Mac Intro @ BCS 30 Jan 1984

Steve Jobs introduces the Macintosh to the Boston Computer Society, a week after the public introduction in Cupertino.

Video Transcript

Note: for some videos, timestamps on the transcripts might be off by a few minutes due to the original videos having been edited for YouTube (typically, sections with music playing may have been removed).

Steve Jobs (SJ): Good evening. I'm Steve Jobs from Apple Computer. We're very glad to be here tonight.


It is 1958. IBM passes up the chance to buy a young fledgling company that has just invented a new technology called xerography. Two years later, Xerox is born and IBM has been kicking themselves ever since.


It is ten years later, the late sixties. Digital Equipment Corporation and others invent the mini computer. IBM dismisses the mini computer as too small to do serious computing and therefore unimportant to their business. DEC grows to become a multi hundred million dollar corporation before IBM finally enters the mini computer market.


It is now ten years later, the late seventies. In 1977, Apple, a young fledgling company on the West Coast invents the Apple to the first personal computer as we know it today. IBM dismisses the personal computer as too small to do serious computing and therefore unimportant to their business.


The early 1980s, 1981. Apple two has become the world's most popular computer and Apple has grown to a $300 million corporation, becoming the fastest growing company in American business history. With over 50 competitors vying for a share, IBM enters the personal computer market in November of 1981, with the IBM PC.


1983. Apple and IBM emerged as the industry's strongest competitors, each selling approximately $1 billion worth of personal computers in 1983. Each will invest greater than $50 million for research and development and another $50 million for television advertising alone in 1984, totaling almost one quarter of a billion dollars combined. The shakeout is in full swing. The first major firm goes bankrupt, with others teetering on the brink. Total industry losses for 1983 outshadow even the combined profits of Apple and IBM for personal computers.


It is now 1984. It appears IBM wants it all. Apple is perceived to be the only hope to offer IBM a run for its money. Dealers, initially welcoming IBM with open arms, now fear an IBM dominated and controlled future. They are increasingly turning back to Apple as the only force that can ensure their future freedom. IBM - IBM wants it all, and is aiming its guns on its last obstacle to industry control, Apple. Will Big Blue dominate the entire computer industry? The entire information age? Was George Orwell right?


(1984 ad playing)


1984 ad narrator: On January 24th, Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh. And you'll see why 1984 won't be like "1984".


SJ: There have only been two milestone products in our industry to date. The first was Apple II in 1977. The second was the IBM PC in 1981.


Come on, let's be fair...


What we need now, is the third industry milestone product, and that's what Macintosh is all about. We've been working on this thing for over two years now. And those of us that have been really close to it, will all tell you it is insanely great. And you'll have a chance to see a little bit more of it later on tonight.


And we're introducing it at a mainstream price point, as most of you know, of $2,495. And what I want to do is run through some of the key milestones and key features of Macintosh very briefly, just in case you haven't heard all about them. And then we'll get into some more interesting stuff here.


The first thing is that Macintosh uses Lisa technology. It's got the identical user interface of Lisa with its radical ease of use, its mice, windows, pull down menus, point-click-cut-and-paste. And to accomplish this, we use exactly the same microprocessor as Lisa: a 68000, running at eight megahertz, and this thing eats 8088s for breakfast.


Macintosh has about 192K bytes of memory. 64K of it is ROM, 128K of it is RAM. And inside the 64K bytes of ROM is contained the entire operating system, the entire graphics foundation and sub system and the entire user interface: all the windowing stuff, the menu stuff, the mouse stuff, all in ROM.


Just like the five and a quarter inch disc was a breakthrough in the seventies, we think the three and a half inch disc is a breakthrough in the eighties. And we're storing 400K bytes of formatted information on one side of these floppies, which fit inside your shirt pocket.


Macintosh has two built in serial ports. These ports are RS 232 and RS 422. They go up to a megabit per second. And they also support a local interconnect scheme called Apple Bus, which allows you to connect up to 32 of these products together at virtually no additional costs.


Macintosh has four voice sound and speech built in. And it talks to you on an extremely high definition, super crisp bitmapped nine - nine inch black and white screen. It's really incredible. As many of you might've had a chance to see at the hands-on, we have one last hands-on at nine o'clock tonight. This screen has over twice the dots of the IBM PC or Apple II, on its screen, very high definition. And all of this power fits into a box one-third the size and weight of the IBM PC. It's a truly transportable product.


And in addition to that, there's a whole family of stuff that goes along with it. Image writer, printers, external disk drives, modems, carrying cases, and a sort of security kit so your Macintosh doesn't go anywhere without you.


Now, you've seen some pictures of Macintosh in these slides. But what I'd like to do now is show you the Macintosh in person. And - all of the images that you will be seeing will be generated by what's in that bag right there.


Now we've been doing an awful lot of talking about Macintosh lately as well, but tonight, really, for the second time ever, we'd like to let Macintosh speak for itself.


Macintosh: Hello. I am Macintosh. It sure is great to get out of that bag.


Unaccustomed as I am to public speaking, I'd like to share with you a maxim I thought of the first time I met an IBM mainframe. Never trust a computer you can't lift. Obviously I can talk, but right now I'd like to sit back and listen. So it is with considerable pride that I introduce a man who's been like a father to me, Steve Jobs.


SJ: Macintosh is targeted at two primary markets. And the first are those 25 million knowledge workers that sit behind desks, particularly in medium and small size offices. And the second is really the college worker. The people in college, that we think are going to be the knowledge workers of tomorrow and there's greater than 11 million college students in America alone.


Now - the telephone. We look at the telephone and we're really impressed with the telephone because it was the first and really the only desk appliance. To be a desk appliance, you have to do something really useful and you have to be really easy to use, so people don't have to spend a lot of time learning how to use this thing, and you have to be really cheap. And we don't think there's been a desk appliance since the telephone. And what we want to do is make Macintosh the second desk appliance.


Now, there are about 235 (million) people in America, but only a fraction of them can use a computer. And the message that we have with Macintosh is that it's the computer for the rest of us.


And we're going to launch the largest advertising campaign in our history ever. Let's communicate this message to those knowledge workers in college workers. And it's going to kick off on the Olympics on February 6th. And I'd like to show you a five of those advertisements right now.


Ad narrator: It's more sophisticated, yet less complicated. It's more powerful, yet less cumbersome. It can store vast amounts of yesterday or tell you what's in store for tomorrow. It can draw a picture or it can draw conclusions. It's a personal computer from Apple, and it's as easy to use as this. Macintosh. The computer for the rest of us.


Introducing Macintosh. It does all the things you'd expect a personal computer to do. It does a lot of things you wouldn't expect a personal computer to do. And it does some things no other computer has ever done before. Of course, to do all of this, you will have to learn to do this. Macintosh. The computer for the rest of us.


The real genius of Macintosh, Apple's newest personal computer isn't it's 32 bit microprocessor, or that it captures the power of a mainframe on a board 10 by 10 inches, or even that it costs half as much as computers half as powerful. The real genius of Macintosh is that you don't have to be a genius to use it. Macintosh. The computer for the rest of us.


