Folklore.org

I haven’t read it in physical form, but maybe Revolution in the Valley: The Insanely Great Story of How the Mac Was Made by Andy Hertzfeld? AFAICT it’s based on the stories from https://folklore.org/, so I ought to be good. You can see how it looks here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WMExWOBvmho https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolution_in_the_Valley

Most of the material from the book (and possibly more?) seems also to be available at Andy Hertzfeld's excellent: https://folklore.org One of my favorite bits is Bill Atkinson's remarkable Polaroid photos of the Lisa/Mac UI evolution from 1978 to 1982: https://www.folklore.org/Busy_Being_Born.html

I’d recommend reading Andy Hertzfeld’s _Revolution in the Valley_. He, amongst others, was a principle dev on the Macintosh project at Apple. Also see : https://www.folklore.org/ all kinds of short stories about the early days of the Macintosh

Yes, it's certainly not impossible to display white backgrounds well on CRTs in general (consider upmarket late-'90s CRT monitors in particular, still overall decent displays by modern standards) but it wasn't to be taken for granted on early-'80s CRTs. White-background display conventions more or less came in with the Engelbart/PARC GUI and IIRC (I think Levy's Insanely Great or https://folklore.org discusses this?) Apple put a lot of effort into making the original Mac's (and I assume Lisa's) monochrome display pleasant to use in that manner.

"A complete history of the Millennium Falcon" like in the URL itself does more justice to this incredibly detailed... document? The site has almost a https://www.folklore.org tint to it, I loved it and I can't wait for space launches get cheaper so some rich folks can build a Millennium Falcon-shaped space hotel. It's one of the coolest and most identifiable ship design ever.

I love that story. In fact the whole Jargon File is a great source of elder geek lore. Another good source is http://www.folklore.org/ for tales of the original Mac development team.

Andy is the principal author of the posts on https://www.folklore.org/ , which is all about the development of the mac. Definitely worth going through in an afternoon, if you're interested in that era.

Also Andy Hertzfeld - Revolution in The Valley: The Insanely Great Story of How the Mac Was Made. Many of the stories in that book are here, as well: https://www.folklore.org/

I love these stories. Is there a general software site with shorts like this (kinda like http://www.folklore.org)? This was pretty good writing too. I was able to easily imagine what it would be like working at 10pm for Microsoft in the 90s. I begin to wonder if the characters knew if they were shaping the internet. Id like to read something about the first iPhone's Safari team. I bet they had to jump through major hoops to build that browser.

> Whats the difference between this and blogging socially on wordpress.com or blogger or tumblr? My answer would be: focus. It's nice that you visited YetAnotherCon 2012, and created ten blog posts about it, but honestly, I don't really care. Storylane focuses on telling stories. http://folklore.org, which does something similar, although even more focussed, is a fantastic read. My hope is that similar intriguing insights into people's lives pop up on Storylane.

Incredible. As a fellow creative, the amount of care and consideration that's displayed here is not at all surprising. The product really speaks for its self. This type of journey that a product takes is so often lost forever. I wish more people documented their creative journeys. At the time, small anecdotes may not be that interesting, but the sum can offer incredible insight into how something came into fruition. It's valuable both as a display of how much unseen work goes into great products, and as a way to help others learn from your mistakes. I'm as guilty of this as anyone else. http://www.folklore.org is a great example of how enthralling these stories can be.

A number of years ago I was fascinated by and read through every story on http://folklore.org which covers the period in time around the creation of the original Macintosh. It appears to be down/overloaded right now, but the Internet Archive seems to have most of it cached. Start with story #1: http://web.archive.org/web/20101214055008/http://folklore.org/StoryVie…

This has to be satire. "Making iPods is better than giving to charity." "Making iPods is more important than caring for your children." "I want to be a pescetarian just because Steve is one." "He stole from his partner, no problem though. He still is the greatest." "He became so cool by doing drugs and getting into eastern religions." Really, this HAS to be satire. What really helped me understand the way Steve Jobs (probably) is was reading the memories of early Apple employees at http://folklore.org/.

That's such a great bite-sized tale. Reminds me of http://folklore.org/.

A great classic. People who enjoyed it are urged to read more like it at the mac-oriented Folklore website: http://www.folklore.org/ A treasure!

