every story is excellent. There's a wide variety of topics, characters, and situations, and not all stories are technical (some are merely amusing), but each story is valuable in that it presents something you probably haven't read anywhere else. A handful of stories deal with widely reported historical events, but coming from Andy's perspective, they feel fresh.
If you are interested in Macintosh or computing history, this book is a must-read. It's the best Mac book since Guy Kawasaki's The Macintosh Way, and that's saying a lot. I highly recommend it.
In Brief Product Revolution in the Valley ISBN: 0-596-00719-1
Manufacturer O'Reilly Contact Info http://www.oreilly.com/ Price $24.95 (320 pages) Pros Short stories; great variety of topics; excellent layout and design; stories available for free on the web Cons Stories available for free on the web Rating (1.0-5.0): 4.7
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