OMG Jaron Lanier! Anyway I was 15 when this apparently happened. At 12 I was still wanting to become a doctor (although I was intrigued by computers, having only experienced Commodores though). Then my family was looking for a family computer (everyone else, it seemed, already had a Commodore or an IBM PC or perhaps an early Apple) and we happened to walk into a legendary Long Island Apple reseller store (Computer Microsystems, RIP) and I encountered the Macintosh (and the Lisa!) for the first time in December 1984. I was completely bowled over. That entire experience (just a half hour demo!) made a VERY deep impression on me; I had never encountered an object in meatspace before that had such obvious love, care, talent, and sweat put into it. It was OOZING those things! You couldn't measure it but I SAW IT!! And the GUI of course was mind-blowing if you hadn't ever experienced one before yet! I told my parents "OMG YOU HAVE TO BUY THIS. YOU HAVE TO BUY THIS!! THIS! IS! INCREDIBLE!!" (there is NO enthusiasm like child-nerd enthusiasm!) My parents were frugal but something about how I must have looked or spoken about it (I remember being shocked for a very long time) convinced them to drop over $5k in 1984 dollars on a Mac 128k, ImageWriter printer, and Apple 300 modem (omg did I have fun with BBS's!). Best Christmas EVER!! And that is the story how I became the last person in my neighborhood to get a computer, but the first one to get a Mac! I idolized you and Bill Atkinson and all the rest of you creative wonderful smart folks! Wow, what a legacy! Did you "feel it" at the time, that something special was happening? So in short, yeah, I'm a developer now who has worked at various startups. ;)
Andy assisted Apple, in Stealing the Windowing and the Mouse interface from engineers in Palo Alto and from another Source from the 60's. He was no genius. And neither was Bill Gates who stole ideas from IBM and from computer club meetings in Berkeley and San Francisco Bay Area back in the 70s
Good artists copy; great artists steal. It never matters who got there first. It matters who does it best. A lesson Microsoft still didn't learn for smartphones, as Ballmer laughed, Apple demolished them and turned them into an enterprise services company. More akin to Salesforce than what they once were.
ANDY !! CONTACT ME... we used to do things in Berkeley and you've been to Kensington... why hath thou forsaken me? Contact via J D in Vegas PLEASE and be careful with your Tesla.
My Dad got a Macintosh 512K in late 1988, when I was 11. And using that desktop GUI for the first time was amazing! And even though the Apple IIe computers at my elementary school were great, I never liked going back to the command line interface that they had after using that Mac. Thank you for all of your hard work on the Macintosh Andy!
Andy! Miss meeting with you... wayback when you were excited ... developing Colored upper and Lower-case text etc on your Apple II .. A.N. Kensingtin kid
I stumbled upon this video today while looking out the window in anticipation of the UPS truck which will deliver my new Mac Studio. I distinctly remember how mesmerized I was as a young kid when I first got a chance to play around with the original Macintosh at a computer show. I've been a fan of the Mac since that day, and it's nice to see the Mac's origin and early days documented - many good lessons there of things to do (and, I guess, a few things NOT to do, too). My thanks and appreciation to Andy and all the other men and women who made this happen.
Take out the Mike Murray parts and it's wonderful, and clearly was a huge missed opportunity. That guy just does not grok it. He doesn't have the deep historical connections of Atkins, and to a certain extent Hertzfeld. Or the instinctive, visceral Geist of Burrell and Hertzfeld.
