The Journal

Folklore

Some weeks ago I watched the movie Steve Jobs, the one with Michael Fassbender, Kate Winslet and Seth Rogen. I had already watched the movie last year, I believe, but it was nice to rewatch, although it was painful to see again the disgraceful treatment of Wozniak and Hertzfeld. After I started fact checking the movie as I usually do I stumbled upon Andy Hertzfeld's website Folklore.org on the history of the original Macintosh computer. I had already checked it the first time I saw the movie but forgot about it. This time I read through all 120+ stories and I loved Hertzfeld prose although I had some hard times to follow the most technical stuff. Yes, I am a little ashamed of that, but I am an Italian speaking software engineer that started developing at school at a time when knowing Assembly or low level operating system knowledge wasn't necessary anymore. It kind of reminded me of the years I spent working at a famous startup incubator in the late 2000s, the similarities are uncanny. There I made plenty of friends that in the prior years made late nights and weekends a habit, all to deliver products on tight schedules, while also having fun at what they did. I kind of laughed sadly when I found out that a lot of us were paid the same amount (more or less) than those guys at Apple were paid 25 years prior.

So I wrote this story because I was influenced by those anecdotes in Folklore and to provide some background to a little game I wrote, just because Hertzfeld made it 600 bytes in the first Mac.

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