Revolution in The Valley (hardcover)

Rating:
Summary: Innovation: how to do it
Review: Even if you have no interest is in Macs or Apple, if you want to see how a team can grow and prosper and make an awesome new product, you will benifit from reading this book. Andy Hertzfeld, who was there in the thick of the creation of the Mac, has created and collected a series of fascinating anecdotes that give real insight to the dynamics of a creative, brillaint and passionate team. As a team leader in an innovating startup company, I found real resonance and insight here. An excellent book.

Rating:
Summary: Eavesdropping in on the Mac's Development
Review: For those of you that have had a Mac from the beginnings in 1984 (like me), this book is for you. We have watched the development of the Mac from the "fantastic" 128k machines that came out in February, 1984 to the fantastic G5 machines that are available now. "Revolution in the Valley" tells us the pre-1984 story of the actual development of the Mac. It is written by one of the true insiders of the story, Andy Hertzfeld, a co-creator of the Mac. The book covers the period of August, 1979 to May, 1985.

The book is written in a diary format, with each entry being a separate story of one to four pages in length. A few times this gets a little cumbersome in that there is repetition where some simple editing would have prevented it. (There is cross-referencing between the stories also.) The writing style allows for quick reading most of the time. There are a few times that the technical details get in the way of the story but overall it is a very engaging read. If you are into human interest stories, this book is for you. You will find out the importance of having a mustache. The passion of everyone that worked on the Mac comes through loud and clear. You will read, first hand, about the personalities of the main players in the development of the Mac, Steve Jobs, Bill Atkinson, Joanna Hoffman, Jef RAskin, and Steve Wozniak, along with many others. There are LOTS of pictures, illustrations, graphics, copies of an actual lab book pages, and quotes. It is 291 pages long but reads VERY fast.

Rating:
Summary: disjointed, weak narrative thread
Review: Hertzfeld gives us a set of vignettes into the people who made the Mac. From 1979 to 1985, we get anecdotes of the development process and the personalities [especially Steve Jobs], from several of the core Mac team.

Being very episodic, the book suffers from an overall drift. As a standalone book, with little other information on the Mac, the disjointedness of the narrative leaves little context. The book is best read if you are already have some knowledge of the history of Apple. Enhanced perhaps by having used the Apple 2 or the Mac itself, and even to have seen the 1984 commercial.

Some portions of the text are best appreciated only by programmers, who can get some sense of the ingenuity of the team. For other readers, you should not worry about the obscurity of those sections. [You'll certainly know which they are, when you meet them.]

Try reading the book after going through other books on Apple that give a better and larger picture of the company.

Rating:
Summary: Intriguing
Review: Intriguing

This is the story of how the Mac was created from inception to finish, complete with sidebars about particular "inside stories" (such as the famous "1984" commercial), written by one of the people on the original design team. This is a story filled with lots of intrigue, suspense, colorful characters (both among the engineers and the management), and anecdotal stories. Steve Jobs is portrayed at times as a visionary, a clod, and most of all a man driven to put the best computer of its time on the market. The story of how Adam Osborne earned Steve's wrath by "insulting" the Apple employees at a trade show in 1981 just as an example describes Jobs in a nutshell. Although Jobs and Apple clearly had the last laugh on Osborne Computers.

The story begins with the team originally working in a small building near the Apple Computer campus, then eventually becoming so big it's eventually moved back to the main Apple campus. Stories of long hours, personality clashes, junk food and sodas abound in this book. It gives an insider's view not just of how the Macintosh came to be, but also how a software engineering team works together or works to put out a product in spite of obstacles that pop up along the way.

The author also discusses his personality clashes with his boss, one of the things that led to his eventually leaving Apple. There are differences of opinions plenty discussed throughout the book, but it seems to me everyone involved in creating the Mac and getting it out the door were passionate about completing the task.

This book is a fascinating look at the "history" of the Macintosh's creation.

