Insanely Great
"Welcome to Mac" – with those words, a new era was born. From the moment the public met Macintosh – introduced by an apocalyptic commercial that had a nation rubbing its eyes in astonishment – it was clear that there had never been anything like it. Its creators had been commanded to devise a personal computer that was not just good, not just great, but "insanely great" – so great that it would change the world. And it did. Macintosh won over a fanatic cult audience with its friendly interface, its attention to aesthetic detail, and what could only be called its quirky personality. It invaded not only people's offices and homes, but their minds as well. The Mac also catapulted the computer industry into an unprecedented mix of technics, economics, and show biz. Eventually, the essence of Macintosh found its way to nearly all computers, and has fundamentally changed the way we deal with information. Like the Model T or the Apollo mission, Macintosh thrust America into a new millennium. Now, on the Mac's tenth anniversary, Insanely Great tells the exciting story of the machine that became a kind of Manhattan Project in a box. Veteran technology writer and Macworld columnist Steven Levy zooms in on the machine – the product of the collective will of its sometimes maniacal creators and its dedicated users – as well as the fortunes of the unique company responsible for the Mac's evolution.
Stats for nerds
8recommend
11mentions
10people
2007–2023years
82% recommend18% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Someone else already mentioned, "Hackers" by Steven Levy, which was great. Levy's "Insanely Great: The Life and Times of Macintosh, the Computer that Changed Everything" was also a vey good read (and only $4.99 for Kindle edition!).
https://www.amazon.com/Insanely-Great-Macintosh-Computer-Eve...
And not sure how well it's aged, but I remember "Accidental Empires: How the Boys of Silicon Valley Make Their Millions, Battle Foreign Competition, and Still Can't Get a Date" was a fun, breezy read.
https://www.amazon.com/Accidental-Empires-Silicon-Millions-C...
- This YouTube video on A/UX https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwrTTXOg-KI is one of the best things I've found about the subject. (It has a usable transcript.)
On the subject of what happened with Big Mac, the Macintosh II and NeXT, https://lowendmac.com/2013/apples-bigmac-project-failed-prec... and some of the articles linked from it https://lowendmac.com/2013/next-years-steve-jobs-before-triu... https://www.aventure-apple.com/le-big-mac-apple/ (Google Translate: https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=fr&tl=en&u=https:/... ) is the best intro that I'm aware of, though there are some additional, important bits of information in Steven Levy's Insanely Great ch. 9 ( https://books.google.ie/books?id=Y6ZQAAAAMAAJ&dq=insanely+gr... ) and the Isaacson bio's ch. 13 ( https://books.google.ie/books?id=JT6FCgAAQBAJ&printsec=front... ). TFA links to some of these, but it missed some of the information in them. (Unfortunately the Adventure-Apple piece needs one big caveat, that it mostly doesn't cite any sources.)
There's also yet another whole strand of Macintosh-adjacent Unix in the Network Server products: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PsVAdrdkyoA .
Some key points from these:
* I have little idea how well-founded Apple's detailed legal complaints were, but the overall claim that "Jobs had done research for a next generation product and taken the key staff, namely Page from Apple to make it reality" is almost surely absolutely right, and NeXT was conceived an attempt to do Big Mac outside Apple using the Big Mac team from Apple. One thing that TFA and the LowEndMac miss is that Jobs, apparently, wasn't the instigator: according to Isaacson, Rich Page and other Big Mac people contacted him and begged him to launch a new company when Big Mac was cancelled. (ISTR seeing this confirmed elsewhere, too, but I don't recall where atm.)
* TFA says that "[a]ll that I can find of the Big Mac project is this insanely low resolution image" showing some hardware and a screenshot of the GUI, but it links to an article which features this glamour shot of what was apparently an industrial design for Big Mac: https://i0.wp.com/www.aventure-apple.com/wp-content/uploads/... . (And this is cited: it's apparently from the Appledesign book https://www.worldcat.org/title/appledesign-the-work-of-the-a... .) The resemblance to the original G3 iMac from over a decade later is obvious. Beyond appearances, some other hardware similarities include a lack of internal expansion slots (according to Levy's book, Jobs maintained his opposition to "slots" through his departure from Apple) and a focus on external expandability instead: the G3 iMac was an early adopter of USB, while Big Mac apparently had Apple Desktop Bus. In fact, according to the Adventure-Apple piece ADB was originally developed for Big Mac under the name of Front Desk Bus (though as usual I see no reference to substantiate this). The single most obvious divergence is that Big Mac couldn't display colour, though no doubt this is because of an underlying similarity: the Big Mac project was trying to hit a roughly G3-iMac-like price point in the mid-'80s.
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- Some of the middle era SV history books are quite good, although they cover the combination of hardware, software, and startup stuff.
Fire in the Valley, Dealers of Lightning, Where the Wizards Stay up Late by Katie Hafner, Soul of a new Machine by Tracey Kidder, The Dream Machine.
There are histories of Apple, Microsoft, and many smaller (and now gone) companies and/or projects.
Showstopper (Windows NT), Insanely Great (Macintosh), Defying Gravity (Apple Newton), In the Plex (Google), Hackers (by Steven Levy), Ghost in the Wires.
More philosophical type stuff In the beginning was the command line Dreaming Code, Coders at Work
There's many worthwhile books about the history and culture of programming and hacking not listed, but this might be a useful starting point.
- I've always liked Steven Levy's book about Apple, Insanely Great. (He released an updated version not too long ago.)
I also thought he did a great job with the profiles of historic computing pioneers in Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution. (One of the few books that users the word "hackers" properly...)
- These free scientific comic books, just scroll down a little for the English versions: https://www.savoir-sans-frontieres.com/JPP/telechargeables/f...
Does God Play Dice - The new mathematics of Chaos by Ian Stewart.
Artificial Life - The Quest for a New creation by Steven Levy
Screw it, Just do it by Richard Branson.
Insanely Great: The Life and Times of the Macintosh - the computer that changed everything by Steven Levy
Manual of the Warrior of Light by Paulo Coelho.
Every book written by Jules Verne, especially 20000 leagues under the sea.
The Swiss Family Robinson.
- Steven Levy's book about the creation of the original Macintosh is also wonderful.
http://www.amazon.com/Insanely-Great-Macintosh-Computer-Ever...