You're about to see a few people learn to use the newest, most advanced business computer in the world. If you know how to point, you already know how to use it. Macintosh. The computer for the rest of us.


This is a highly sophisticated office computer. And to use it, all you have to do is learn this. This is Macintosh from Apple, also a highly sophisticated office computer. And to you use it, all you have to do is learn this. Now, you decide which one is more sophisticated. Macintosh. The computer for the rest of us.


SJ: So if you watch the Winter Olympics, you'll be seeing those, about two to three times a night.


Now, you know that over 70% of all the computers used in education are Apples. And, uh, that makes us feel really good, cause we care a lot about that. And it's a great leverage point for the Apple II as well. And most of them are of course in kindergarten through 12th grades, cause that's where most of the schools are in those schools that bought computers faster than the colleges.


But a year ago we went in search of about half a dozen colleges and universities throughout America, that would be using a large number of personal computers in 1984, and large meant greater than a thousand. And we didn't find a half a dozen. We found 24 major colleges and universities, and we announced this last Tuesday, the Apple University Consortium, which is formed of those 24 colleges and universities. All the seven Ivy league schools are part of this. They have placed over $50 million worth of orders today for Macintoshes. And they're going to be doing courseware development leading the way really for over the other, over 3000, some schools in this country. And, they're telling us that Macintosh is the ideal college computer. So we think you're going to see lots of Macintoshes on college campuses. And here's a list of them: Stanford, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Dartmouth Brown on and on. And you're going to be seeing a lot of Macintoshes on campuses.


Now, when we designed the Apple II, we designed it in a garage, but what most people don't know is we designed it to be built in a garage. And we figure if we ever made 50 of them a month, we'd be doing well. Uh, and we surpassed that goal at this last December, by over 2000. We shipped over a hundred thousand Apple IIs in December. But what we wanted to do with Macintosh was make it the first personal computer that was designed from the start to be built in the millions. There's never been a personal computer that you could say this about.


We are currently making over 500 Macintoshes a day in this factory, and we will be ramping up to one every 27 seconds within the next few months.


Now, Macintosh was developed by a small team of people, less than a hundred. And you're going to have a chance to, to meet and ask several of them some questions tonight. And this group of people are, they're more like artists than they are engineers. They're not really interested in careers. What they're interested in is doing something insanely great, and then getting it out into the world to leverage their energy. And they were able to leverage the resources of a billion dollar company in developing Macintosh.


And, I've never in my life, had the privilege of working with, with such a fine, fine group of people. And, we think, you know, Macintosh has changed our lives, working with it over the last few years. And we think it's going to change the lives of millions of people that buy them.


Macintosh is, you know, is, was probably one of the worst kept secrets in the world. But one of the best kept secrets was it that we didn't just introduce one standalone product again. We introduced a family of four new 32-bit products this week. And, we introduced Lisa a year ago and it clearly captured the imagination and set the technical direction of the industry. It didn't capture as many desks as we wanted to. But it's clear that everyone's running in the direction of mice and windows and icons, and you've seen Vision, and you're seeing sort of the early part of MS Windows, and even a rumored IBM windowing package.


But what we introduced in addition to Macintosh were three new Lisas. And the first one was Lisa 2. It has a half a megabyte of RAM and a three and a half inch disc, totally compatible with Macintosh. And we introduced it at $3,495, just a thousand dollars more than Macintosh.


The second Lisa's the Lisa 2/5. It added a five megabyte profile Winchester disk drive. And that was only a thousand dollars more again, $4,495.


The third Lisa was Lisa 2/10. It's got a built in 10 megabyte Winchester disk drive right above the floppy there. And it's $5,495.


Now all the Lisas, we switched over to use the three and a half inch floppy disk drive. We feel so strongly that it's the drive of the eighties. And it's totally compatible with Mac and we're doing something for all the existing Lisa 1 owners. We are upgrading their Lisa 1 to a Lisa 2/5. That means changing the three and a half inch disc drives, and you're changing the five and a quarters for three and a halves, and giving them a new front bezel and some new software, and that upgrade's entirely free for all existing owners.


So as we move forward with the second iteration of this technology, we absolutely don't want to penalize those pioneers. And so we're just pulling them right along with us at no additional costs. But the other neat thing about all the three new Lisas and all the Lisa 1s, is it they're a hundred percent Macintosh software compatible. We pulled it off.


And together, these four workstations are the foundation of what we're calling the Apple 32 super micros. It's a family of compatible products based on Lisa technology in 32 bit architecture. And if you look at the four workstations, they now span a pretty wide range of price and performance, all the way from the key building block, which is Macintosh at $2,495, to sort of the flagship and performance, which is Lisa 2/10 at $5,495.


Now let me tell you a few other things, in addition to workstations, which are going to form the basis of this super micros family. The first thing is Apple Bus. Now, as you all know, local area networks, uh, the whole area of local area networking is a joke right now. Ethernet never really took off. IBM has been promising the world, a local area network now for two years, and hasn't announced anything. And the last thing the world needs is another local area network.


So what we're going to do is simply wait until those standards emerge and connect to those standards. But while those standards are emerging, people still want to hook things together yet they don't want to pay a thousand dollars per computer to hook them onto some sort of network. And so what we've done is we have built in Apple Bus to every single Lisa 1s, Lisa 2s, and Macintosh. It's built in, it operates at 230 kilobits per second, and operates up to a thousand meters. That -- excuse me, a thousand feet. And, for about $25 per computer retail, you'll be able to buy a little box screws on the back that simply has a little transformer and a few connectors in it, and hook up to 32 Macintoshes, Lisas and peripherals together for virtually free. And we think that this will be a really good idea for the next 24 months until the networking really shakes out. Sort of think of it as "free net".


The next thing that we need to do is we need to print out these amazing graphics that we can create. And we have the ImageWriter printer, which we think is a pretty much of a breakthrough in terms of the price to do this. It sells for six -- $595. And when you buy it with a Macintosh, it's $495.


But something we're really excited about is higher resolution dot printing. And before the end of 1984, we will introduce a breakthrough in laser xerographic printing for under $5,000. And we're working very hard on that. And I think when you see the results, you'll be really happy.


Next thing that we need is we need to talk to these Big Blue mainframes. And to do that, we've got a little box called the Apple Line box. For about a thousand dollars, it's available now. And it hooks up to any Macintosh or Lisa and talks full 3278 Datacom with any IBM mainframe, does it as well or better than an IBM PC.


This fall, you'll see small file servers in the 10 to 20 megabyte class that hook up to Applebus and shared Winchester that you can share among a bunch of Macintoshes and leases. It'll be very, very inexpensive.


And then something that we hope to get out late this year or early next year is a Unix server. And we think Unix is a pretty lousy operating system to put inside a workstation, it's old technology, and it's really big and you need a Winchester, so you can never make the workstations cheap. But we think it's a great operating system when you're in a multi-user environment.


