folklore.org

Andy Hertzfeld was a member of the original Macintosh design team at Apple. He wrote much of the original Macintosh ROM including the toolbox and resource manager among many other things.

I met him at an early San Francisco Macworld. A group of us were walking the floor and there he was, with his backpack. We said “hi Andy” and he came right up, introduced himself and said “I have to show you this… it’s so cool.”

He walked over to the nearest booth with a Macintosh in it (it happened to be the MacBottom booth; MacBottom was an early company that made an external hard disk that sat under the Mac). He took off his pack, reached in and pulled out a disk. He started to put the disk in the demo MacBottom Mac and one of the sales people in the booth who did not know who he was stated to walk toward us. I went over to him and said that it was okay… blah blah blah and he retreated.

Andy, talking non-stop, asking us where we were from (Eugene, Oregon at the time), proceeded to put the disk in, and somehow distracted us so we did not see the setup for what was about to happen.

Then he said “watch this.” and he tapped a key and the screen wiped left and there was MacPaint, he tapped it again and we were back in MacWrite. He had just shown us a beta of what would later be called “Switcher” his early “MultiFinder” program.

Our jaws dropped; it was totally amazing. He was delighted with the effect, so much so that he reached into his pack and gave each of us a Switcher beta disk. I have that disk to this day.

Over the following years I met him and Bill Atkinson many times and both are absolutely gems: terrific people and of course, genius designers and programmers.

Andy has just put up a hybrid blog/community center/Apple story archive and it’s a wonderful place to browse around if you know something about the history of Apple and the Mac and even if you don’t. Check it out.