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By Root 413 0

not being recharged properly. Neither he nor Hertzfeld had worked on one project for quite as long before. The fatigue of designing a computer was printed on the pair and both were working harder than they had ever worked. Smith was twenty-six and Hertzfeld twenty-nine though both looked older. Behind his spectacles, Hertzfeld’s eyelids looked like swollen leeches while his cheeks were unshaven and pale. The pallid circles around Smith’s eyes bore the marks of late evenings. The same slack belts of fast food were strapped to their waists. Hertzfeld had found that developing a computer distorted time. “I used to think six months was a long time. But it’s not. It seems like an instant.”

Smith, his auburn hair tucked tight behind one ear and hanging in a thin curl beneath the other, tripped over his words in a frothy rush: “It’s so weird,” he complained to Hertzfeld. In a languid tone Hertzfeld asked, “How do you know that you’ve fixed it when you don’t know how it occurs?” Smith replied, “It’s so frustrating because I haven’t proved that I cannot solve the problem and I haven’t proved that I can solve it either.” Hertzfeld sighed. “We’re going to be getting into superstitions. We’re going to see that it works but we won’t be sure that it works.”

Smith had been trying to solve the puzzle for a couple of days. He had first noticed the computer wasn’t behaving properly while the rest of the engineers were celebrating what they thought was the completion of the first Mac prototype. Smith had ignored the champagne, which at Apple (and at the Mac group in particular) had a habit of appearing from behind even the thinnest milestone, and sat by himself looking at the computer. He had used a heat gun, which looked like a hairdryer, and a spray to heat and cool particular chips to temperatures where quirks were liable to appear more frequently. Smith had decided that the problem lay with the largest chip on the board, the Motorola 68000 microprocessor.

The 68000 and the other chips on the board were a tribute to the continuing advances in semiconductor technology. The 68000 was a sixteen-bit microprocessor, and consequently the Mac had about ten times as much computing power as the Apple II, though it used half as many chips. Smith compared the difference in complexity to watching an ordinary baseball game and then trying to follow the action in a game where eight batters hit simultaneously to fifty-four outfielders. He was perspiring and kept flicking frames onto the logic analyzer to inspect another frame showing the electronic signals from the clocks. He said, “You thrash around the design space long enough and you learn the idiosyncrasies.”

Some at Apple thought the entire Mac project reflected a parade of personal idiosyncrasies rather than any grand design. There was no plan of Napoleonic proportions. False starts, diversions, mistakes, experiments, rebellion, and competition formed the stuff of the machine. The Mac, like other products that rely on technological advances, the uncertain swings of a fast-growing company, and the proclivities of different managers, was something that Apple had been groping toward for several years. For almost two years it was one of those projects that could have foundered with the departure of a programmer or the appearance of a faulty prototype. Hertzfeld, who had watched the ups and downs, the delays in announcement, had formed his own conclusion about how to measure progress: “The time to completion,” he had decided, “is a constant.”

The starting point turned into the only sure point of reference. In the middle of 1979 the manager of Apple’s publications department, Jef Raskin, was asked to take charge of a small group that would build a computer to sell for $500, work through a television set, contain a built-in modem, and be able to run both the Pascal and BASIC languages. Raskin, misspelling the name of his favorite apple, code-named the project Macintosh and dreamed up his own idea for a computer. “I thought it was more important to give people a choice of case color than a choice