the rosin smoky world of hardware hacks and hand coded software

Revolution in The Valley: The Insanely Great Story of How the Mac Was Made by Andy Hertzfeld
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Oh boy, this book is the most fun i've had reading and reminiscing in quite a while. Based on the web site Folklore.org (https://www.folklore.org/), Revolution in The Valley is a collection of "anecdotes about the development of Apple's original Macintosh, and the people who made it". Most of the Mac developers are contemporaries of mine, and reading their stories, and especially their technical tales of hardware and software in the late 1970s and early 1980s so resonated with the time and way i learned computers and programming back in the early 80s. The hardware, the software, the chips, the hacks, the clever solutions to challenges all took me back to an earlier day when computers were hands on, both in the hardware and the code.

I was given one of the first Macs (128k RAM) by a friend back around 1990 that had died - would not power on or boot up. After some research and ordering some parts, i was able to refurbish the analog board (that had died) resulting in a working Mac to play with. After some more research, i was able to add a decoder chip and replace the memory chips to yield a 512k Mac (an optional upgrade left in the digital board by the sneaky and clever design team, which is actually mentioned in this collection of stories). I could go on and on, but this book was really a trip back in time to the time i first discovered personal computing, both hardware and software, and was able to dabble in the rosin smoky world of hardware hacks and hand coded software. What a great, wonderful trip down memory lane! Loved this book!

View all my reviews