observe the Mac ’s 20th anniversary has been a lot of fun — we covered it extensively in our February event , and we ’ll publish a series of stories about it in Mac Beat throughout 2004 . But look past the increase culture medium coverage of the Mac in this anniversary year , and you ’ll incur the best twentieth - birthday present the Mac could ever get : Folklore.org .
Original Mac squad member Andy Hertzfeld set up the site , which features piles of first - person accounts of the early day of the computer — all written by the very people who make the Macintosh . The storey themselves are enchanting and include such treasure as the origin of Steve Jobs ’s “ reality distortion field ” ( Bud Tribble coined the term , likening Jobs ’s fierce brand of optimism to a Star Trek military force field ) ; a bold statement Jobs made to Adam Osborne , the creator of the first “ portable ” computer ; and Bill Gates ’s shameful past tense as the computer programmer of a peculiarly embarrassing DOS TV game .
“ I ’ve been telling friends and coworkers anecdotes about the original Macintosh developing for the last 20 eld , ” Hertzfeld told me . “ It was satisfy to finally write some of them down . ”
Hertzfeld had been kick around the mind of something like Folklore.org since 1996 , but it was the 20th anniversary of the Mac ( and a desire to do some programming in the Python scripting language ) that was the impetus for the launching of the Web site in January .
The message of Folklore.org is a kickshaw in itself , but Hertzfeld ( who also cofounded Radius , General Magic , and Eazel ) also envisions the system that runs the website as a giving to the World Wide Web residential area ; he ’s pass away to expel the Folklore software this spring so other masses can set up similar sites of their own . I trust it will join some other landmark Web technologies , such as Slash ( featured most famously at Slashdot.org ) and the Weblog tools Blogger and Moveable Type , as one of the edifice blocks of the Web .
Subjective Reality
When I first realise Folklore.org , I ’ll accommodate that I wondered just how reliable any story could be 20 age after the consequence key out . But Hertzfeld ’s got a good answer : he freely concede that history is immanent , that memory is a singular thing , and that unlike people can aboveboard have unlike recollections of the same consequence . So all of that figures into Folklore ’s excogitation — conflicting accounts can live together in the organization , providing readers with multiple viewpoints of the same historical event .
As for his own recollections , Hertzfeld say the reaction from his former Macintosh colleagues “ has been uniformly incontrovertible . ” Several of them , let in programmer Steve Capps and ikon designer Susan Kare , have contribute stories to the project . “ Even Steve Jobs told me that he liked the site , ” Hertzfeld says .