> So you'd better be a Steve Jobs Steve Jobs is a huge perfectionist. However he will make you work 70+ hours a week to achieve his perfection and he will ride you every step of the way to get the best out of you. http://www.folklore.org

"... Jef did not want to incorporate what became the two most definitive aspects of Macintosh technology - the Motorola 68000 microprocessor and the mouse pointing device. Jef preferred the 6809, a cheaper but weaker processor which only had 16 bits of address space and would have been obsolete in just a year or two, since it couldn't address more than 64Kbytes. He was dead set against the mouse as well, preferring dedicated meta-keys to do the pointing ..." ahaa ... here's that pesky Raskin article ~ http://tinyurl.com/5e22z So he was against the mouse & loved those keystrokes. As for the source? It's first hand from Mr Mac himself, Andy Hertzfeld on http://folklore.org

That's certainly one opinion, and is even right, to some degree. But there's also movies like the Imitation Game about Alan Turing, which is a movie, and not a documentary, but there are also countless documentaries about him. There's no shortage of hagiographies about Steven Jobs, in both book and film and tv miniseries format, along with Pirates of Silicon Valley which includes Microsoft's part. There's a movie about Aaron Swartz (The Internet’s Own Boy). The movie Antitrust(2001) is fictional, but in the same area. Hackers (1995) is fictional but a cult classic. Freedom Downtime (2001) is about Mitnick and hacking culture. There's smaller documentaries too. There's that one about Wikileaks, that one about Cambridge Analytica. There's books like The Dream Machine (Mitchell), Unix: A History and a Memoir (Brian W. Kernighan), The UNIX‑HATERS Handbook (Simson Garfinkel et al.). There's http://folklore.org about the early days at Apple. Asiometry has https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ffh3DRFzRL0, a 20 minute bit about the Unix wars. The source code to the original Microsoft DOS is at https://github.com/microsoft/MS-DOS. The Anarchist Cookbook is on Kindle, https://www.2600.com/Magazine/digital-back-issues goes back to 2010. DefCON got too big for the Riv and the Sahara, and is now at the LVCC. Yeah it's not the same. It's never going to be the same, but some still gather for their yearly mecca and watch Hackers and get drunk in hotel suites paid for by corporate sponsors.…

> first production versions of macOS? A couple of years maybe? Ok, I'll bite. If we're talking classic Macintosh OS, perhaps.[0] macOS? No way. The first Mac OS X was released in 2001, and was in development between 1997 and 2001 according to Wikipedia.[1] But the bulk of the OS already existed 1997. Mac OS X was a reskin of NeXTStep. NeXTStep was released in 1989, final release 1995, final preview 1997 (just before Apple sold out to NeXT).[2] NeXTStep was in production for quite some time before the x86 version shipped (around '95 from memory). In case you are wondering, I can assure you that NeXTStep was a very capable OS. NeXTStep was in development for a couple of years before the first hardware shipped in 1989. NeXTStep was built on top of Mach and BSD 4.3 userspace. Mach's initial release was 1985.[3]. Not sure how long the first release of Mach took to develop. You can check BSD history yourself. But I'd say, conservatively, that macOS took at least 14 years to develop. [0] check https://folklore.org/ [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_operating_systems [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXTSTEP [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mach_(kernel)

Don Eyles' writing about programming the lunar module (which was something he did!) is fantastic [1]. There's also a gallery of photos on that site and he has a whole book! And, click around on Bret Victor's references page[2] -- it's a real treasure. Despite my constant fear that mentioning it will make it go away, it needs to be shared to be useful. It's a big collection of classic papers and interviews. Someone mentioned "As You May Think", which is on there, as is Bush's follow-up from ~20 years later, and Douglas Engelbart's own partly annotated version of the original! Also check out folklore[3], which is a great bunch of stories about working at Apple in its early days, by people who worked there (mostly Andy Hertzfeld, I'm pretty sure). Lastly, look up "Ignition!" by John Drury Clark[4], which is a tangent, but is amazing -- it's about the history of the design of rocket engines, largely about the wild experiments and chemical science involved, and is very well written. I didn't feel right finding a pdf to link straight to, but they aren't that hard to find. As a bonus, this isn't so much historical, but it's a great inspirational essay, Richard Hamming's "You and Your Research"(transcript[5], a video version[6]). Talks about working at Bell Labs and the different cultural elements there across people as part of analysing what makes certain people truly great. 1 - https://www.doneyles.com/LM/Tales.html 2 - http://worrydream.com/refs/ 3 -…

