History lesson

Posted on Thursday, Jul 15, 2004

A really interesting read can be found at folklore.org, which is “a web site devoted to collective historical storytelling.”

Although right now it’s only stories about the development of the original Macintosh, mostly written by Andy Hertzfeld, one of the main authors of the Macintosh system software working on the core operating system and the User Interface toolbox, as well as most of the original desk accessories.

Lots of fun anecdotes about my man Jobs, especially the one that describes Andy’s first encounter with the Reality Distortion Field:

_“Well, it’s Steve. Steve insists that we’re shipping in early 1982, and won’t accept answers to the contrary. The best way to describe the situation is a term from Star Trek. Steve has a reality distortion field.”

“A what?”

“A reality distortion field. In his presence, reality is malleable. He can convince anyone of practically anything. It wears off when he’s not around, but it makes it hard to have realistic schedules.”


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