From: Klas Strandberg <>
>
> And I designed the Telinga in my two room apartment, sharing it with wife=
> and newborn boy. (feels good to compare myself with the Mac-people, hihi.=
)
I believe there is no single place that defines a expert designer. Some
design at the kitchen table, or a garage, others design in large
organizations. Or work as teams of experts. It does not make them any
less expert to be in a large organization. Nor does it make them any
more expert to do it anywhere else. The judgment comes on what they
produce. I respect experts wherever I find them, and I don't judge them
by looking at them, but looking at their work. And they rarely go out
tooting their own horn. Or badmouthing others. Some people need to get
out of their cabin and breathe some good air to clear their heads.
I hate to give you the news, Klas, but the Mac was decidedly not
designed in a garage. It was a large development team in one of many
buildings on the Apple Palo Alto Campus. Rich does not know the history
very well. The original Mac had the signatures of all the original
development team molded into the inside of it's case. I have one of
those and it's a bunch of signatures.
What was done in the garage, years before that, was put together do it
yourself kits for the original Apple computer, the one that quickly
evolved into the hugely successful Apple II. For your money in the
original you got a box of components, and instructions. With a bit of
soldering and assembling you had a computer. Looked like a thick
keyboard, had no disk drives or monitor (you used your TV). Hardly had a
user interface. It was a long way down the road and a much, much larger
company that developed the Mac.
There were, in fact, two teams working on follow on's for the Apple II
series. Both were given the task to use a more modern processor and
build a entirely new computer to be the next generation after the Apple
II series. The mac team had instructions to bring in a computer that was
priced under $2000. Their efforts were headed toward a command line
computer that would have been similar to the original PC, but with a
better processor. The second team, the LISA team had no such limitation.
The LISA team was the group that actually took the desktop user
interface that had been developed by Xerox for their Star, refined and
improved it and put out the LISA, which not only had a desktop we would
recognize but came with a full suite of office applications. And also
cost, initially, $10,000. The Mac group got interested in the OS and
it's interface, and, with a great deal of effort the OS was reworked
from it's original 1meg RAM requirement down to something that fit on a
floppy disc. That's how the original mac ended up being a desktop
machine that started the world down the road to the desktops we all use
today. It did so, because they managed to do it cheaply enough, the LISA
would never have been able to do that because of it's price. The history
of this period is somewhat muddied as the person in charge of the mac
team was Steve Jobs, and he was very resentful that he was passed over
when the LISA team was established earlier. History has been slowly
revised to fit his huge ego. As soon as he gained enough power in the
company he tried to wipe out even the mention of the LISA. I know
because I have a LISA. Which, overnight, became "LISA who?"
I'd not be surprised to find that the original Rycote was a garage or
kitchen table project. Same with a lot of the big respected companies if
you look far enough back. But that does not mean the last expert thing
they did was back then.
I'm, of course, out of luck. I don't have a garage, and don't even have
room in our kitchen for a table. So I can't possibly be expert in
anything, which is just fine by me.
Walt
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