And what we're going to be doing is coming out with a server, which is a large disc, a very fast CPU that hangs on the network that allows you to run Unix and vertical applications on top of it and use the Macintoshes and Lisas as really sort of "new wave" terminals into that software.


Now, we thought long and hard about whether we should come out with an IBM PC compatible. And, we do a lot of market research. We have a pretty good brand out there in the marketplace and we could have sold a lot of them. But that's not what we wanted to do. What we want to do is we want to establish a second standard in the office, based on radical ease of use and the kind of power that these workstations are able to provide.


But we know that if we're going to do that, we need to build bridges to the IBM world. And we think there's three major bridges that we have to build.


The first one, and most importantly is -- for all the great software that runs on the IBM products, we've got to have better versions running on our Apple 32 workstations. And I think by the summer early fall, we will have accomplished that goal. The second is local area network support. We expect IBM to introduce one or two local area networks in the April, May, June timeframe. And we will connect to the most prevalent of those networks. And the third is the 3278 data communications, which we're doing now. So we think if we build these three bridges to the IBM network, that we can continue to sell better computers.


Now, if you go back about a hundred years to the 1880s, there were approximately 20, 25,000 trained telegraph operators in the United States. And you really could send a telegram between Boston and San Francisco and it'd take about three or four hours and go through the relay stations, and it really worked. And it was a great breakthrough in technology -- they've been around for about 30, 40 years. And there were some people that talked about putting a telegraph machine on every desk in America to improve productivity.


Now, what those people didn't know was about the same time, Alexander Graham Bell filed the original patents for the telephone, a breakthrough in technology. Because putting a telegraph machine on every desk in America to improve productivity, wouldn't have worked. People wouldn't have spent the 20 to 40 to 100 hours to learn Morse code. They just wouldn't have done it.


But with the telephone within 10 years at over 200,000 telephones on desks in America, it was a breakthrough because people already knew how to use it. It performed the same basic function. But radical ease of use. And in addition to just letting you type in the words or clicking the words, it let you sing it, let you intone your sentences to really get your meanings across.


We are at that juncture in our industry right now. There are people suggesting that we should put a current generation box on everyone's desk to improve productivity. A telegraph if you will. And we don't believe that, we don't think it will work. People will not read those damn 400 page WordStar manuals. They won't carry around these cards in their pockets with 150 slash-w-z's. They're not going to do it. And what we think we have here today finally is the first telephone. And in addition to letting you do the old spreadsheets and word processing, it lets you sing. It lets you make pictures. It lets you make diagrams where you can cut them and paste them into your documents. It lets you put that sentence in bold Helvetica or Old English, if that's the way you want to express yourself.


What we think we've done is we've gotten us back on the track of letting us bring this technology, not just to people that have them hooked up to these Big Blue boxes in Fortune 500 corporations. Sure, we want to sell those - our products to those people. But what we're really doing, the reason we're doing what we're doing, is because we want to bring this to tens of millions of people. And never before has the time been riper, and never before with a radically easier to use 32 bit technology, we've been closer to doing just that.


So with that, I'd like to ask everyone to just stand up and relax for a few minutes. And we're going to put a few tables up here and bring the Macintosh software team, and one of the members of the hardware team up here, and answer whatever questions you might have about what we're doing. Thanks.


Talk a little bit about the piece that they did starting with my right, your left I guess.


Steve Capps: My name is Steve Capps and, uh, I worked a little bit on the RAM and I helped Bruce Horn with the Finder.


Andy Hertzfeld: My name is Andy Hertzfeld and I worked in a lot of the systems software for Macintosh.


Randy Wigginton: My name is Randy Wigginton and I wrote the word processor.


Bill Atkinson: My name is Bill Atkinson. I did the QuickDraw graphics, primitives and the MacPaint application.


Bruce Horn: I'm Bruce Horn, and I worked on the ROM a little and on the Finder with Steve Capps.


Burrell Smith: My name is Burrell Smith, and I designed the digital logic board for Macintosh.


Owen Densmore: I'm Owen Densmore, I did the printing,


Rony Sebok: My name is Rony Sebok, and I wrote the mouse lesson that you get on your Mac guide and the (unintelligible.


SJ: So if you have some really great questions, we'd like to answer them. But before we do, Bill and Randy are gonna run through some really quick demos, which you'll be able to see up on that screen to give you a little feeling for the kinds of things that we can do.


Bill Atkinson: Um, I'm going to show you the MacPaint graphics editor that runs on Macintosh and lets you edit images. Sometimes conveying your message goes better with pictures than with words. What you see when you open up MacPaint is three palettes: a palette of current tools, a palette of patterns and a palette of border thicknesses. To use them, you point with the mouse and click on a tool and press - stretch out a line here, and release when you've got the line. Or choose a different thickness and do the same. There are structured tools along here that let you make hollow and filled objects, like a field rectangle here, choose a pattern to fill it with, and here make a - a filled oval. You can erase parts of the image using this little thing that looks like a brick. It's supposed to be an eraser, but that's the best I could do. And if you just scrub with it, it kind of eats away. (applause.


And, after you get bored with scrubbing a lot, and you can just click twice and I'll get rid of everything. This tool lets me do draw a curved filled object - when I let go of the mouse, it will complete the curve and fill it in. Or here a polygonal object where I just click at each vertex, and when I click twice, it finishes it off for me. Okay.


A little more free form tool is the brush tool here. I'll erase things here and draw something with a brush. It's, a lot like scribbling with a crayon. You can use it in conjunction with a pattern. And for example, let's choose a large brush shape. You have a variety of shapes you can choose from you just click on one and we'll choose a big round brush here, draw with that. And, uh, somehow the patterns sort of magically line up. (applause.


I'm a little nervous. I'm not too good with a mouse. Okay. Um, the next tool here is a spray can and it lets me do smooth shading. I can, I can kind of gradually shade in something and the longer I spray the darker it gets. For example, (applause) I might take this circle and turn it into a three-dimensional sphere by shading it in. Maybe I'll pick up a little bit of white paint and spray without to put a highlight on it. Um, and... I can even control individual pixels. I can point it at a dot and turn it on or off. And you have to kind of squint a bit, or you can go into fat bits, which lets you see a magnified view, and then it's easy for me to turn on, on and off bits. (applause).


The hand tool lets me scroll. I can press on the document and push it around underneath the window. So up in the left-hand corner, I'm seeing a normal size view. And here I'm seeing a little bit magnified view so that I can active - act right on it. Um, if you click in the small size view, you go back to normal size.


If you have edges on your document, you can fill in areas using the paint bucket. Some people say it looks like a cap, or, you know, a graduation cap, but it's supposed to be a paint bucket, pouring paint out the tip of it. So if you select a pattern and press, you can just fill in with that color of paint. It's like a coloring book.


Then there's a tool for making text. You can point someplace and type. That's the first time I touched the keyboard. And - huh I'm not a very good typer. And change the sizes and the emphasis things, et cetera.


The next two are tools at the top, allow you to work on a portion of the image. The rectangle selector here says, I want to grab this rectangular chunk of the image and you see little marching ants around it to help you distinguish what's selected.


