(2018-06-19) Notion Tool And Craft Hertzfeld

Notion Tool & Craft: Today, we’re going to talk to Andy Hertzfeld

The problem with the Lisa was, it was going to be very expensive compared to the Apple II. It ended up costing $10,000 originally and that's in $1983 so that would be more like $40-50,000. Today, that's not a computer for the masses. Whereas, we were really inspired by the Apple II, which was affordable to an individual.

My job was really to take the brilliant work that Bill Atkinson did for the $10,000 computer and try to get that to fly in a $2,000 computer

The Lisa used, more or less, industry-standard techniques, whereas, Burrell Smith, the designer of the Apple Macintosh was inspired by Woz and used crazy tricks all over the place.

Lisa didn't have that Apple II magic feeling about it. It was done by a large team with a more formal process. It wasn't really a hacker's machine.

The central thing though, is Lisa wasn't really viewed to be a platform for third parties. The concept with Lisa was Apple would write all the applications itself. Maybe eventually have third parties write software, but at least for the initial launch of Lisa, seven applications, all developed by the Lisa team.

The Lisa was more like a product from most companies, the Macintosh just had all this love poured into it. And that was a pretty big difference.

The team didn't know what the Macintosh would become. Rather, obsession and excitement to see where they'd end up drove them to expand the boundaries of what was possible.

It was really development through prototyping. We didn't really trust ideas on paper.

That was our philosophy was really incremental development

lots of little discoveries we made to improve the software

One example is what's called mouse scaling

we didn't have that for the first year. We eventually stumbled on it and we did it

I think the essential way to do anything great, you have to have some incremental development philosophy because you're just going to be wrong with your grand design that you don't iterate on.

By the 1990s, Andy was asking the question, "Where do we go after the personal computer?" He and several colleagues from Apple cofounded a company called General Magic, where they developed a new kind of handheld device.

Well, where we were right on was just the concept of a pocket communicator.

The idea was little postcards, little graphical postcards would fall out of the sky into your pocket. That was the founding vision of General Magic.

the parts that were a little bit off, some of them were just General Magic blunders like not really choosing the best processor architecture. I mean, again, clearly, the ARM chip was the way to go for the portable things

The team wasn't always right about conceptual, strategic decisions either, but they were always ambitious.

He had this idea of the network being programmable and intelligent. The idea was you can make a programming language that all the servers in the network ran so you can program the servers in order to do arbitrary things.

So, we invented this new programming language called Telescript where programs can travel in the network between servers, gathering up what they needed and then coming back to the device. Thought that was a pretty compelling vision, but history proved us wrong. You didn't really need to do that, just the remote procedure call type paradigm was good enough, which is really what the web is based on.