1419 Most -- virtually all -- of the books I review here on Applelinks are softcover editions, and there's good reason for that. Computer books typically have a head-spinningly short half-life, often not much more than a year and rarely two before the content is hopelessly out of date.

However, the subject of this review is a hard-cover, and deservedly so. It's not a computer book per se, but rather a history/blog/diary about an important slice of time in computer culture. Relatively recent history to be sure, but it will be just as readable and interesting 10 or 20 years from now as it is today -- its historical value arguably enhanced by the passage of time.

"Revolution in The Valley" by Andy Hertzfeld is subtitled "The Insanely Great Story of How The Mac Was Made," and it chronicles that saga from the germ of the Macintosh idea as an underground "Skunkworks" Project at Apple in 1979, to May 31st, 1985, when Steve Jobs was banished by CEO John Sculley, the author had left Apple, and the Mac as a commercial product was still less than a year on the market. This really is a "present at the creation" memoir.

When Hertzfeld joined the Macintosh team in February, 1981, and became one of the principal authors of the Macintosh operating system, including the Graphical User Interface Tool Box and many of the original desk accessories. Hertzfeld left Apple in March, 1984, and went on to cofound three significant IT companies: Radius (1986), General Magic (1990), and Eazel project to design a user-friendly interface for Linux in 1999. He is currently involved in a project to develop Web-based software for collective storytelling, which is also used in publishing the stories contained in Revolution in The Valley. More on this in a moment.

In his foreword to Revolution, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak notes that "there are occasionally short windows in time when incredibly important things get invented that shape the lives of humans for hundreds of years. The development of the Macintosh computer was one of the events. Every computer today is basically a Macintosh, a very different type of computer from those that preceded it. Who developed this revolutionary computer? What motivated them.?"

In Revolution in The Valley, Herzfeld endeavors to answer these questions as he traces the development of the Macintosh from an insider's perspective as one of the "chosen few" who worked on the project with Steve Jobs.

"Most users today have never experienced what computing was like before the GUI [graphical user interface]," Herzfeld observes. "The Macintosh became very successful, although not quite the way we imagined. Today, the GUI we produced is ubiquitous, used by hundreds of millions of people every day, though most experience it through non-Apple platforms. "

Herzfeld begins at the beginning, which for him was January, 1978, when he purchased an Apple II (serial #1703) for $1,295. "Eventually, I became so obsessed with the Apple II that I had to go work at the place that created it," he relates,. I abandoned graduate school and started work to as a system programmer at Apple in August, 1979.

Apple had ramped up two new projects in the fall of 1978, the Sara and the Lisa, the latter of which was Apple's first computer with a GUI, and which was eventually marketed both as the original Lisa, and later the Macintosh XL. Herzfeld says that the Macintosh design team was inspired by Wozniak's original Apple II design, and their objective was to recreate its innovative spirit.

The purpose of this review is not to summarize the development history of the Macintosh computer. That's what the book does in what is essentially a collection of anecdotes, both of Herzfeld himself, and his friends and colleagues of the era, that were collected and posted on the [url=http://www.folklore.org]http://www.folklore.org[/url] website to mentioned above. While the book's content is finitely circumscribed (unless there are revised editions in the future), the website's capacity is essentially unlimited in practical terms, and new content will continue to be added there.

Herzfeld is scrupulous about attributing credit widely, and each member of the cast of characters gets a cameo profile in the book's lead-off section.

Revolution in The Valley is organized in five parts with a total of 90 vignettes or stories typically running two to four pages long plus illustrations. This structure makes the book very friendly to browsing, and while the content is arranged chronologically, there is no real central narrative thread, so one can peruse a bit from anywhere in the book in no particular order and it will still make sense.

For example, one of the first topics I thumbed it too was a chapter/story entitled "More like a Porsche. " As one who has frequently used automotive metaphor in writing about the Macintosh, I was tickled to discover that they were applied right from the Mac's early conception. Herzfeld relates a conversation between Steve Jobs and Apple Director of Creative Services James Ferris debating whether the Macintosh form factor should more closely emulate the Volkswagen Beetle or a Ferrari. In the end, Jobs determined that it should be "more like a Porsche," which is what he was driving at the time, coincidentally or not.

Another of many interesting anecdotes is a three-paragraph, one-page story about mustaches worn by many members of the Macintosh design team at the time, including Jobs and Wozniak (there are photos).

We are also informed who it was that identified the famous Jobs "reality distortion field," (Bud Tribble). "Amazingly, the reality distortion field seem to be effective even if you were acutely aware of it," Herzfeld recalls, "although the effect would fade after Steve departed. "

Other bits of legendary Mac lore exposited includes the famous pirate flag, the story behind the "1984" Super Bowl commercial, and Hertzfeld's take on who was the real "father of the Macintosh." Herzfeld acknowledges that Jef Raskin was definitely the creator of the Macintosh project at Apple, but many others contributed to its consummation, and he notes that Raskin vigorously opposed what became two of the most key elements of the Mac -- the 68000 Motorola processor chip and a mouse, became increasingly alienated from the team, and finally left during the summer of 1981, two and a half years before the Mac's release.

Herzfeld gives Bill Atkinson and Burrell Smith honorable mention, but says that "ultimately, if any single individual deserves the honor, it would have to cast my vote for the obvious choice: Steve Jobs. The Macintosh never would have happened without him, in anything like the form it did. "

Revolution in The Valley is bound in the increasingly popular "square" format (actually 7.9" x 8.0"), the pages being roughly as tall as they are wide. This is an ideal configuration for laying out photos attractively, which is probably why it first seemed to become popular with photography books.

The photos and illustrations are one of the coolest factors of "Revolution." There are many, a large proportion of them in color, and they are key elements of the saga. One of my favorite sections is a six-page Gallery of Susan Kare's original MacPaint art from 1983.

Inside the front and back covers, as well as at several places in the book proper, are reproductions of Hertzfeld's original project notes, scribbled and sketched on binder and graph paper.

There is also a gallery of screenshots (actually photographs) of Macintosh graphical user interface elements as they appeared on a Mac display for the first time, and even a shot of Steve Jobs and some early Macs on the cover of the very first issue of Macworld magazine.

Revolution in The Valley is very nicely bound and presented, especially for a hardcover book costing only $24.95. No worries about cost-value with this one. If I have a negative criticism it is that the print is more than a tad small for my aging eyes. I should capitulate and get bifocals I guess, but the optometrist tells me that sticking with single vision as long as I can tolerate it will cause no harm. I digress. Anyway, the typeface could have been a bit larger, albeit at the expense of some white space.

Other than that, I can't think of anything much to complain about. This book will prove a durable volume of interest to anyone curious about the Macintosh's beginnings for many years to come. It's more storytelling than literature, an observation I expect in Andy Herzfeld would agree with. As he concludes, "Enthusiasm is contagious, and a product that is fun to create is much more likely to be fun to use. The urgency, ambition, a 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."

Revolution in The Valley (hardcover)
The Insanely Great Story of How the Mac Was Made
By Andy Hertzfeld
1st Edition December 2004
ISBN: 0-596-00719-1
320 pages,
$24.95 US, $36.95 CA, �16.95 UK

For more information, visit:
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/revolution/?CMP=ILC-MW4368687969

Also available at Amazon.com for $16.47


Charles W. Moore

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