Free Revolution in the Valley: The Insanely Great Story of How the Mac Was Made by Andy Hertzfeld

concept of the game was as bad the crude graphics that it used. Since the game was written in BASIC, you could list it out and see how it was written. We were surprised to see that the comments at the top of the game proudly proclaimed the authors: Bill Gates and Neil Konzen. Neil was a bright teenage hacker who I knew from his work on the Apple II (who would later become Microsoft's technical lead on the Mac project) but we were amazed that such a thoroughly bad game could be co-authored by Microsoft's co-founder, and that he would actually want to take credit for it in the comments.

Joining the Mac Group
by Bruce Horn in September 1981
    In the spring of 1981, I was 21, and just about to graduate from Stanford. I had been working at least part-time (and often fulltime during the summers) at Xerox PARC in the Learning Research Group for the last eight years. The people at PARC were legendary, and I felt extraordinarily lucky to be able to work with many of them. It was a tremendous learning experience, and I had had the chance to work on a variety of exciting projects through the years.
    My most recent project had been the NoteTaker, a portable Smalltalk machine with a bitmap touchscreen display, mouse and keyboard, stereo sound, and dual 8086 processors: one I/O processor which also ran BitBLT (Bitwise BLock Transfer) to draw the graphics, and one emulator processor dedicated to running the Smalltalk bytecode interpreter. My job was to help out on the bytecode interpreter, to write the I/O processor routines, and to basically keep enough of the NoteTaker prototypes running so that they could be used for demos to management. The NoteTaker hardware had been created by Doug Fairbairn, a gifted hardware and chip designer who had recently left to start a new company, VLSI Technology, Inc., or VTI.
    On that project I had been working closely with Larry Tesler. Larry was an amazing guy--he had invented the modeless text editing engine for Smalltalk (modeled on his Gypsy editor), and would wear a t-shirt with the slogan "Don't Mode Me In" around the lab. He also was famous for writing a piece of software that would coordinate flash cards at Stanford football games to provide spectators across the stadium with animated bitmap graphics. One evening Larry and I went out for dinner to a local pizza parlor on El Camino in Palo Alto. While we were waiting for the pizza, Larry said, "Bruce, I'm thinking of leaving PARC."
    "Really? How can you leave PARC?" I was incredulous. PARC was the Mecca of computer science; we often said (only half-jokingly) that 80 of the 100 best computer scientists in the world were in residence at PARC. I could walk down the hall and wander into the offices of people like Alan Kay (the leader of the Learning Research Group, where many of today's user interface innovations were first created); Chuck Geschke and John Warnock (who later founded Adobe); and Ed McCreight, the inventor of B-Trees. And they all made time to answer my questions, even if they were from a geeky and gangly teenager. LRG and the rest of PARC were full of the brightest and most creative people on the planet. Why would anyone want to leave?
    Larry said that he was ready for a new challenge--ready to try to get some of the PARC ideas out into the world. I said, "Well, what about Apple?" We had been talking with Apple recently and had given a demo of Smalltalk to Steve Jobs. Although Larry didn't say anything right away, it turns out he had already been interviewing at Apple, and was soon to join the Lisa team.
    When I finally did graduate in mid-1981, I wasn't sure what I wanted to do. Working at PARC was a dream come true, and I had lived that dream for more than a third of my life. But maybe I should get out into the "real world." PARC was so ahead of the rest of the world--we had Alto and Dorado workstations with mice, large portrait bitmapped displays, WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) text editors, graphics editors, interactive