Must read (with plenty of Bill): https://folklore.org

Highly useful. Many thanks. Writing this response is the first productive thing I do with a Macintosh. To me it's somewhat inspiring and sad that my virgin user experience on a Mac, having clicked on Safari because it's the only thing that looked familiar, was the memorial video being shown today[1] on apple.com for 1 year since Steve Jobs death. This feeling of sheer admiration is greatly reinforced by the pushback of a thought that a past generation of great man (Being 29 myself) was here to creatively pioneer the core culture values for us to build upon. I have just recently learned about Apple and Steve, reading Walter Issacson point of view. I found that honestly understanding how and mostly why Apple was build is an easily traceable path to enable one to learn to admire the actions and mostly the philosophy behind the company and behind Steve Jobs. Reading http://www.folklore.org also gives it's magical touch of a time that once was. So thank you for your wonderful experience tips. Your assumption for this macbook is correct it will be used as a tool to making software, I hope to build something useful and fun for the world. Will Have Fun, thank you for the suggestion :) Maxim. [1] http://movies.apple.com/media/us/stevejobs/stevejobs-memorial-us-20121…

In addition to the blog where this post is taken from https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/, you could check https://folklore.org/ for early Apple anecdotes. And also https://www.jwz.org/blog/ for early Netscape/Mozilla stories

Cue the classic instance of Bill Atkinson writing "-2000 lines": https://www.folklore.org/Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.html

Famously Gates thought that the Mac cursor was a sprite, when it was actually in software https://www.folklore.org/Shut_Up.html Apple loved doing things in software, ever since Woz wrote the Apple II disk routines in software so their floppy drives didn't need their own controller (the Commodore machines had a whole second CPU running an operating system in theirs). This is also why the one thing that WOULD lag the cursor on a classic Mac was formatting a floppy disk, since it required interrupt-level timing. Even to this day Apple loves running things in software - the speakers on modern Mac laptops are driven in software - macOS has a daemon that runs and adjusts the speaker volume, tracking the sound pressure sent to them to keep them from being blown out. When Asahi Linux added speaker support, they had to reimplement this from scratch.

Best friendship takes place! https://www.folklore.org/I'll_Be_Your_Best_Friend.html

The best code is no code.[0] The main "issue" I have with Claude is that it is not good at noticing when code can be simplified with an abstraction. It will keep piling on lines until the file is 3000 lines long. You have to intervene and suggest abstractions and refactorings. I'm not saying that this is a bad thing. I don't want Claude refactoring my code (GPT-5 does this and it's very annoying). Claude is a junior developer that thinks it's a junior. GPT-5 is a junior developer that thinks it's a senior. [0]: https://www.folklore.org/Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.html

Thank you for writing down this memory. It would fit perfectly on https://folklore.org but unfortunately it seems that the site is no longer accepting new memories.

It's rarely going to be worth it for an individual user, but it's very useful if you can get it to a lot of users at once. See https://www.folklore.org/Saving_Lives.html "Well, let's say you can shave 10 seconds off of the boot time. Multiply that by five million users and thats 50 million seconds, every single day. Over a year, that's probably dozens of lifetimes. So if you make it boot ten seconds faster, you've saved a dozen lives. That's really worth it, don't you think?" I put a lot of effort into chasing wins of that magnitude. Over a huge userbase, something like that has a big positive ROI. These days it also affects important things like heat and battery life. The other part of this is that the wins add up. Maybe I manage to find 1% every couple of years. Some of my coworkers do too. Now you're starting to make a major difference.

> I count four different corner radius sizes currently on my screen, which is maddening. I don’t see the mere fact of having multiple radiuses alone is a good criticism of the UI. If seeing multiple corner radiuses infuriates you, how do you survive in the real world? (https://www.folklore.org/Round_Rects_Are_Everywhere.html) Or do you think it would look or work better with more consistency in corner radiuses? I would think radiuses look best when (somewhat) scaled to the dimensions of their rectangle (and that’s where, IMO, they may not be doing things the best way. For thin, long rectangles, I think the radius they chose is a tad too large, leaving barely any vertical straight lines)