Rating:
Summary: Great insider's first-hand account of Mac's creation
Review: Subtitled "The Insanely Great Story of How The Mac Was Made," this 291-page hardcover was written by the original Mac's brilliant software wizard, Andy Hertzfeld. That turns out to be this book's greatest strength and also its biggest weakness. Compiled from postings from Hertzfeld's folklore web site and augmented with the reproduction of original notes and historical photos, Revolution provides an insider's first-hand account of the Mac's creation, from Jef Raskin's 1979 conception through Steve Jobs' resignation in 1985. For the most part, it's a thoroughly entertaining read, though better editing could have eliminated much of the repetition in the piecemeal presentation and provided explanations of the technical hacks Hertzfeld recounts. Revolution's in-the-trenches vantage succeeds in making you feel you are part of the Mac team, but for the full story of what was going on at Apple and the industry at large, it's best balanced with additional reading. P.S. In the interest of full disclosure, please note that I am the author of Apple Confidential 2.0: The Definitive History of the World's Most Colorful Company.

Rating:
Summary: Highly enjoyable
Review: This book and "Cult of Macintosh" are vastly different books but could be sold as a companion set. They look at the Mac from two perspectives that really mark its place in History.
Andy Hertzfield has done a wonderful job. The book leaves me wanting more -- Where are all these creative people today? What happened to them? What do they think about the world of technology today? I sure hope he plans another book.

Rating:
Summary: The definitive Mac book
Review: This is the gratest book I have ever read about the making of the Mac. It is written by one of the last insiders: Andy Hertzfeld, one of the key members of the original Mac team. The book is full of very detail stories about the internal designs of the Macintosh and pictures never published before.

The book is not about the internal Apple power struggles of the 80s. It is a book written by an engineer for engineers. It is a must read for all the engineers that love the work well done

Thank you Andy for this book for the rest of us!
Carlos

Rating:
Summary: Folklore in print
Review: Upon seeing that many of the stories featured at folklore.org were now bound in hardcover, I immediately sought out this book. This book was a delightful read to cover the interesting history of the Macintosh in how it was formed over the course of around five years. Apple has been the maker of many revolutionary and different products over the years (Newton, Cube, iMac, iPod), and treading into new territory can be a thrilling and dangerous ride. The creation of the original Mac was probably not much different.

This book sits well with quite a few other books I've read over the past year or so, including The Cathedral & The Bazaar, Softwar, and Hackers: Heroes of the Revolution.

For those interested in computing/Apple history, this is an excellent book which details the creation of the original Macintosh computer.

Rating:
Summary: Must Have for the Apple faithful
Review: What a great book! Much of what is written here can be found on the folklore website that Andy Hertzfield has put together, but this hardcover gem is just one of those things a Macophile has gotta have anyhow.

There's a lot of pointy-headed programming talk in here, which may challenge some, but even if you don't understand some of the references, the story they're being told against comes through every time. If you do, so much the better - these guys truly were/are brilliant, and their work deserves to be memorialized.

The portrait of Burrell Smith that emerges as such a focal point in the development of the Mac is particularly fascinating.

Great effort.

Rating:
Summary: Part blog, part diary; completely fascinating
Review: Written as a series of short blog-like entries, this book takes you on a unique behind-the-scenes look at what it was like building the original Mac. I found it a genuine and fascinating peek into both the "birth of the Mac" and the emerging personal computer industry as a whole. It's tough to fathom what it must have been like to write an entire operating system and applications with only 128K to work with.

Being in the software industry myself, I could identify with a lot of the programming situations and unique characters that end up in software development. It was oddly comforting to find that certain things haven't really changed that much. My favorite in this regard was a short entry about a management decision to "track progress" by entering the number of lines coded that week. One guy put down "-2000", as he had done some optimizing and was able to get rid of a lot of extra source code.

Great nuggets of information about how things came into existence. For instance, the "Command" key icon, the boot beep, and the original font names. A glimpse at what it was like to work for Steve Jobs was also captivating.

All told, a must read.