Cringely’s NerdTV has started with an interview of Andy Hertzfeld:
I was a grad student at UC Berkeley when I bought my Apple II and it suddenly because a lot more interesting than school. I started focusing all my time on being an Apple II hobbyist, dropped out of grad school to go to work for Apple in August of ’79. I did some products for the Apple II, most notably the first small low cost thermal printer, the Silent Type. I started on the Mac team in February of 1981, wrote a lot of the original system software for the Mac including the User Interface Toolbox, the Window Manager, Menu Manager, Control Manager. I left Apple in April of 1984, pretty soon after the introduction of the Mac. I helped my friend Burrell Smith who did the digital hardware for the Mac start a company called Radius in 1986 that made peripherals for the Mac. I did a lot of stuff as a third-party developer, sold system software back to Apple. In 1990, along with Bill Atkinson, who was sort of my mentor on the Mac project, we started a company called General Magic that made some of the first handheld computers – what they call a PDA, though I always thought that was not such a good name.
Jobs versus Gates:
Steve came over to my house shortly after [Triumph of the Nerds] aired in 1996. I asked him what he thought of the documentary. He said he thought it was really good, but when he watched it on TV he thought his comment about Bill Gates having no taste might have been a little too harsh. So he called Bill Gates to apologize.I don’t know how you call Bill Gates, but if you are Steve Jobs you get right through. He said, “Bill I’m calling to apologize. I saw the documentary and I said that you had no taste. Well I shouldn’t have said that publicly. It’s true, but I shouldn’t have said it publicly.”
And Bill Gates replied, “I’m glad you called to apologize, Steve, because I thought that was really an inappropriate thing to say.”
Steve couldn’t help himself, he said, “You know it’s true, it’s true you have no taste.”
And Bill Gates responded to him, saying “Steve, I may have no taste, but that doesn’t mean my entire company has no taste.”
So Bill admitted he had no taste, but thought it was an unfair slur to say that MICROSOFT had no taste.
Another anecdote:
In January, 2004, the Computer History Museum had a little presentation about the marketing of the Macintosh with all the original Macintosh marketing team up on the stage. And a large percentage of the rest of the Mac team in the audience. They had a Q&A toward the end and an older guy got up and said he thought MacPaint was probably the best program ever written. Was it possible for him to see the source code? It turns out the person asking the question was Don Knuth — another one of my heroes. He came up to me afterwards.
[...]
Don Knuth repeated his request to me and I thought, “Boy, that’s Don Knuth asking me for a favor, I’d better do as much as I can to fulfill this. So as soon as I got home I called Bill and said, “You’ve got to have a copy of the MacPaint source lying around somewhere.” Nope. He had it on an old Profile hard drive that went up in smoke 10 years ago. I said, “Come on, Bill, it has got to be on a floppy somewhere.” I twisted his arm hard enough, he called me back two days later he’d found this wooden box with floppies in it — he’s got the MacPaint source, but no machine to read a floppy.So I cobble together an old Mac. It turns out it is in an obsolete file format that had never shipped, because it was the Lisa Monitor file format that was just used for the development of the Lisa. So I had to write a utility to piece things together. It turns out the files weren’t even encoded in text. In those days bytes were precious enough that it actually used a run length encoding to get the blanks at he beginning of scan lines and source code. All the indentation was wrong so I wrote another utility in perl and was able to get clean beautiful copies of the MacPaint source. Put them on a CD, sent them off to Don Knuth. He responded by inviting Bill and I over to his house, which was quite something.