When you point inside the selection, you can pull on it and it'll come with you. If you hold down the option key, then as you do so, at least behind the old one, so you can peel off a copy easily. (applause.


And if you hold down the feature key, it stretches it instead.


Undo that. Notice when I'm dragging this, it carries around a rectangle of white. Sometimes you want to carry, you want to select a non rectangular selection. And notice this carries just the ball. I just lasso around the object, when I let go the lasso tightens around it and it gets just that thing. Again, option will peel off a copy. And in fact, Feature and Option will peel off many copies. (applause.


If I select a portion of image, I can also do edit commands on it. I can say to rotate that on its side. And that helps me when I want to put a label on the side of something. Or I can say to, select a portion of the image and say flip that horizontally, or flip it vertically, or, invert it - many different transforms that I want to do onto the image.


So far we've been working on one portion of the page. About a third of it as well as you can see it on the screen, though you're dealing with a whole printer full on eight by - eight by ten page. When you say Show Page, it'll show you the entire page and I can show as a rectangle that shows what portion you're looking at now. I can pull that rectangle down to another portion of the page to scroll to there and say, that's the portion I want to work on. And I prepared an image ahead of time, a little fish, and I'll select that with the last so. And copy that into the clipboard. This lets me take it between different documents. I can now paste that into another, MacPaint document, or I'm going to quit MacPaint, and we'll even paste this into a word processing document. Randy Wigington is not going to show us the MacWrite word processor. (applause.


Randy Wigginton: As incredible as MacPaint is, it's really nothing compared to the quick dry routines that - now, now - it's nothing compared to the quick dry routines that Bill wrote for the ROM. And he also wrote for Lisa. If it weren't for Bill, none of us would be up here on this stage. So I'd like to thank him for that.


Bill Atkinson: I thought you were gonna say, compared to MacWrite.


Randy Wigginton: No. No, it's a lot more interesting than a word processor. The whole thrust behind Mac is to make everything easy to use and very visually oriented. As Steve said, we didn't want you to remember a lot of escape slash command z's, or anything like that. The whole idea is that whatever you see in the screen is what you're going to get on the printed page. And we wanted things to be simple and easy to use. With MacWrite, even though there's a lot of features, they're all very easy to use.


For example, to type, all you do is you simply point the mouse somewhere, you click and you start typing. Now you type. No great feat. You can also, however, go up and change the style. I'm going to type some underlined text.


You can also type lower case letters. Additionally, you not only have a choice of changing all the styles, but you can additionally change the size of any font that you're dealing in. I'm going to go to a larger font.


Additionally, we have a large choice of fonts. All of these fonts come provided with each disk. One of my favorites is London, which is Old English. This is a wonderful for writing letters to Mom. She really thinks you're getting a classic education this way. (laughter) Another, another font that is, uh, one of my favorites, is the one called the San Francisco. This is used for Apple's new program called, uh, Cons Can't Wait. (laughter) This isn't a very successful con, he has problems.


You'll notice here that we have a document that was formatted with left and right margins. However, you haven't so far seen a way to control those. THe way we do that is through the use of rulers. A ruler affects the format of the text from it up to the next ruler. By simply say "Show rulers", we can see the ruler that's formatting all of this text here.


We have choice. We have left margin, and the first line indent. Over here, we have a right margin. Here we have a tab stop. Here we have three buttons that determine the spacing of your document: single-spaced, one and a half spaced, or double spaced. You simply click on the box that you want to format the text according to your desires. We have center justified, right justified, or fill justified, where your margins are fully justified on both sides. We wanted you to see the printer image. (applause.


The printing routines, they were written by Owen Densmore, do all the printing magic, so I can't claim credit there. Here's a table that we entered earlier. Additionally, we wanted you to be able to format tables, featuring numerics and normal text, and be able to change these and edit these as you want it.


We have two types of tabs, normal tabs and decimal tabs. These are tab wells that I can get extra tabs from. Here's a decimal tab. A decimal tab right-justifies texts up to a decimal point. Notice that this column, all of the decimal points are lined up. If we simply pointed the tab, move it and let go, the column will reformat underneath it, new tab stop, move it back. This is pretty useful for formatting tables and things like that.


Well, earlier Bill made a picture and a picture's worth a thousand words, and we thought we wanted to be able to handle that. So, if you simply point and click, we can go ahead and paste and the picture will now appear in the middle of your word processor document. This is a pretty useful for illustrations and graphs and things like that. If you click on it, you can form a box around that. You can move the picture around. You can make your picture real small, make it real large. Fish is still ugly. Well, just make it - make it look like a sardine. (laughter.


And, uh, one feature I forgot to cover was if you wish to replace some texts, for example, I wish to have this letter written to trout rather than squid, you simply select the text you want to type in and you type its replacement, nothing else to remember. You can also go back and change any fonts anytime you want. We can select all of this. Let's put all of that in the San Francisco font, that's my favorite. So make it all a large. We can underline it.


If you make a mistake at any time, no matter what you've done, you can always go back to the edit menu and select undo. It will tell you what you're undoing and we'll go back to the way it was before. If for example, you had a lot of this selected, and as happens sometimes, your cat jumps on the keyboard, and types that, you simply go up and you say undo, and you're back to where you were. We wanted to make it pretty forgiving, so that you wouldn't curse at me later. Okay. Thank you. (applause.


SJ: Do we have any questions we might be able to help answer? Yes, in the front.


Audience member: Sound - sound generation. Uh, what, what is the chip and how can we get information on writing music software for those?


SJ: Great. I'd like to ask a Burrell to talk a little bit about the hardware and, for Andy to talk a little bit about the software. Burrell?


Burrell Smith: We don't use any particular integrated circuit, rather the sound generation hardware's fully integrated in with the, uh, logic and timings of the machine. In addition, there's software support that provides up to four voices of sound with 24 bit sound pitch control, or a speech, that you heard today.


Andy Hertzfeld: So basically the way it works, as far as the hardware is concerned, Burrell is fetching every 44 microseconds, he fetches an eight bit value and throws it into a digital to analog converter. And it was up to me to make that easy to use and generate pitchers out of that. So the way it sort of works is the sound triber wakes up at the end of every video screen and computes the next 370 values to fill the buffer with, I can do with this in a variety of ways. It, um, the way, the most common way is to use what we call the four voice sound generator. You can specify for totally different independent wave forms and a 24 bit pitch value for those sounds. Right.


And, um, it will generate four simultaneous tones to do music type stuff. Of course, that isn't enough to do. That's great for doing periodic type sounds like music. But, uh, to generate speech such as you heard, uh, demonstrated today, you need to be able to pump along wave forms through the, through the speaker. So, the sound driver also permits you to pump arbitrary wave form scale to any frequency rate through the speaker.


SJ: Okay. Next? Yeah. In the back there.


Audience member: You have an intermediate level quality printer, which you've talked about, the laser printer and the dot matrix.


