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.
From Andy Hertzfeld
I did some products for the Apple II, most notably the first small low cost thermal printer, the Silent Type.
As you know, Microsoft eventually kind of grabbed the gold ring out of Apple's hands, I guess.
I started working at Apple about 18 months after I bought my Apple II.
Part of Steve's job was to drum into us how important what we were doing actually would be to the world.
The Apple II was not designed like an ordinary product. It used crazy tricks everywhere.
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.
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.
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 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.
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