August 28, 2008
Original Mac designer dishes on development
Posted Aug. 28, ’08, 8:30 AM PT by Dan Moren
Category | Apple » People
If your Mac fandom isn’t just old-school but pre-school, you ought to know Andy Hertzfeld. One of the chief architects of the original Macintosh OS, Hertzfeld helped lay the groundwork for the GUI operating system that we all use to this day. More recently, he runs Folklore.org, a compilation of stories from his time working on the Macintosh, and works at Google.
As we approach the 25th anniversary of the Mac (in January, zOMG!@1), O’Reilly.net’s James Turner sat down to talk to Hertzfeld about a number of topics, including his thoughts about the development of the original Mac, what Apple owed to Xerox PARC, and what he thinks about the current Mac OS. Here’s an excerpt:
But yeah; I have my complaints with OSX but I’m not sure it’s worth getting into them. It’s—they’re far and away the best alternative [Laughs] out there for people and so I don’t want to berate it but there are you know a few places where I think it could be improved, but not so much by returning to the original—to 25 year-old ideas. I think we really want to get more to like 2020 than back to the ’80s.
Word. I mean, look: it’s almost 2009 and not a single crazy virtual reality interface. What’s up with that people? We’ve only got a few years before we have to get hoverboards and flying cars out the door, so we’d better start beefing up our desktop computers, you hear me?
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It's 2008, Dan :)
Maybe 25 year-old ideas are obsolete, but letting some very smart people free to invent without too many commercial constraints or compatibility issues has been the origin of everything that makes Macs (still) different and better.
As an example, instead of basing Keynote on the commonplace, windoze-sque paradigm of powerpoint, a further development of a genial sw piece as HyperCard would have produced an equally user-friendly but far more powerful application.