SJ: The question is do we have an intermediate letter quality printer. The answer to that is yes and no. I'll handle the no first. No, we don't have one, because we don't believe in them. Uh, we believe in letter quality output, but we believe in getting that through much higher resolution dot printing such as a laser printer. Uh, we will - the Macintosh hardware supports letter quality printing, and some people like Microsoft are going to probably support daisy wheel printers. The problem is, how do you print the fish with a daisy wheel printer? And how do you print Old English with the daisy wheel printer? Let me ask Owen Densmore to jump in since Owen wrote all the printing for Macintosh and Lisa he's like a printing guru.


Owen Densmore: I'm not too sure what the question is other than, are we going to do something like that? The most important thing from my standpoint and the largest challenge I faced when I worked on the Macintosh was really to design the printing interface, so it was a miniature application running inside the host - the host program. It's fully configurable. It's rather easy conceptually anyway, you stay up a lot of nights working it out as my family can attest. But it's a very configurable design. The idea being that if a given application sorely needs a daisy wheel printer to make the revolution happen, it will happen. Unfortunately it's not very much fun. And Bill gets to have all this great time you see with this, with his graphics program and I don't want to be left out. So I want to, I want to go after color. I want to go over after higher resolution. I want to go after typesetters. I think that there's a big need for type setting applications in the industry. And I think we're going to do that. It's, I think that it really is going to be more interesting.


SJ: One final note, if you look at the output that you get off a $500 ImageWriter printer, it's pretty amazing. And you, you can't, we can't stand up in here and say, it's letter quality printer, letter quality output that you might want to send out of a legal office. But with the exception of those kinds of very high end applications, you'd be surprised at how good it is. And the beauty of the fonts in many cases makes up for the slight lack of resolution. You gotta to take a look at it. It's pretty good. Anything else? Yes.


Audience member: Do you have any information on a new assembly? The new assembler for it that'll be available? Like the third quarter.


SJ: The question was, do we have information on a new assembler that will be available. I guess come grab one of us after the meeting, trying to fill you in on all that stuff. Yes.


Audience member: What about communication with existing eight bit software and eight bit programs, to interface them with using MacWrite for instance, and actually in both directions, how it accepts like an ASCII file.


SJ: Randy?


Randy Wigginton: The terminal emulation program is coming from Apple in the very near future that will allow you to bring files over. Of course they won't have the formatting information since no one else does that right now.


SJ: Yes.


Audience member: I have a couple of questions about the word processor. First of all, with the justification that you were demonstrating, it always affected the entire document. Now, most of the time you wouldn't want to center the entire document. You might just want to set a header over the top, and then just leave the right format and wanted to see how that was gonna...


Do you hav.


SJ: any other questions?


Audience member: Trout, which was very conveniently, also five letters. What if we wanted to change it to Caliban.


SJ: Oh, these are hard questions. You can do whatever you like. Okay. Any other questions? Yes.


Audience member: What's the, uh, the development part where we want to develop software for the Macintosh. Did we get the Lisa IIs and do it? There? It's the same tools environment that's available on the Lisa?


SJ: What's the development environment. Steve Capps?


Steve Capps: Currently, we are developing all the software on the Lisa and we have this downloading program that you download your programs onto the Mac, and there's a debugging terminal that can be anything that talks ASCII. So you could get by with the Lisa and a Macintosh. In the future, we will hopefully be totally Macintosh based.


Audience member: Is the development language Pascal?


Steve Capps: Yeah. We have Pascal and 68000, similar language. We have versions of C up on, on the Macintosh. I'm not sure when they'll be available.


SJ: Yeah. Yes?


Audience member: Um, earlier you mentioned how you were not going to abandon the Lisa 1 pioneers. What about the Apple IIe pioneers.


SJ: There's some question is what about all the people that own Apple IIe's? I would, first of all, say that you own the most popular, serious, personal computer of all time. Number one. Number two, I think that statement is going to be true three years from now. See the real interesting question is when will we sell more of these in a quarter or in a month than we do Apple IIe's or Apple, or follow-on Apple II products. And I don't think it's going to be 1984 and I don't think it's going to be 1985. We sold 100,000, actually about 110,000 IIe's in December. What happened was, was we had a sort of a flat October because it's hard to compete against a product that doesn't exist. The minute the PC junior was introduced, our sales went through the roof. (applause.


And I think you're gonna see an incredible commitment to the Apple II, on the part of ourselves and that third-party community. We're spending as much R&D on the Apple II family as we are on the Apple 32 bit family. And as you've seen, we have the mouse on the Apple II. It actually runs pull-down menus in a sort of simplified version of Paint that Bill helped someone else do. And you're going to see a lot of stuff on the II. You're going to see some, some very exciting things in 1984 and the II coz we're really committed to that product. Yeah. A matter of fact, there's, there's someone here tonight that we might want to bring up here that, that had a lot to do with the Apple II. Woz?


(Steve Wozniak comes on stage.


Woz flew in from Seattle. We didn't know he was coming and he just showed up here. And he's here. Any other questions? Yes.


Do we have a spreadsheet program for Mac. Uh, Microsoft has announced MultiPlan for Macintosh and it's in the stores now. And, Lotus has announced 123 for Macintosh and it's in their development labs now.


Yes.


Audience member: What about the availability for other things from Apple you've mentioned - what? 27 computers, every second or one computer every 27 seconds. Why don't you get the software.


SJ: The question is, when are you going to get the software? Where the - as you know, the word processor and Paint are available now, uh, we are rolling out the terminal program, I believe in February, Mac terminal. Mac Pascal is I believe March. Mac logo, I think is slipped. We've got a version of Basic, which is really hot that we've also slipped on probably in the May, June timeframe at the latest, although Microsoft's version of Basic is on, is going to be on the shelves within 30 days.


Oh, it's available now. Oh, great. Great. Any from the real back? Yeah. Just stand up. Cause we can't see you.


Audience member: How are any color monitor in the near future? Secondly, do you see a three and a half inch diskette as a handicap in a five inch world.


SJ: Okay. The first question was, do we see a three and a half inch diskette as a handicap? Clearly we do not. We're storing, as we said, 400K bytes of information on one side of the diskette. You can throw these things, you can take them and, uh, (throws diskette into the audience) I would never do that with a five and a quarter inch floppy. And I bet that diskette will still work. They're really tightly protected. They don't need these ridiculous jackets. They're very high capacity and they're very reliable and will allow us to build smaller and smaller products in the future. So we're really happy with that decision. So happy that we converted all of the Lisas over to it. And you can expect that all future 32 bit products from Apple will use that technology for floppy diskette storage.


On the color side, we had a very interesting challenge - and a choice. We knew how to do low resolution color, which is the kind that you can get on current generation personal computers. And we had a breakthrough on how to do high resolution, high definition, black and white. And as you can see from the Macintosh display, it's very high definition. We could not figure out a way to take very high definition color, which currently sells for 15 to $20,000 and figure out how to put it in a box that would sell for $2,500. We just don't - we don't think there's a way to do it today.


