Andy Hertzfeld was a vital number in the growth group that created the initial Macintosh computer system in the 1980s. He acquired an Apple II computer system in January 1978 and started working at Apple Computer in the following year Hertzfeld functioned as head developer of the system software application until he left Apple in August 1984.
After he left Apple he co-founded three brand-new firms:
Radius in May 1986
Together with Burrell Smith, Mike Boich, Matt Carter, Alain Rossmann and other participants of the original Mac group concentrating on Macintoshequipment. Distance was an American hardware firm, Their products varied from processor upgrade cards (Radius Accelerator) bringing Motorola 68020 cpus to earlier Macintosh systems; graphics accelerators (Radius QuickColor); tv tuners (RadiusTV); video capture cards (VideoVision); shade calibrators (PrecisionColor); multi-processor systems (Radius Rocket) for 3D rendering and also multiple OS sessions; premium video clip adapters and monitors.
General Magic in 1990
Together with Bill Atkinson as well as Marc Porat. General Magic was a business that established a new kind of portable interactions tool they called a "individual smart communicator", which was a PDA forerunner that stressed communications.
The initial job started in 1990 within Apple Computer, when Porat convinced Apple's CEO (at the time John Sculley) that the next generation of computing would require a collaboration of computer system, communications and customer electronic devices firms to work together. Referred to as the Paradigm project, the task competed time within Apple, however monitoring continued to be typically uninterested and also the group had a hard time for resources. Ultimately they came close to Sculley with the idea of spinning off the group as a different company, which happened in May 1990.
Eazel in 1999
Eazel was staffed with former workers of Apple Computer, Netscape, Be Inc., Linuxcare, Microsoft, Red Hat and Sun Microsystems, among others. Mike Boich was CEO; Bud Tribble was VP of Engineering; Andy Hertzfeld was a principal developer and also Darin Adler led development. Susan Kare, writer of the initial Macintosh symbols, was generated to develop new vector graphics-based iconography.
Eazel's major success was the new Nautilus file supervisor for the GNOME desktop computer atmosphere. Its company strategy entailed generating income from online services to be provided via Nautilus such as storage space, however it fell short to do so prior to equity capital ran out. On 13 March 2001, Eazel launched Nautilus 1.0 as well as laid off most of its staff members. It tried to offer its core advancement group but went out of business in May 2001. The Nautilus data manager has actually continued to be upgraded by the totally free as well as open resource software community.
Hertzfield startet aiding Mitch Kapor in 2002 with promoting OSS (Open Source Software) via he's involvement in Open Source Applications Foundation.
In 2005 he began helping Google, he still functions there and also is the main designer of the Google+ Circle.
Our collection contains 22 quotes who is written / told by Andy.
"Working long hours being single helps because your time is yours. Once you have a family your time isn't all yours anymore. Most of the Mac team, we were in our mid-20's, most of us were single, and we were able to essentially devote our lives to it"
"Scotty heard that I was thinking about quitting Apple because of his actions, so he called me into his office and asked what it would take for me to stay? I said, maybe if I could work on the Mac project, which Steve had just taken over from Jef Raskin"
"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 working at Apple about 18 months after I bought my Apple II"
"I developed some unique software to public it on the web that I call the Folklore Project"
"I knew the Apple II was great when I bought it, but as I dug into the details it just completely blew me away the creative artistic approach that the designers had taken"
"But typically for a project like the Mac, the size we had was pretty good. And it has different stages. The team grows as you have to write manuals and do testing... though the Mac had no formal testing"
"The Apple II was not designed like an ordinary product. It used crazy tricks everywhere"
"People who work on the user interface side need to have empathy as a key characteristic. But if you are writing device drivers you don't really need to understand humans so well"
"The Macintosh having shipped, his next agenda was to turn the rest of Apple into the Mac group. He had perceived the rest of Apple wasn't as creative or motivated as the Mac team, and what you need to take over the company are managers, not innovators or technical people"
"Part of Steve's job was to drum into us how important what we were doing actually would be to the world"
"I left Apple in April of 1984, pretty soon after the introduction of the Mac"
"As you know, Microsoft eventually kind of grabbed the gold ring out of Apple's hands, I guess"
"We were developing an innovative Personal Information Manager called Chandler but a couple years ago I took off from that to do a project writing down my memoirs essentially, reminiscing about the development of the Macintosh"
"I got bitten by the free software bug in February of 1998 around the time of the Mozilla announcement"
"I did some products for the Apple II, most notably the first small low cost thermal printer, the Silent Type"
"But I think Steve's main contribution besides just the pure leadership is his passion for excellence. He's a perfectionist. Good enough isn't good enough. And also his creative spirit. You know he really, really wants to do something great"
"Being idealistic really helps you overcome some of the many obstacles put in your path"
"In fact when I first got my Apple II the first thing I did was turn it on and off, on and off, just because I had the power to do so, which I'd never had on a computer before"
"I left General Magic in 1996 to become an Internet hobbyist - got a T-1 line to my house. At one point I had all four food banks of the Bay Area hosted from this house here"
"Apple was our benefactor at starting General Magic, but about a year later decided they would rather BE General Magic and tried to make us blink out of existence... which we eventually did, but it took a few years"
"A lot of people thought Steve Jobs was a CEO of Apple but he never was until he came back to Apple in 1997"
