Andy Hertzfeld and collaborators tell first-person stories from the development of the original Apple Macintosh in the early 1980s.
Commenters recommend it for short stories about the Mac's early days and note it underlies the book Revolution in the Valley.
That's certainly one opinion, and is even right, to some degree. But there's also movies like the Imitation Game about Alan Turing, which is a movie, and not a documentary, but there are also countless documentaries about him. There's no shortage of hagiographies about Steven Jobs, in both book and film and tv miniseries format, along with Pirates of Silicon Valley which includes Microsoft's part. There's a movie about Aaron Swartz (The Internet’s Own Boy). The movie Antitrust(2001) is fictional, but in the same area.
Hackers (1995) is fictional but a cult classic. Freedom Downtime (2001) is about Mitnick and hacking culture. There's smaller documentaries too. There's that one about Wikileaks, that one about Cambridge Analytica. There's books like The Dream Machine (Mitchell), Unix: A History and a Memoir (Brian W. Kernighan), The UNIX‑HATERS Handbook (Simson Garfinkel et al.). There's http://folklore.org about the early days at Apple. Asiometry has https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ffh3DRFzRL0, a 20 minute bit about the Unix wars.
The source code to the original Microsoft DOS is at https://github.com/microsoft/MS-DOS. The Anarchist Cookbook is on Kindle, https://www.2600.com/Magazine/digital-back-issues goes back to 2010.
DefCON got too big for the Riv and the Sahara, and is now at the LVCC. Yeah it's not the same. It's never going to be the same, but some still gather for their yearly mecca and watch Hackers and get drunk in hotel suites paid for by corporate sponsors.…
Don Eyles' writing about programming the lunar module (which was something he did!) is fantastic [1]. There's also a gallery of photos on that site and he has a whole book!
And, click around on Bret Victor's references page[2] -- it's a real treasure. Despite my constant fear that mentioning it will make it go away, it needs to be shared to be useful. It's a big collection of classic papers and interviews. Someone mentioned "As You May Think", which is on there, as is Bush's follow-up from ~20 years later, and Douglas Engelbart's own partly annotated version of the original!
Also check out folklore[3], which is a great bunch of stories about working at Apple in its early days, by people who worked there (mostly Andy Hertzfeld, I'm pretty sure).
Lastly, look up "Ignition!" by John Drury Clark[4], which is a tangent, but is amazing -- it's about the history of the design of rocket engines, largely about the wild experiments and chemical science involved, and is very well written. I didn't feel right finding a pdf to link straight to, but they aren't that hard to find.
As a bonus, this isn't so much historical, but it's a great inspirational essay, Richard Hamming's "You and Your Research"(transcript[5], a video version[6]). Talks about working at Bell Labs and the different cultural elements there across people as part of analysing what makes certain people truly great.
1 - https://www.doneyles.com/LM/Tales.html
2 - http://worrydream.com/refs/
3 -…
Highly useful. Many thanks.
Writing this response is the first productive thing I do with a Macintosh. To me it's somewhat inspiring and sad that my virgin user experience on a Mac, having clicked on Safari because it's the only thing that looked familiar, was the memorial video being shown today[1] on apple.com for 1 year since Steve Jobs death.
This feeling of sheer admiration is greatly reinforced by the pushback of a thought that a past generation of great man (Being 29 myself) was here to creatively pioneer the core culture values for us to build upon. I have just recently learned about Apple and Steve, reading Walter Issacson point of view. I found that honestly understanding how and mostly why Apple was build is an easily traceable path to enable one to learn to admire the actions and mostly the philosophy behind the company and behind Steve Jobs. Reading http://www.folklore.org also gives it's magical touch of a time that once was.
So thank you for your wonderful experience tips. Your assumption for this macbook is correct it will be used as a tool to making software, I hope to build something useful and fun for the world.
Will Have Fun, thank you for the suggestion :)
Maxim.
[1] http://movies.apple.com/media/us/stevejobs/stevejobs-memorial-us-20121005_r848-9dwc.mov
> first production versions of macOS? A couple of years maybe?
Ok, I'll bite. If we're talking classic Macintosh OS, perhaps.[0] macOS? No way. The first Mac OS X was released in 2001, and was in development between 1997 and 2001 according to Wikipedia.[1] But the bulk of the OS already existed 1997. Mac OS X was a reskin of NeXTStep. NeXTStep was released in 1989, final release 1995, final preview 1997 (just before Apple sold out to NeXT).[2] NeXTStep was in production for quite some time before the x86 version shipped (around '95 from memory). In case you are wondering, I can assure you that NeXTStep was a very capable OS. NeXTStep was in development for a couple of years before the first hardware shipped in 1989. NeXTStep was built on top of Mach and BSD 4.3 userspace. Mach's initial release was 1985.[3]. Not sure how long the first release of Mach took to develop. You can check BSD history yourself. But I'd say, conservatively, that macOS took at least 14 years to develop.
[0] check https://folklore.org/
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_operating_systems
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXTSTEP
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mach_(kernel)
Famously Gates thought that the Mac cursor was a sprite, when it was actually in software https://www.folklore.org/Shut_Up.html
Apple loved doing things in software, ever since Woz wrote the Apple II disk routines in software so their floppy drives didn't need their own controller (the Commodore machines had a whole second CPU running an operating system in theirs). This is also why the one thing that WOULD lag the cursor on a classic Mac was formatting a floppy disk, since it required interrupt-level timing.
Even to this day Apple loves running things in software - the speakers on modern Mac laptops are driven in software - macOS has a daemon that runs and adjusts the speaker volume, tracking the sound pressure sent to them to keep them from being blown out. When Asahi Linux added speaker support, they had to reimplement this from scratch.
It's rarely going to be worth it for an individual user, but it's very useful if you can get it to a lot of users at once. See https://www.folklore.org/Saving_Lives.html
"Well, let's say you can shave 10 seconds off of the boot time. Multiply that by five million users and thats 50 million seconds, every single day. Over a year, that's probably dozens of lifetimes. So if you make it boot ten seconds faster, you've saved a dozen lives. That's really worth it, don't you think?"
I put a lot of effort into chasing wins of that magnitude. Over a huge userbase, something like that has a big positive ROI. These days it also affects important things like heat and battery life.
The other part of this is that the wins add up. Maybe I manage to find 1% every couple of years. Some of my coworkers do too. Now you're starting to make a major difference.