So the question was, should we go with low resolution color, which you really don't want to stare at all day, or high definition black and white. And we chose the latter. Because there are a group of technologies converging around black and white as an example, the technology that lets us do the very high definition CRT in Macintosh. Secondly, someday we hope to put a Macintosh in a book, with flat panel technology, which will most certainly be initially monochromatic. And the third is that laser printing technology is going to be monochromatic initially as well. So there appears to be a lot of these high resolution black and white technologies converging in the next three or four years, which are going to allow us to blossom that out into a complete system. Someday there'll be color. And as a matter of fact, Bill built color into QuickDraw from day one. But, the types of products for the next 24 months are going to be monochromatic.


What's that? Animation? That's a great word.


Software for animation? Andy?


Andy Hertzfeld: Mac is capable of doing some incredible animation and I'm sure you'll see some amazing animation editors working. Bill Budge is working on some games for Mac that I'm sure will blow your mind. Steve Capps wrote an, the Atlas chess game, which you can see sometimes, which does some amazing 3D animation.


SJ: You don't happen to have that do you?


Andy Hertzfeld: Uh, no, haven't got it.


SJ: Yeah, you've got it?


Bill Atkinson: I'll go get it.


SJ: Ha, go get it yeah. Yes.


Audience member: I can see where MacWrite would be much easier to learn than WordStar, but once you know all the commands, which would be faster, using the cursor or using the command?


SJ: The question is, after you become an expert, is the mouse still a feature or a handicap? Would anybody like to answer that? Or you want me to. Anybody else?


Andy Hertzfeld: It depends a lot on the individual user. I'm sure different people would prefer different things. I think all of us up here who've had experience with a mouse far prefer using the mouse.


SJ: Absolutely. The question. There's a few questions. First of all, we've got to do traditional things better with the mouse, and then we've got to do the untraditional things. Now we all know that it's hard to draw a fish with cursor keys. So we can start off there. The second thing is that. Even after you become an expert, we've done a lot of testing, it does take some extra time to get off of the keyboard and find the mouse and then get back to the keyboard and home position once you've used the mouse. But even with that delay, it is faster. Number one. And number two, after you've selected something, the chances are extremely high that you want to act on that selection, i.e. go up to the top of the screen in the menu bar. And since you're already on the mouse, if you add up both of those, it's much, much faster than cursor keys. In addition to being able to draw fish.


Audience member: Will students in universities that aren't in this elite consortium also be allowed to buy the Macintosh for a thousand dollars? [00:57:35]SJ: Uh, the question is will the students who go to schools that are not part of this consortium be allowed to buy the Macintosh with a thousand dollars? Uh, the answer is no.


Audience member: Why not?


SJ: Because we go bro. (laughter.


We are currently trying to broaden that program, out to, to probably, a larger number of schools in a second generation program. But we're not ready to roll on that right now. And certainly every school has called us about it. So we're in the process of figuring out exactly what to do. But we, again, our goal is to get these to tens of millions of people. And we know the college students can't necessarily afford $2,500, in that point in their life. So we're going to try some, some creative solutions to that. Yes?


Audience member: Can we have Woz talk about the future of the Apple II?


SJ: Sure.


Woz: Just vaguely and generally future of the Apple II? Uh, Right. We've got some of the most excited, you know, Apple enthusiasts in our personal computer systems division of which I'm a part and we're working on some, some absolutely great, what we believe are great, revolutionary changes in the world, uh, coming out of our division. We've got several great products on the work, on the way for this year. Not all computers. And, um, well, I can't say too much more because I'll be specifically describing products in the works.


SJ: Yeah.


Audience member: Now for Apple IIs. What about upgrading those to IIes.


Woz: Converting Apple IIs to IIes? I'm still hoping that someone does it and I'm pushing for it because a IIe has been around for about a year, and maybe it's been seen for a year before that by some developers, but a lot of the features of the IIe that went beyond the II Plus don't get used right away because there's no really mass market. The software does not use double-height and it does not use the extended memory of the IIe. That software is about to start appearing, you know, eventually, but it turns out the whole Apple market strongly is very supportive of its prior customers and the people who brought, bought the II Pluses, and that's been the nature of things. So the IIe software has not really started appearing yet. In other words, using features of the IIe that don't work on your II Plus. When that happens, there may be a need for a card.


SJ: Way in the back there. Yeah, no, you?


Audience member: Two questions. How are you getting video from the Mac on the screen, and are you, do you have a version of SmallTalk in the works?


SJ: Uh, two questions. One. How are we getting the video out? And second, do we have a version of SmallTalk? We're getting the video out. We add a little board inside the Macintosh that allows us to bring on video. Unfortunately, the Macintosh, well, fortunately the Macintosh's screen is very high resolution. What that means is you can't plug it into an ordinary TV. And so we didn't spend the extra, you know, 10 bucks, it would cost to build a video output in each Macintosh because nobody's have anything to hook it up to anyways. So for those people that really need it, we sort of, we can do a special version, which has an output, which is what's feeding this projector.


In terms of SmallTalk, um, Bruce Horn actually has implemented several SmallTalks. He was at Xerox Park, at an early age. And I'll let him talk about that.


Bruce Horn: Well, none of us are really working on a version of SmallTalk, but I can say that there's going to be a version of Pascal, that has a lot of the good qualities of SmallTalk that Think Technologies is doing. And I heartily recommend that. I I'm sure that somebody will do a version of SmallTalk for it at some point, but, for the time being, I think the Think Technologies thing is the greatest in the world.


SJ: Yes. The one I missed before. Right you. Yes, quick, stand up! No not.. See you missed it again.


Audience member: Three family, which is sort of fallen by the wayside, it seems. Is there going to be a IIe emulation mode for III? Is there going to be continued support for the III?


SJ: Is there going to be continued support for the Apple III? Is anyone calling you while I'm answering your question? (laughter) No, seriously. We're shipping about 2,500 Apple IIIs a month. And 80% of those are going to people that already own Apple IIIs. Which means two things. One, the III is a pretty niche product. And two, people are really happy with them. So we anticipate making IIIs until the cows come home. With the upgrade of Pro DOS on the Apple II, the Apple II software environment's now much closer to the Apple III software environment. You're going to see much more of a migration of software between those two. So I think the III has got a pretty long life ahead of it. It's probably the fourth largest selling product in the industry right now. And we sort of look at it as our, our, you know, big brother to the Apple II. Do we have any, any more questions for the software group up here rather than sort of general marketing ones while they're here?


Yeah, right up there. Does Macintosh do multitasking or not? Who wants to answer that one? Andy?


Andy Hertzfeld: Macintosh does a sort of limited form of multitasking. We allow, as you've seen these little desk accessory programs, such as the calculator and the puzzle, we were running. The application yields time to the desk accessories to allow them to run concurrently with the current application. But right now we have too limited a memory to permit huge programs to run simultaneously. I think probably you'll see something like that in the future. Steve?


SJ: Yes. Owen?


