The Original Macintosh:    36 of 94 
Inside Macintosh
Author: Andy Hertzfeld
Date: June 1982
Topics: Documentation, Software Design, Lisa
Summary: Developer documentation was crucial to our success.
The phone book edition of Inside Macintosh


















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When you were all locked in that room decided what did and didn't make the cut, what ideas were thrown by the wayside? What ideas were put aside but resurfaced later (as proportional thumbs were, mentioned in another article)?
I remember receiving piecemeal documentation before Inside Mac came out, and being surprised at hearing Apple's plan to publish in book form. All the programmers I knew would have preferred merged master docs, probable in updateable 3-ring binders, with a single index (instead of having to search IM I-III, then the Tech Notes, then IM IV, then IM V...).
I worked extensively with the early manager-based 3-ring Inside Macintosh chapters in 1984 and always found them very readable and usable. I liked the 3-ring format better than the later book format since the 3-ring format was easier to thumb through and you could add additional information to the notebooks. I also have a set of the "inside Lisa" programming documentiation which was called the "Lisa Programmer's Handbook". This was full of Lisa programming details but not in as a consistent or standardized format as Inside Macintosh since each was written by the Lisa programmers themselves. This documenation set is around a 1000 pages long I'd say (it fills 2 very large notebooks). The Lisa also had a "user interface guide" document which originally (ca. 1980) was around 30 pages long, but the final version from 1984 which was based on the Lisa Toolkit application framework library was around 100 pages long. I found the Lisa UI and Mac UI standards documents the most interesting of the Lisa and Macintosh technical documenation. These provided not only details about the UI Apple wanted for these machines, but also the rationale behind the UI design. I could tell that a lot of thought went into these documents. I assume the Mac UI documenation was heavily based on the Lisa UI documention. Also, Bill Atkinson and Larry Tesler were the key people behind the Lisa's original UI standards documentation (Atkinson was head of the Lisa UI investigation group). -David Craig shirlgato AT cybermesa DOT com
Typo: "a women in her mid-twenties" => "a woman in her mid-twenties".
My first copy of Inside Mac was an nth generation photocopy of the 3-ring binder version, I don't even remember any more where I got it. I got a *lot* of use out of it. I went on to buy the published versions (although I don't remember them being phone book flimsy) and got a lot of use out of those as well. And yes, I still have my copy of the hardback edition.
Even today (2018), these pieces of the Mac (and Apple itself) History are delightful to read. I wonder what all the characters think looking back to those days when they were creating the future of computing industry. I write this lines in an iPhone, which is some sort of “great-great-great-grandson” (in computer life) of their early work!