Insanely Great

Steven Levy wrote this account of the Macintosh a decade after its 1984 launch, drawing on interviews with the development team and on his own reporting for Rolling Stone and Popular Computing at the time. He traces the graphical interface from Douglas Engelbart's work at SRI in the 1960s through Xerox PARC's Alto to the Lisa and then the Macintosh.

Levy's argument is that the Macintosh mattered because it made a set of interface ideas cheap enough to reach ordinary users, and that this required specific engineering decisions and specific personalities. He covers Jef Raskin's original conception of an appliance computer and his displacement by Steve Jobs, the bitmapped display, the mouse, the decision to include no expansion slots, the 128 kilobyte memory constraint that crippled the first machine, and the culture of the development team. He is direct about the failures, including the machine's commercial disappointment in 1984 and 1985 and the internal conflict that followed.

The book stops in the early 1990s, when Apple was declining and the Macintosh's interface ideas had been absorbed by Windows. Levy's assessment of Apple's prospects has been overtaken, and the book contains none of the story that made Apple the most valuable company in the world. Its value is the detailed record of a specific product development and of the argument, then unresolved, about whether interface quality could be a durable competitive advantage.

American technology journalist and editor at large at Wired who wrote histories of hacker culture, Apple, Google and Facebook.

Hackers documented the MIT and Homebrew programming culture of the 1950s through the 1980s and named the ethic that later shaped open source and startup engineering. In the Plex and Facebook report from inside those companies on how their products, ranking systems and business models were actually built.

Wired