Owen Densmore: Of the - when you ask about multiprocessing one of the things you're, that's you have to keep in mind is what you're really looking for. For example, in printing, it's possible to use it as a background/foreground use - put it in that kind of usage. So for example, in printing and in many other places throughout the system, we use something called an idle procedure, a procedure that's passed into other packages that will be called at times when the first one is busy. I know that wasn't too clear, but the idea being, that by using something more like a code routine, you get many of the features of multiprocessing for free. So to be very specific when you look at MultiChart or excuse me, MultiPlan, you'll notice that when you're printing, the application comes back to you and you can still edit it. And that code routine type mechanism will give you that type of multiprocessing.


SJ: Okay. One or two last question and we got to turn it back over to Jonathan. Yes. Right, sir.


Audience member: Are we going to see more than 128K and one drive in the Mac?


SJ: Will there ever be more than 128K and one drive in a Mac? Uh, yes and no.


Uh, Burrell has designed the board to accept two 56K RAM chips in addition to the 64K RAM chips. So someday when we can get a large enough supply of 256K RAMs, there will be a 512K Mac, and there will be an upgrade path for all the existing owners to bring in their digital board and swap it out for a 512 K digital board at a certain price. And that's going to be real exciting. I would probably be about 1985, hopefully in the first half when we can do that.


In terms of the second disk drive, we're not going to build a second disk drive into Mac for two or three reasons. First of all, we don't want everyone to have to pay for a second disk drive when only some people will use it. So the people that will use it can get an outboard disk drive. Secondly, it would have increased the weight in terms of it being a transportable small product and we didn't want to do that. And the third thing is some people may choose to get an add on Winchester, a direct connect Winchester rather than a second disk drive, and why burden them with having to pay for the second disc drive. So I think that we will stick with one disk drive again, I think sometime, maybe, you know, in the first half of 1985, we might be able to go to double-sided drives. And obviously again, we'll provide some sort of upgrade path for the existing owners. It's hard to tell right now. One last question. Over there.


Audience member: Okay, you have wonderful graphics, word processor, spreadsheets. Do you have any plans for a database management system.


SJ: Do we have any plans for a database management system? A lot of people have plans for database management system on Macintosh. I think you'll see a half a dozen of them by fall.


Okay. Thank you very much. (applause.


Remember that, that, when you use a Macintosh, these are the people that did it. And they were sort of hiding out in that ROM. Thanks.


Woz: Well, t'was a surprise to come out here and I noticed, you know, different pieces of software, just different brands than I'd see you on the West Coast. So it's obvious to me that the marketing of software is not, is generally regional for a lot of stuff.


Journalist: Like what would you have out there that you might not get here for the hell of it? [01:07:02]Woz: I have no idea. I can't remember specifically. Specifically I've got to remember, but so many hundreds of pieces of software. Also, but it's just in my travels out here, usually I'm surprised because it's different, you know, similar pieces, but I never even heard of them, which surprises me and also, and yet they are in the duplicates and they're just not in the, you know, (intelligible) stores back there.


Journalist: Where are your most excited users? In which part of the country?


Woz: They're actually everywhere and in general, you can be out in some of the most just rural, you know, areas of Kansas and you discover there's a huge Apple following out there. We're in Silicon Valley and, you know, it seems to go up and down. It almost depends which group you're you're in with them, which stores they haunt.


Journalist: Do you do a lot of travel for Apple now?


Woz: No, I - as a matter of fact, I do a ton of traveling, but it's all for myself because I feel that we sprung from a club, a club, a bunch of people got together like this and shared, I need this. What kind of hardware surrounds them, it's good? So I go about, maybe once a month on the average for the last few years, I go anywhere in the country to clubs that invite me to speak and shows and all. And I just tell them a lot of the stories, how we got started and where we stand. And I answer all questions and I do it at my own expense because I don't really want to feel like I'm being paid to tell a story exactly the way Apple's press public relations department wants it told. I just tell it the way it is.


Journalist: Can you tell us anything about that RAM in 8088, the children...


Woz: I can't tell. I can't talk much about that. It's um, you know, I'm looking -- I'm looking forward to it. I really do see the 68000 is my personal interest in growth paths and not the 8088 or 8086. As a matter of fact, I was instrumental in taking a hard line against the 8086 for our Lisa machine before the 68000 came out when we were trying to decide which processor. And I was proposing some bits slice arrangements of my own, and we didn't go too at far on that before the 68000 was much more, it was there and it was much better.


Journalist: Will it be possible, since the motherboard of the IIe's got room, to be able to put a 68000 chip and utilize and update Apple IIe that way?


Woz: Well, I think we're - we're so strongly into any Apple II product we come up with. Building in a co-processor is a little bit too radical for us. We take very small steps. So we're extremely compatible with what went before. We don't take a major extreme step that's much better, but not compatible with what happened before.


It can be done. I think a more logical way to get there is Apple IIs always have slots, maybe a specific Apple II that is designed with a special slot for 8086 cards and 80 and 68000 cards. For some reason, a special swap might be added that supports those cards better.


Rony Sebok: We have a font editor, which is how they design all the fonts. A woman named Susan Kare designed all of the type of fonts.


Audience member: How many characters can you put across the screen? If you put the smallest.


Rony Sebok: The really small ones, I would assume over, you know, a hundred, 120. And 9, 9.5 is the smallest one that we have there. 72 is the largest amount of (unintelligible) . Anybody can design any fonts that they want. You know, we're going to be distributing our font editor to users groups. It's not a perfectly polished program, but we decided we wanted to get it on the market. And, yeah, you can design your own and with it, you can move them into your system, and then they're accessible to all the programs. It's basically we have a system where fonts are having to reside in resources, they're resource files, and every program knows to look there for the fonts.


Audience member: What if I wanted to make a little newspaper? You had two columns where you're already trying to print. Would that be possible?


Rony Sebok: The word processor right now, it doesn't do, columnar or word wraparound, which is what you ideally want, right. You want, once you've gotten to the bottom of the page here, to be able to wrap around. There are word processors that are coming out I'm sure that will be doing that. This current one doesn't support it.


Audience member: But on the screen, could you, could you put two columns.


Rony Sebok: Oh you certainly could. Sure.


Audience member: Everyone... (untintelligible).


Rony Sebok: No, I actually, I worked on the mouse lesson, which is the first thing that anybody's going to use, it's a little demo that teaches mouse tips, starting, pointing, clicking techniques. It's just a challenge in showing (untintelligible.


Andy Hertzfeld: Very shortly, we'll start producing those machines that are both 220...


Audience member: ..Like a car supplier... (untintelligible.


Andy Hertzfeld: Probably. I'm not sure something like that will be available, although it's possible, if you have a real need for it, just write a letter to someone and they'll see what they can do. But...


Audience member: It could be consensus... (untintelligible.


Andy Hertzfeld: Every Mac from day one supports the international market. With, through lots of different character sets. All our programs are easily translatable. Here's something that we didn't tell you, but the same facility that lets you translate your applications to different languages, allows you to customize your applications to your own needs. So you can actually change menu items. It could be whatever you like, it'll be for yourself. It's available now to developers. But right now it's not polished enough to make it... Right now you can use it to kill yourself.


Audience member: It's okay. I'm planning on being a developer.


Andy Hertzfeld: Yeah. So developers get it, but you have to be, you have to be a knowledgeable, sophisticated user right now to avoid changing something you shouldn't have changed. You know, in other words, it's...


Audience member: There's joy.


Andy Hertzfeld: Yeah. That's right. And we had lots of fun with it, just changing around. We get programs from other people and we can change around the menus and the icons. It's a lot of fun. Actually, you're responsible for designing an icon. When you produce an application, you have to put in this special part of the file or the icons for the Finder to use for your program. And yet we have some funny icons.


Audience member: This is going to be fun. I hope we can get (unintelligble) we've done one dozen products for the IIe.


Andy Hertzfeld: Oh, sure.


Audience member: Where are the icons stored?


Andy Hertzfeld: Okay. What happens is, they're stored in the resource part of the application file. When the Finder comes in, it recognizes an application it's never seen before, it pulls those. Yeah. The Finder sorta says, Hey, I've never seen this guy before, looks inside it and finds its icons and pulls it out into one of its own internal files. So it doesn't have to keep all the applications open, just copies the parts of it it needs, mainly the icons, into this file called Desktop. And that's why you can do it. Yeah. That's why even when the disc is not in there, you can still display the icons, et cetera.


Audience member: You know, once you want to do something, that's going to require the disc, then you're in trouble because you have to get the disc back again.


Andy Hertzfeld: It'll just ask you to stick the disk back in. It says, please insert the disk, and get out the name of the disk. We did that because you realize that a lot of people will have two-drive software, but we wanted it to run on a single driver. The human was willing to be the multiplexer.


So, you know, you can do that at work, even though it's a little bit of a pain in the neck to swap disks so many times.


Audience member: What do you think is the most, uh. Oh, you got a question? I'd build up... (untintelligible.


Andy Hertzfeld: Oh, he's the guy who wrote that amazing chess program that you saw on the screen, as well as the Finder program and lots of other stuff.


Audience member: Sort of perspective view... (untintelligible.


Steve Capps: You need to sayn I think about that, is the fact that it's so vanilla. That there, you know, all I do is call Bill Atkinson's routines. And you know, most games you sweat your brain out, trying to make the thing so tuned. You know, like Bill Budge, when he writes his games, he's squeezing every last drop out of that machine and that's squeezing maybe 10% of the machine. So people that are maniacs are gonna stay up all night, squeezing the last drop on the machine, are going to blow that out of the water.


Andy Hertzfeld: And also people with just good ideas. We don't want them to develop the technical skill it takes to be an assembly language tracker and still be able to write great games because we've done all the hard graphics work for them.


Audience member: Including the animation.


Andy Hertzfeld: Including the very fast and powerful graphics it takes to do the animation.


Audience member: Cause it looks like you could.


Andy Hertzfeld: You still have to be a good artist. Like I can't draw pictures like that. And you need to find someone who can to, to make a really pretty game.


Audience member: Oh, someone will market a picture library.


Additional games have very small amount of definition in their objects because they're very small objects. Typically you can't tell...


Steve Capps: You can animate, I'd say three or four or five square inches with no problems at all on this thing. And...


Andy Hertzfeld: He figures he can draw... Bill Budge was working on this space shuttle animator, and he figures he can draw the full screen with a very complex image over 10 times a second.


That's tons of power.


Audience member: This is real innovation. Can you do the similar to sprites?


Andy Hertzfeld: Better than sprites because it's all software based here. You're not limited by the artificial restrictions of any sprites. You're just -- just, just your imagination, is the only thing that really limits you.


Steve Capps: The one thing that there's an ultimate screen that you can be painting this screen off, you know, this one's being, being displayed. And then in a fraction of a second, faster than the eye could see, you could switch to the other one.


So yeah. So that way you get very nice.


Audience member: How many do you have? Just two?


Andy Hertzfeld: Just two is all you ever need, right. As well, one being displayed, you paint the other one, right.


Steve Capps: So if you can't paint it, with a frame times a 60 frames a second, if you can't paint your image or that fast, you can paint it a little bit slower, but do the flip, which is instantaneous.


Andy Hertzfeld: You do it asynchronously.


Steve Capps: You don't see any, any... or black. It doesn't see.


Andy Hertzfeld: You can sort of log into the, into the video heartbeat of the system, the system, you can arrange for the system to call you every time during vertical retreats, which is an excellent time to do display updating because, um, you know, the video is not active then and do incredible smooth animation, never flcikers.


Audience member: How's interrupt support? Can you get...


Andy Hertzfeld: Fully interrupt driven, asynchronous IO.


Audience member: Was is the original Lisa that had that problem? That it wasn't easy to get to interrupt side, I hear.


Andy Hertzfeld: Oh, it's reasonably straightforward. You have to know what you're doing. And it's real easy to crash things if you do something wrong. If you follow the conventions that are well-defined, you can do whatever you want.


Steve Capps: The best one is if you shut off interrupts, the mouse stops moving. Yeah. [01:17:05]Andy Hertzfeld: Well, yeah.


Audience member: I got the hint that that might happen since you can move the mess around while it's turned into a watch and doing disc reads.


What's happened to the claim that you can't do cursors on mice without hardware support?


I'm doing collegial vision cartridges part-time so that's why I'm asking questions about sprites and all that stuff.


Andy Hertzfeld: Nothing to me beats a straight bitmap and a fast processor. Because all of a sudden these, the limitations go away. Right.


Audience member: Digitizers. Cheap video digitizers.


Andy Hertzfeld: Let people capture any image that they see in the world. And put it on the screen and edit it with Paint. And...


Amazing digitization stuff. And what he's going to do is provide to the clubs such as this Boston Computer Society. Just images that you can paste into your documents.


Audience member: Like a fake, fake book for a graphic artists?


Andy Hertzfeld: Yeah, exactly.


Audience member: And ol.


Steve Capps: Over sells all those copyright fee designs.


Andy Hertzfeld: We'll put a bunch of that stuff in the public domain. And I imagine a lot of artists will want to do some real fancy ones and sell


Steve Capps: Somebody selling digital art for the Lisa right now.


Audience member: Okay. And just again, it's just gonna take the images you want and then pull it out in something else. Okay. Well, thanks very much for your fine explanations.


What's on your feet by the way?


Andy Hertzfeld: He actually, for Christmas, he bought the entire software group shoes like this. Yeah.


Audience member: Can you get, can you can't buy them here?


Steve Capps: And then they're sort of like...


Andy Hertzfeld: They're called Bands.


Steve Capps: They're sort of like step-in slippers. Yeah. Oh, they have high tops. The name of the shoe is Bands.


Audience member: Put in a plug.


Steve Capps: You can buy them here? Ah Okay.


Audience member: I think whatever everybody's wearing now or are white kinds of sneakers, unlaced. They fall off, I guess. Very carefully (unintelligble) they're laced within that timeframe. They're very careful.


Steve Capps: We've got to get God we're behind. We've got to start a new trend.